necessary to execute certain papers and to file them in Chicot County,
Arkansas, before a certain fixed date. You ordered me by telegraph to
prepare the papers and bring them to you in Washington in the speediest
way possible, in order that I might carry them, within the time limit,
to their destination. I started for Washington within five minutes, by
the quickest possible route, preparing the papers on the train. I had to
change cars five times between Cairo and Washington, and seven times
more between Washington and Memphis. All that will presently be changed.
In our conference the other day with the railroad men, I suggested
something to the car builder, George M. Pullman, which will some day
bear fruit. At present every railroad runs its own sleeping cars and
runs them at a loss. Some of them have quit running them because they
lost money. The trouble is that the passenger must get up in the middle
of the night and transfer from one sleeping car to another. Therefore he
takes no sleeping car. I have suggested to the car builder, Pullman,
that he shall take the sleeping car service into his own hands and run
his cars through from every western to every eastern city without
change, he paying the railroads for hauling his cars and he collecting
the revenue that men will be willing to pay for the comfort of through
transportation.
"Now, all this is merely a beginning. The railroads of this country,
together with the new ones now building, will presently be consolidated
into great systems. Transportation, both as to freight and as to
passengers, is now done at retail, and the cost is enormous. It will,
after a while, be done at wholesale, and at a proportionate reduction in
cost.
"Now the thought that is in my mind is this: We have got to build this
great nation anew upon lines marked out by the events of the last few
years. The war has been costly--enormously costly. It has saddled the
country with a debt of about three billions of dollars, besides the
incalculable waste. But it has awakened a great national self
consciousness which will speedily pay off the debt, and, incidentally,
develop the resources of the country in a way never dreamed of before.
Those resources, so far as they are undeveloped, or only partially
developed, lie mainly in the West and South. It is our duty to develop
them.
"The government is building a railroad to the Pacific coast. That, when
it is done, will annex a vast and singularly fruitful country to the
Union. The fertility of the soil there, and the favorable climatic
conditions, promise results that must presently astonish mankind. But in
the meanwhile it is our part of the nation-building work to develop the
resources of what we now call the West. Minnesota, in its eastern part,
is already producing wheat in an abundance that discourages all eastern
farmers and sets them to the culture of small fruits and to truck
gardening for the supply of the great cities there. There is great gain
even in that. Presently the Minnesota wheat farmers will extend their
limitless fields into the Dakotah country as soon as railroads are built
there--and a new era of development will begin."
"Why do you not include the South in your reckoning?" asked Hallam.
"I do. Under the new conditions the South will produce more cotton than
it ever did, and its coal and iron resources will be enormously
developed. But the South is, for the present, handicapped by disturbed
conditions and a disorganized labor system. It will be long before that
region shall take its full share in national development--in what I
call 'nation building.'
"Pardon me for wandering so far afield. I have meant only to show you
what I regard as the true character of the work that you and your
associates are doing. Now, I wish and intend to do my share in that
work. To that end, I must have money of my own, and that control of
other people's money which comes only to men who have money of their
own. I don't care a fig for money for its own sake. I want it as a tool
with which I may do my work."
"I think I understand you," answered Hallam, after a few minutes'
reflection. "You shall have the tools. You have already put away
two-thirds of your salary from month to month. I have to-day multiplied
that salary by three. You'll soon have 'grub stakes' for any enterprise
you may choose to enter upon. But that isn't all. If it were, it would
mean that I am to lose you presently. I don't mean to do that. You are
too good a man for a clerk. I propose to make of you a partner in all my
outside enterprises. I must go now. I've five people to meet at ten
o'clock. Come to me after that hour, if you're sufficiently rested, and
we'll talk business."
"Oh, I'm sufficiently rested already. I'll join you at ten or a little
later, as I suppose you won't be free till then."
Captain Will Hallam rose, grasped the hand of his companion, and, after
a look into his eyes, said:
"You're the right sort. You have vim, force, pathos, and energy. You and
I, working together, will salivate things in a way that will make
Calomel ashamed of itself."
"But how about Kennedy and his discharge?" asked Duncan.
"Oh, that's settled. I've sent him his quittance papers, and he's your
enemy for all time. You can stand that."
"Yes, so long as you are my friend."
XI
THE WAYS OF GUILFORD DUNCAN
During all this time Guilford Duncan had been taking his meals at the
little boarding house of Mrs. Deming. The other boarders--a dozen in
all, perhaps--did not interest him at first, and for a time he took his
meals in silence, except for courteous "good-mornings" and
"good-evenings." His table companions were mainly young clerks of
various grades, with whose ideas and aspirations young Duncan was very
slightly in sympathy.
After a time, however, he decided that it was his duty to cultivate
acquaintance with these table companions, in whom he recognized private
soldiers in the great army of work--the men upon whom the commanders of
all degrees must rely for the execution of their plans.
Accordingly, Duncan began to take an active part in the conversations
going on about him, and little by little he injected so much of interest
into them that whenever he spoke he was listened to with special
attention. Without assuming superiority of any kind, he came to be
recognized as in fact superior. He came to be a sort of Autocrat of the
Breakfast Table, directing the conversations there into new channels and
better ones.
It was his practice to buy and read all the magazines as they appeared,
including the particularly interesting eclectic periodicals of that
time, in which the best European thought was fairly represented.
His reading furnished him many interesting themes for table talk, and
presently the brightest ones among his companions there began to
question him further concerning the subjects he thus mentioned. After a
little while some of them occasionally borrowed reading matter of him,
by way of still further satisfying their interest in the matters of
which he talked at table.
A little later still, these brighter young men, one by one, began to
visit Duncan's room in the evenings. In the free and easy fashion of
that time and region, he made them welcome without permitting their
coming or going to disturb his own evening occupations in any serious
way. His room was very large, well warmed, and abundantly lighted, for
he had almost a passion for light. There was always a litter of new
magazines, weekly periodicals, and the like on the big table in the
centre of the room, and there were always piles of older ones in the big
closet. Still further there was a stand of bookshelves which was
beginning to be crowded with books bought one by one as they came out,
or as Duncan felt the need of them. Literature was the young man's only
extravagance, and that was not a very expensive one.
"Welcome! Help yourself! Read what you like and you won't disturb me."
That was the spirit of his greeting to all these his friends whenever
they entered his door, and it was not long before the room of the young
Virginian became a center of good influence among the young men of the
town.
How greatly such an influence was needed the bank officers and other
"solid" men of the city well knew and strongly felt. Few of them ever
thought of reading anything themselves except the commercial columns of
the newspapers, but they had reasons of their own for recognizing the
good work Guilford Duncan was quietly doing, by cultivating the reading
habit among their clerks.
Cairo was an ill-organized community at that time. The great majority of
its people were "newcomers," from all quarters of the country, who had
as yet scarcely learned to know each other. War operations had filled
the town for several years past with shifting crowds of adventurers of
all sorts, who found in disturbed conditions their opportunity to live
by prey. There were gambling houses and other evil resorts in dangerous
numbers, where soldiers and discharged soldiers on their way through the
place were tempted to their ruin by every lure of vice and every ease of
opportunity to go astray.
The solid men deplored these conditions, but were as yet powerless to
better them. After the rush of discharged soldiers through the town
ceased, the evil influences began to operate more directly upon the
clerks and other young men of the city itself. Some who had begun life
there with every prospect of worthy careers had sunk into degradation
through vicious indulgence. Others who still managed to hold their
places in business and to do their work tolerably were manifestly
falling into habits that darkened their futures. In two or three
instances young men of good bringing up, who had earned enviable
reputations for diligence and good conduct, were lured into the gambling
dens, robbed there, and at last were tempted to defalcations and even
sheer robberies of the employers who trusted them. In one conspicuous
case a youth who had won special regard among the better people by the
tender care he was taking of his mother, and by diligence and
faithfulness in his work, fell a victim to the passion of gambling,
robbed money packages that passed through his hands as a cashier in an
express office, was caught, convicted, and sentenced to prison as a
common felon, to the saddening of all the town.
Under such circumstances even the least cultivated of the hard-headed
business men could not fail to regard with special pleasure the silent
work that Duncan was doing for the salvation of at least a considerable
group of young men who might otherwise have fallen victims to the evil
conditions that beset them.
Apart from his association with the young men who frequented his room,
Duncan had no social life at all. He never visited at any house, except
that Captain Hallam frequently had him to a meal over which the two
might "talk business," or where he might meet and help entertain
prominent men of affairs from other cities, whose visits were inspired
by commercial purposes far more than by considerations of a social
nature.
It created some little astonishment, therefore, when one day at the
boarding house table, Duncan said to those about him:
"I hear that you fellows are organizing some sort of club for social
purposes. Why haven't you given me a chance to join?"
"We didn't think you would care for such things. You never go out, you
know, and----"
"What is the purpose of your organization, if you don't mind my asking?"
"Oh, certainly not. We're simply making up a little group, which we call
'The Coterie,' to have a few dancing parties and amateur concerts, and
the like, in the big hotel dining room, during the winter. We've a
notion that the young people of Cairo ought to know each other better.
Our idea is to promote social intercourse and so we're all chipping in
to pay the cost, which won't be much."
"Well, may I chip in with the rest?"
Seeing glad assent in every countenance, he held out his hand for the
subscription paper, and put down his name for just double the largest
subscription on it. Then passing it back he said:
"I think I may be able to secure some support for so good an
undertaking, from the business men of the city and from others--the
lawyers, doctors, and the like. Your entertainments certainly ought to
have the benefit of their countenance. At any rate, I'll see what I can
do. I don't know that I shall myself be able to attend the dances and
the like--in fact, I'm sure I shall not--but I'll do what I can to help
the cause along."
He did what he could, and what he could was much. The solid men, when he
brought the subject to their attention, felt that this was an extension
of that work of Duncan's for the betterment of the town, which they so
heartily approved. They subscribed freely to the expense, and better
still, they lent personal countenance to the entertainments.
Guilford Duncan also attended one of the entertainments, though it had
been his fixed purpose not to do so. The reason was that Guilford Duncan
was altogether human and a full-blooded young man. From the time of his
arrival at Cairo until now, he had not had any association with women.
When such association came to him he accepted it as a boon, without
relaxing, in any degree, his devotion to affairs.
It was the old story, related in a thousand forms, but always with the
same purport, since ever the foundations of the world were laid.
"Male and female created he them." "And God saw that it was good."
All of human history is comprehended in those two sentences quoted from
the earliest history of mankind.
XII
BARBARA VERNE
The person who had originated and who conducted Mrs. Deming's boarding
house--famous for its fare--was, in fact, not Mrs. Deming at all. That
good lady would pretty certainly have scored a failure if she had tried
actively to manage such an establishment. She had never in her life
known necessity for work of any kind, or acquired the least skill in its
doing. She had been bred in luxury and had never known any other way of
living until a few months before Guilford Duncan went to take his meals
at what was known as her "table."
She had lived in a spacious and sumptuously furnished suburban house
near an eastern city, until two years or so before the time of this
story.
When Barbara Verne, her only sister's child, was born and orphaned
within a single day, and under peculiarly saddening circumstances, the
aunt had adopted her quite as a matter of course.
No sooner had Barbara ceased to be an infant in arms than she began to
manifest strong and peculiar traits of character. Even as a little child
she was wondered at as "so queer--so old fashioned, don't you know?"
She had a healthy child's love for her dolls, and though the persons
around her had not enough clearness of vision to see that she was
fruitfully and creatively imaginative in her peculiar way, her dolls'
nursery was full of wonderful stories, known only to herself and the
dolls. Every doll there had a personality, a history, and a character of
its own. Barbara was the intimate of all of them--the confidential
friend and companion, who listened to their imagined recitals of griefs
and joys with a sympathetic soul, counseled them in a prematurely old
way, chided them gently but firmly for their mistakes, commended good
conduct whenever she discovered it in them, and almost mercilessly
rebuked such shortcomings as common sense should have spared them. For
common sense was Barbara's dominant characteristic.
She never told their stories to anybody. That, she felt, would have been
to betray their confidence shamefully. It was only by eavesdropping on
the part of her nursery maid, and by casual overhearings of her talk
with her dolls that their life stories became known to anybody except
herself.
And Barbara quickly put an end to the eavesdropping when she discovered
it. She had a French nursery governess, Mathilde, whose double function
it was to look after the child and to teach her French by talking to her
only in that tongue. The maid, in fact, made the child teach her
English, by talking with her chiefly in that language.
That, however, was an offense the child did not consider. She did not
greatly value instruction in French--"English is so much better," she
used to say to her aunt. "And besides, nobody ever talks in French. So
why should we bother about it? Of course, I like to have La Fontaine's
Fables read to me, and I like to read them to my dolls, because the
dolls always enjoy them."
"How do you know that, Barbara?"
"Why, because they never interrupt. When I tell them 'make up' stories
of my own, they often interrupt me. They 'want to know,' and sometimes I
can't tell them. But with La Fontaine's stories it is never so. Still I
don't think French is of much consequence."
That was the ill-informed and immature judgment of a child of seven or
eight years. Perhaps the other judgment with which that same child
coupled it in the lectures she sometimes gave her French nursery
governess was sounder.
"Mathilde, you are an eavesdropper," she solemnly said to the girl one
night. "You hide behind the door and listen while Phillida tells me
about the way Corydon treats her. And you listen while I tell Phillida
not to be foolish, and while I talk to Corydon about his behavior. I
shouldn't mind that so much, Mathilde, if you didn't laugh at the dolls
and their troubles. I don't like that."
But, notwithstanding the child's imaginative gift, she was intensely
practical, in a quick-witted way that often astonished those about her.
She had an eager desire to learn domestic arts, and her peculiar
conscientiousness in the doing of whatever she undertook to do, usually
resulted in a skill superior to that of her teachers.
She loved to haunt the kitchen, where her courtesy won even the
cantankerous cook for a friend, and from her the girl learned so much of
her art that the cook could teach her no more. In the laundry the
good-natured Irish woman who presided over that department of household
economy gave her always so warm a welcome that the child came to think
of the faithful woman as one of her choicest friends. Working with her
over a little ironing board, Barbara quickly became expert in all the
finer and more delicate operation of her art, or as the laundress
herself said:
"Shure, the blissed choild puts the raal Oirish accint into the doin' up
of a pretty frock."
When she grew a little older, Barbara's French nursery governess left
her, and from that hour, almost without knowing it, the child took her
education largely into her own hands, and her aunt stood too much in awe
of her almost preternatural resoluteness, to interfere in any serious
way. She provided masters for the child, but it was the girl herself and
not the masters who decided what she should learn.
In that early time it was not generally thought necessary, or even
desirable, to send girls away from home to study in colleges in company
with boys--to learn Latin, Greek, mathematics, and basketball--to read
the indecencies of classic literature--and to mould themselves into an
unlovely similitude to men. But there were frivolities in the education
of women then which were almost as conspicuous as are the masculinities
that have since taken their place.
In Barbara's case neither of these influences was felt. Without quite
knowing what her own thought was, the girl early made up her mind that
she would learn thoroughly all things that a woman must practice in
life, that she would make herself fit to do a woman's part in the world
without any pretense whatever.
She was set at one time to learn the piano, as in that day every girl
was, to the saddening of human existence and the torturing of human
nerves. After taking a few lessons Barbara was shrewd enough to discover
that she had no musical gifts worth cultivating. She therefore promptly
requested her aunt to dismiss her music master.
"Oh, but you must learn to play, you know, dear."
"Why must I, auntie?"
"Oh, well, every girl must, you know."
"But why, auntie?" persisted the little female Socrates.
"Why, it's a necessary part of every girl's education, you know."
"Oh, I know they all do it," answered the girl, "but most of them would
do better to leave it alone. You often say that it tortures you to hear
girls 'pound the piano' when they want to show off. Now, I haven't the
gift for music, and I don't want to show off. Why should I learn to
'pound the piano' and make other people miserable?"
So the argument went on, and it ended at last, as it was predestined to
end, in the abandonment of the piano lessons, leaving Barbara to grow up
in complete ignorance of an art which, in that half-barbaric time, was
deemed a necessary "accomplishment" of every young woman who had
fingers, whether she had any perception of music or not.
For the rest, Barbara educated herself upon lines which she deemed
womanly. There was no art of kitchen or laundry or sewing room in which,
as she grew older, she did not make herself the superior of the highly
paid servitors whose skill her aunt employed to perform such functions.
For explanation she said only:
"I am to be a woman. I must know how to do all womanly things. If I
don't know all that better than the servants do, I must always be
dependent upon servants. I think that would be humiliating."
In the same spirit she took up such school studies as she deemed proper
to her womanhood and only such. But she gave to each a degree of
conscience that always surprised her teachers. She had not the gift of
learning easily, but her devotion was such that she learned thoroughly
in spite of all the difficulties. She early conceived the notion that
she must know her own language well--how to spell it, how to pronounce
it, and, still more, how to use it simply, honestly, and effectively in
the expression of her thought. Her over-mastering devotion to truth
would not let her rest content with any loose or inaccurate expression.
"No," she would say, "that isn't the word I want. It doesn't say just
what I mean," and she would never be satisfied until she found the word
she did want.
The handwriting to which she schooled herself was in like manner
scrupulously truthful. The writing masters of that time cared far more
for ornateness than for verity, or even legibility. They laboriously
taught their pupils to make "hair" lines for upstrokes and heavily
"shaded" ones for down. They decorated their capital letters with
meaningless flourishes, and they did many other things equally useless
and unworthy.
Barbara would have nothing to do with such insincerities. She would not
even try to learn them. She studied the essential form of each letter,
and, discarding everything else, she wrote, as she herself said, "so
that other people might read easily." The result was a dainty little
round-lettered text, which had truth for its basis and uncompromising
sincerity for its inspiration.
Arithmetic gave her a good deal of trouble. Had the mastery of that
science been an "accomplishment," she would have put it aside as one for
which she had no gift, as she had done with music. But she realized that
one must acquire a certain facility in calculation, and she did all the
work necessary to acquire that facility. She puckered her pretty
forehead over the "sums" that she had to do, and she often, all her
life, employed roundabout methods in doing them. But in the end she got
the "answers" right, and that was all that the little truth worshiper
cared for in the case.
She early became fond of reading such books as appealed to her. She
would never consent to believe that she _ought_ to read books that did
not find a response in her mind, merely on the ground that their reading
was deemed a proper part of every young person's education.
"All that sort of thing is 'show off,'" she used to say. "It is a false
pretense;" and she scorned all false pretenses.
Yet she was by no means an idly self-indulgent reader. She diligently
mastered some books that did not particularly interest her, because she
believed them to contain information or instruction or counsel that
might benefit her.