John Rich

“ And for years the general shuddered when his memory brought back the picture of the little man, with his hard tanned face, his glaring green eyes, his brazen voice trumpeting the doctrine of materialism to the people.
"John," said the general, the next day, as he sat in the mill, going over the plans of the college buildings with Barclay, who was chairman of the board of directors, "John, why are you so crass, so gross a materialist? You have enough money—why don't you stop getting it and do something with it worth while?" ”

“ The men whom you bought and paid for don't stay bought—do they, my boy? Oh, your old mother knows, John. Men who will sell are never worth buying; and the house that relies on them, falls. You have built a sand dam, son—like the dams you used to build in the spring stream when you were a child. It melts under pressure like straw. You have no worldly power. In this practical world you are a failure, and good old Phil Ward, who went out into the field and scattered seeds of discontent at your system—he is seeing his harvest ripen in his old age, John," she cried. "Can't you see your failure? ”

“ So she managed it that John should go into partnership with General Ward, and Bob Hendricks managed it that the firm should have offices over the bank, and also that the firm was made attorneys for the bank,—the highest mark of distinction that may come to a law firm in a country town. The general realized it and was proud. But he thought the young man took it too much as a matter of course.
"John," said the general, one day, as they were dividing their first five-hundred-dollar fee, "you're a lucky dog. Everything comes so easily with you. ”

“ They worked along for a while, and the general stopped and put his foot on his spade and cried: "That boy—that boy—that boy! Isn't he selling his soul to the devil by bits? A little chunk goes every day. And oh, my dear, my dear—" he broke out, "what profiteth a man if he gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? Poor, poor John." He fell to his work again, sighing, "Poor John, poor John!" So they talked on until the afternoon grew old.
And while they were talking, John and General Hendricks were in Barclay's office going over matters, and seeing where they stood. ”

“ Will it bring Jane back? Will it give Jeanette her heart's desire, and make her happy all her life? You know, dear, that it will only make me miserable. Has it made you happy, John? Turn it into gold and pile it up in the front yard—and what will it buy that poor Phil Ward has not had all of his life—good food, good clothing—good enough, at least—a happy family, useful children, and a good name? A good name, John, is rather to be chosen than great riches—than all your money, my son—rather to be chosen than all your money. ”

“ After a "Hello, Watts; getting pretty late for an old man like you," Hendricks answered: "Well, you know John—when he gets a thing in his head he's a regular tornado. There was an immense crowd in town to-day—depositors and all that. And do you know, John went out this afternoon with a paper in his hand, and five hundred dollars he dug out of his safe over in the office, and he got options to lease their land for a year signed up by the owners of five thousand acres of the best wheat land in Garrison County. ”

“ Forty years before, when John was playing in the dust of the road leading up from the Sycamore, no king in all the world knew so much of the day's doings as John knows now, sitting there at the polished mahogany table with the green blotting paper upon it, under the green vase adorned with the red rose. A blight may threaten the wheat in Argentine, and John Barclay knows every cloud that sails the sky above that wheat, and when the cloud bursts into rain he sighs, for it means something to him, though heaven only knows what, and we and heaven do not care. ”

“ 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 god." ”

“ Yonder that deep gash in the sod at the left hides a woman's face—pale, wasted, dead on her pillow; and that clean black streak on the ebony cane—that is a tear, and in the tear is a girl's face and back of hers shimmers a boy's countenance. All of John Barclay's life and hopes and dreams and visions are spread out before him on the ground. So he closes his eyes, and braces his soul, and then, having risen, whistles as he limps lightly—for a man past fifty—down to the boat. ”

“ For one is bold in dreams.
A little after sunrise the next morning John rode away from his mother's door, on one of his horses, leading the other one. He was going up the hill to get Bob Hendricks, and the two were to ride to Lawrence. He had been promised work, carrying newspapers, and the Yankee in him made him believe he could find work for the other horse. As the boy turned into Main Street waving his mother good-by, he saw the places where he and Ellen Culpepper had stopped the night before, and they looked different some way, and he could not realize that he was in the same street. ”

“ Primarily, which is very notable and curious, I observe that men of business rarely know the meaning of the word "rich." At least if they know, they do not in their reasonings allow for the fact that it is a relative word, implying its opposite "poor" as positively as the word "north" implies its opposite "south." Men nearly always speak and write as if riches were absolute, and it were possible, by following certain scientific precepts, for everybody to be rich. Whereas riches are a power like that of electricity, acting only through inequalities or negations of itself. ”

“ God gave you ten talents, John Barclay—ten fine talents, my boy, and you wrapped them in a napkin and buried them in the ground, buried them in greed and cunning and love of power, and you are reaping envy and malice and cruelty. ”

“ The next morning when Neal Ward went out of the office at the mill, John Barclay sat shivering with wrath and horror. Every second stamped him with its indelible finger, as a day, or a month, puts its stain on other men. ”

“ Day after day, until the days and nights became a week and the week repeated itself until nearly a month was gone, John Barclay, dry-eyed and all but dumb, paced the terrace before his house by night, and by day roamed through the noisy mill or wandered through his desolate house, seeking peace that would not come to him. The whole foundation of his scheme of life was crumbling beneath him. He had built thirty-five years of his manhood upon the theory that the human brain is the god of things as they are and as they must be. ”

“ Jane won't mind, I am sure, and I know Jennie will understand. It isn't what even we who love you think of you, John—it is what you are that counts. Oh, Johnnie, Johnnie, maybe you could serve your country and humanity in jail—by showing the folly and the utter uselessness of all this money-getting, just as your father served it by dying. ”

“ I am foolish, John, but some way, I want my little boy back—the one who used to sit with me so long ago, and play on the guitar and sing 'Sleeping, I Dream, Love.' I don't like your new music, John; it's so like clanging cars, and crashing hammers, and the groans of men at toil. ”

“ It reaches out from the picture, with the light on the flesh tints, with the animal hair thick upon it, and with the curved, slender, tapering fingers cramped like a claw; and when one follows up the arm to the crouching body, the furtive mouth, the bold, shrewd eyes, and then sees that forehead full of visions, one sees in it more than John Barclay of Sycamore Ridge, more than America, more than Europe. It is the menace of civilization—the danger to the race from the domination of sheer intellect without moral restraint. ”

“ But there came a gray dawn of a May morning when John Barclay clutched his bedfellow and whispered, "Bob, Bob—look, look." When the awakened one saw nothing, John tried to scream, but could only gasp, "Don't you see Ellen—there—there by the table?" But whatever it was that startled him fluttered away on a beam of sunrise, and Bob Hendricks rose with the frightened boy, and went to his work with him.
Two days later a letter came telling him that Ellen Culpepper was dead.
Now death—the vast baffling mystery of death—is Fate's strongest lever to pry men from their philosophy. ”

“ And this is strange, too, considering how rich and powerful John Barclay is and how by the scratch of his pen, he might set men working by the thousands for some righteous cause. Yet so it is; for with all the consciousness of great power, with all the feeling of unrestraint that such power gives a man, driving him to think he is a kind of god, John Barclay was only a two-legged man, with a limp in one foot, and a little mad place in his brain, wherein he kept the sense of his relation to the rest of this universe. ”

“ As the headlight of the train lit up the cinder yard, and brought the glint of the rails out of the darkness, John Barclay, a thousand miles away and thirty years after, fancied he could see her there in the railroad yards beside him waving her hands at him, smiling at him with the new-found joy in her face. For there is no difference between fifty-three and twenty-three when men are in love, and if they are in love with the same woman in both years, her face will never change, her smile will always seem the same. ”

“ And so that day and that night dropped from time into eternity, and who knows of all the millions of stars that swarmed the heavens, what ones held the wandering souls of the simple people of that bleak Western town as they lay on their pillows and dreamed. For if our waking hours are passed in worlds so wide apart, who shall know where we walk in dreams?
It is thirty years and more now since John Barclay dreamed of himself as the Wheat King of the Sycamore Valley, and in that thirty years he had considerable time to reflect upon the reasons why pride always goeth before destruction. ”

“ And the mother answered sadly as she looked up at him: "I know, dear—it is a new world; but the same old God moves it; and the same faith in God and love of man move men that always have moved them, and always will move them; there are as many things to live and die for now, as when your father gave up his life, John—just as many." They rocked together in silence—the boy of forty and the mother of sixty. ”

“ He sneered at reformers, and mocked God, did John Barclay in those days. He grew arrogant and boastful, and strutted in his power like a man in liquor with the vain knowledge that he could increase the population of a state or a group of states, or he could shrivel the prosperity of a section of the country by his whim. For by changing a freight rate he could make wheat grow, where grass had nourished. ”

“ Because little happened worth the telling; for growth is so still and so dull and so undramatic that it escapes interest and climax; yet it is all there is in life. For the roots of events in the ground of the past are like the crowded moments of our passing lives that are recorded only in our under-consciousnesses, to rise in other years in character formed, in traits established, in events fructified. And in the years when the evil days came not, John Barclay's tragedy was stirring in the soil of his soul. ”

“ If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich. ”

“ For it is God moving among men. Thus He manifests Himself in this earth. Through the centuries, amid the storm and stress of time, often muffled, often strangled, often incoherent, often raucous and inarticulate with anguish, but always in the end triumphant, the voice of the people is indeed the voice of God!
Nearly a dozen years had passed since the Russian painted the picture of John Barclay, which hangs in the public library of Sycamore Ridge, and in that time the heart of the American people had changed. ”

“ Brownwell shrugged his shoulders and smiled blandly as he answered: "Just so-so; I go twice a week. And—" he waved his gloves airily and continued, "What is it the immortal Burns says: 'A man's a man, for a' that and a' that!' And I'm a man, John Barclay, and she's a woman. And I go twice a week. You know women, sir, you know women—they're mostly all alike. ”

“ So there they stood, the only two people in the universe, reunited lovers, each with the voice of the other sounding in his ears. For Mr. Dolan was right. There are only two people in the world, and for these two lovers earth and the stars and the systems of suns that make up this universe were only background for the play of their happiness.
As Neal Ward came back to John Barclay from the telephone, the young man's face was burning with joy. ”

“ God, that he may prove his own wisdom and nothing more."
"Mother," cried Barclay, petulantly, "I can't stand this—that you should turn on me—now." He broke away from her, and stood alone. "When I need you most, you reproach me. When I need sympathy, you scorn all that I have done. You can't prove your God. Why should I accept Him?"
The gaunt old woman stretched out her arms and cried: "Oh, John Barclay, prove your god. Tell him to come and give you a moment's happiness—set him to work to restore your good name; command him to make Jeanette happy. These things my God can do! ”

“ Thus, suppose any person to be put in possession of a large estate of fruitful land, with rich beds of gold in its gravel, countless herds of cattle in its pastures; houses, and gardens, and storehouses full of useful stores; but suppose, after all, that he could get no servants? In order that he may be able to have servants, some one in his neighbourhood must be poor, and in want of his gold—or his corn. Assume that no one is in want of either, and that no servants are to be had. He must, therefore, bake his own bread, make his own clothes, plough his own ground, and shepherd his own flocks. ”