John Rawn

“ VII
"Is it true?" began Rawn. His eyes lighted up suddenly. "He has agreed?"
Halsey broke in now. "It is true, Mr. Rawn," said he. "I love her. I love your wife; I can't help it. I have told her so. You see."
"You love her!" John Rawn burst out into a great, croaking-laugh. "You love her? I say, that's good! That's good news to tell me, isn't it? Why—I sent her—I used her, to make you love her! You see reason now at last, do you?—every man does at last—every man has his price. You'll go back to work to-morrow? There's a lot to do, but we can save it all yet. ”

“ Here also, one lift above him on the doorstep of Kelly Row, was another man, John Rawn, who, thinking he was full of ideas, had none, but who had every confidence in himself; a man who early in his youth had proved his ability to leave to others the skin of their bananas while he himself took the meat, and paid naught therefor. ”

“ Rawn spoke largely, finely, with a nice appreciation of all values.
"My God!" whispered Halsey. "What do you mean?"
IX
Rawn paid small attention to him, and he broke out yet more vehemently. "But it is an enormous thing—you are dealing with the power of powers! The great force of the world is gravitation. It makes the world move, keeps the sun in its place. Water running down hill never tires. It doesn't know any eight-hour day."
"That term will cease to exist within two years," said John Rawn grimly. "It is a detestable thing. It has hampered business long enough." ”

“ This was the general day of harvest for Graystone Hall.
But the day passed on. Shadows lengthened beyond the tall towers and softened as they fell toward the east. The soft airs of evening, turning, came in across the open gallery front. Night came, night unbroken by more than a few lights in all the myriad windows of this stately monument which John Rawn had builded as proof of his personal success. Vehicles, passing slowly, held occupants staring in curiosity at this vast, vacant pile. Human sympathy lacked, human aid there was not. ”

“ In these savage hours the mind of John Rawn cast about for rescue, for hope. No rescue, no hope, appeared except one last desperate alternative, purchasable not now with cash or power or influence—since these were gone—but with what other and dearer things remain to a man—things some men, not rotted with the love of self, keep through any or all disaster, prize, even above life and all a life's business success. Halsey! Ah! Halsey was the savior of Rawn—Halsey, the man who had humiliated him in his own home. How could Halsey be secured? ”

“ I hate you, I loathe you! My God! how I detest and loathe the sight of you! Go away—go away from us! You're not any part of a man!"
XI
"It's true!" gasped John Rawn to himself; "My God, it's true! She said that—I heard her—to me? What have I done to deserve this? ... I ought to kill you," said he to Halsey slowly.
"Of course you ought," said Halsey. "If you were any portion of a man you would. But you've tried that, and you know where you ended."
"But Halsey—Charley!—you don't stop to think!" began Rawn pitifully. "You will go back—you will go back to the factory, in the morning? ”

“ And it is to be remembered that at this time John Rawn was drawing a salary of one hundred and twenty-five dollars a month, the highest pay he had ever received in all his life; also that he was at this time a man forty-seven years of age. We have classes in America, but occasionally the lines that separate one from the other prove susceptible of successful attack at the hands of a determined man. As Rawn stood before Halsey, who only goggled and gasped at such statements as his last, he seemed a determined man. ”

“ Listen, Charles. I love my girl, Grace. She has always been a good child. I'm putting you in a place where you can take good care of her. I want you to stick to her for ever, through thick and thin. Remember, my son, that your wife is your wife, and that nothing must separate you from her."
"Maybe it'll work out something after my idea, after all." Halsey spoke pleasantly as he could at this mention of Grace.
"We'll take our chances but what it will work out our way!" said John Rawn, grinning in return. "You want to work for man, do you? Well, I want men to work for me!" ”

“ At times it seemed to him he could see opening out before him a new world of wide and inviting expanses, a world of warmth and light and luxury and color; in short, a world as unlike Kelly Row as you may well imagine, inhabited by beings wholly different from those obtaining in Kelly Row. And there, among all these, one.... It is to be seen, in fact, that the life of the city began to open before John Rawn. The soul of the city is woman, as it was the soul of Rome. Rawn was learning what hitherto he had small opportunity to learn. ”

“ He flaunted his ownership of such a woman in their faces. What more can a rich man do than that same? Is that not the dream and test of power—to secure what others may not have, to secure special privileges in this life? And is not the quest of beauty the first business of him who has attained power? Of all these special privileges which had come to John Rawn so swiftly in these late rapid years, none so delicately and warmly filled his heart as that of being able to call Virginia Rawn his own. ”

“ I wanted to work it out, I say, so that every man could have the benefit—and free!"
"Every man is going to have it," remarked John Rawn grimly, "but not free. What did I tell you a while ago? Get an idea, cinch it—and then sell it! The people can have this benefit, yes; but they'll pay for it. That's the way success is made."
"Ah, is it so?" was Halsey's answer. He flung himself against the table, his pale face thrust forward over his outspread arms. "Success! You mean only that the corporation grip on this country will be stiffened more than any one ever dreamed. ”

“ Some men in such circumstances brood; some drink; others search out the other woman or women. John Rawn was cast in different mold. He had, in short, spoken truth when he told his wife that he had no new matrimonial plans. Situated thus, yet handicapped thus in his new-found solitude, but a few days had passed before he sent over for his daughter, Grace, and her husband, Charles Halsey ”

“ As a matter of fact, however, John Rawn was born in Texas—and of Texas at the very spot where, had it been left to his own candid opinion, no John Rawn, no especial hero, ought ever to have been born. The village he honored by his birth—one of seven which now contend over that claim to fame—was the very home of democratic equality; and how could the home of democratic equality be called typical environment for the production of a man believing in the divine right of a very few? ”

“ A pleasant, gentle, generous smile spread over his countenance, a smile which showed his content with himself, his future prospects, his past performances.
"You ought to have been there with me, Charles, when I talked to old Standley and his side partner, Ackerman. That was the big scene of my whole life!"
"The big scene?" said Halsey, half musingly. "No! Maybe not. We don't know what there may be on ahead."
"Isn't that the truth!" assented John Rawn graciously. "When a man of brains and energy gets his start, there's no telling where he won't go, or what he won't do. ”

“ The truth has already been stated regarding John Rawn; that, batrachian, half-dormant for almost half a century, and then putting into business what energy most men put into love and sex, he had passed a life of singular innocence, or ignorance, as to womankind. He had never countenanced much gossip about women, because he had little interest in the topic. The grande passion marks most of us for its own now and again, or is to be feared now and again; but the grande passion had passed by John Rawn. ”

“ He showed, in short, that he found her society wholly agreeable upon every possible occasion. If this was in bad taste, if many or most, in the usual guess, put it at the point of impropriety, John Rawn gave himself no concern. The Rawn aristocracy began in him. He founded it, was its Charlemagne, its William the Conqueror, as ruthless, as regardless of others, as selfish, as megalomaniac as the best of kings. Here, therefore, were two aristocrats! They ran well in couple.
It is not to be supposed that a girl so shrewd as Virginia Delaware could fail to realize the full import of all this. ”

“ So much as to the physical body. In respect of epochal changes in a man's character we may wholly approve the dictum of the philosopher, though perhaps not agreeing to any specific seven-years period. Thus, in the case of John Rawn, the first stage of his career, in which he lived without any very great alteration, occupied some seven and forty years. Yet it was a wholly different John Rawn who, at forty-eight, found himself seated at the vast and shining desk of the president of the International Power Company, in the city of Chicago. ”

“ I'll hold the control."
"Of what?"
"Of all of it," said John Rawn, gently smiling, as he leaned his knuckles on the dingy table in the dining-room in Kelly Row.
Halsey smiled at him, tapping his finger on the side of his head. "I see," said he.
"No, I'm not crazy. What do you think you see?"
"Things don't happen in that way, Mr. Rawn. Inventors don't get off in the money like that. Don't tell me that."
"Right you are," said Rawn, dropping a clenched fist on the table top. "Inventors don't! But men of that same class—men of grip and grasp—they do get off where the money is! ”

“ Granted these essentials, we customarily pass carelessly over any hero's youth, even as lightly, perchance, over his ancestry. Not so in the case of John Rawn. He himself would say, if asked, that no hero of so exceptional a merit as his own could be thus lightly produced; that indeed not even the three generations accorded to the making of a gentleman could be called sufficient for the evolution of a personage of mold such as his. Let us yield to a will so imperious, a wish so germane to our own amiable intent. Mr. Rawn shall have all the generations that he likes. ”

“ He might one day have extended his hand to his fellow-man understandingly, might have gone through life much as other men indeed, dying simply and without much outcry about it, as most of us do, and living with small disturbance of the world's equilibrium, as most of us also do. But in that deplorable case there would have been no John Rawn as we know him, and no story about him worth the telling. ”

“ Not an extraordinary young man, perhaps, but certainly serving well enough to show that youth speaks to youth; and that, when youth is past, all is past. Excepting—as John Rawn would have noted—the making of money; which means not much to youth itself, but which means all to middle age.
Of all this very wise and useful philosophy, be sure, Mr. Halsey was ignorant, or regarding it, was indifferent. ”

“ Youth has no pity for age, love no pity for a mate's inefficiency; but after all some sort of contempt, at least, seemed due him.
"Rawn," said Halsey, "it's pretty hard. We're all of us paying a hard, heavy price for what we thought we had. But we can't evade it, any part of it. It was your fault that Grace left me. We were going to part. You sent your wife after me, as you call it. I suppose Grace found that out. You know what she did then. I said I blame you, and so I do. But I was going to get a divorce—"
"Divorce!—you divorce my daughter! John Rawn's daughter!" ”

“ Halsey's enthusiasm carried him beyond resentment and amusement alike.
"Molecules are everywhere, in everything, Mr. Rawn," he explained gently; "and now we know they move, though we can see them only in mass and as though motionless."
"I don't see how that can be," began Rawn; but checked himself.
Halsey smote his hand against the solid wall. "It moves!" he exclaimed. "It's alive! It vibrates—every solid is in perpetual motion. The dance of the molecules is endless. It's in the air around us, above us—power, power—immeasurable, irresistible power, exhaustless, costless power! ”

“ Rawn himself expanded in all this social success. He saw doors hitherto closed, opening before him, saw his future unrolling before him also like a scroll. A hundred times a week he walked to his young wife, caught her in his arms, uxoriously infatuated with her youth, her beauty, her aplomb, her fitness for this life which he had chosen. For once he almost forgot to regard himself as a collector of beautiful objects, although the truth was that his wife, Virginia, became more beautiful each day, more superb of line, more calmly easy in air, more nearly faultless of garb and demeanor. ”

“ Grace tried it. It doesn't work. It takes something else besides money, I reckon. We're lucky when we find that, any of us, I reckon. If we don't, we've got to take just what God gives us. But money doesn't buy everything in the world. John, sometimes I think it buys about as little as anything you can think of!" She gulped just a little in her thin throat.
"All the same," said he firmly and generously, by this time almost fully the great John Rawn once more, "it was very decent of you, Laura." ”

“ Rawn.
It is possible that in the time of Elizabeth pier glasses with heavily carved frames were not common in the size affected by Mr. Rawn in his private apartment. He stood before the great glass now and gazed at what he saw; a face haggard and lined, shoulders stooping a little forward, body a little stooped, a little heavy, a little soft; the watch charm hanging in free air—the figure of a man no longer athletic, if ever so.
Rawn stood engaged in his regular nightly devotions—he made no prayers of eventide beyond that to his mirror. ”