Complete Works of Rudyard Kipling (Illustrated) (80 page)

“I’d sooner begin sweeping out the office — isn’t that how the big bugs start? — and touch something now than — ”

“I know it; we all feel that way. But I guess we can hire any sweeping we need. I made the same mistake myself of starting in too soon.”

“Thirty million dollars’ worth o’ mistake, wasn’t it? I’d risk it for that.”

“I lost some; and I gained some. I’ll tell you.”

Cheyne pulled his beard and smiled as he looked over the still water, and spoke away from Harvey, who presently began to be aware that his father was telling the story of his life. He talked in a low, even voice, without gesture and without expression; and it was a history for which a dozen leading journals would cheerfully have paid many dollars — the story of forty years that was at the same time the story of the New West, whose story is yet to be written.

It began with a kinless boy turned loose in Texas, and went on fantastically through a hundred changes and chops of life, the scenes shifting from State after Western State, from cities that sprang up in a month and — in a season utterly withered away, to wild ventures in wilder camps that are now laborious, paved municipalities. It covered the building of three railroads and the deliberate wreck of a fourth. It told of steamers, townships, forests, and mines, and the men of every nation under heaven, manning, creating, hewing, and digging these. It touched on chances of gigantic wealth flung before eyes that could not see, or missed by the merest accident of time and travel; and through the mad shift of things, sometimes on horseback, more often afoot, now rich, now poor, in and out, and back and forth, deck-hand, train-hand, contractor, boarding-house keeper, journalist, engineer, drummer, real-estate agent, politician, dead-beat, rum-seller, mine-owner, speculator, cattle-man, or tramp, moved Harvey Cheyne, alert and quiet, seeking his own ends, and, so he said, the glory and advancement of his country.

He told of the faith that never deserted him even when he hung on the ragged edge of despair — the faith that comes of knowing men and things. He enlarged, as though he were talking to himself, on his very great courage and resource at all times. The thing was so evident in the man’s mind that he never even changed his tone. He described how he had bested his enemies, or forgiven them, exactly as they had bested or forgiven him in those careless days; how he had entreated, cajoled, and bullied towns, companies, and syndicates, all for their enduring good; crawled round, through, or under mountains and ravines, dragging a string and hoop-iron railroad after him, and in the end, how he had sat still while promiscuous communities tore the last fragments of his character to shreds.

The tale held Harvey almost breathless, his head a little cocked to one side, his eyes fixed on his father’s face, as the twilight deepened and the red cigar-end lit up the furrowed cheeks and heavy eyebrows. It seemed to him like watching a locomotive storming across country in the dark — a mile between each glare of the open fire-door: but this locomotive could talk, and the words shook and stirred the boy to the core of his soul. At last Cheyne pitched away the cigar-butt, and the two sat in the dark over the lapping water.

“I’ve never told that to any one before,” said the father.

Harvey gasped. “It’s just the greatest thing that ever was!” said he.

“That’s what I got. Now I’m coming to what I didn’t get. It won’t sound much of anything to you, but I don’t wish you to be as old as I am before you find out. I can handle men, of course, and I’m no fool along my own lines, but — but — I can’t compete with the man who has been taught! I’ve picked up as I went along, and I guess it sticks out all over me.”

“I’ve never seen it,” said the son, indignantly.

“You will, though, Harve. You will — just as soon as you’re through college. Don’t I know it? Don’t I know the look on men’s faces when they think me a — a ‘mucker,’ as they call it out here? I can break them to little pieces — yes — but I can’t get back at ‘em to hurt ‘em where they live. I don’t say they’re ‘way ‘way up, but I feel I’m ‘way, ‘way, ‘way off, somehow. Now you’ve got your chance. You’ve got to soak up all the learning that’s around, and you’ll live with a crowd that are doing the same thing. They’ll be doing it for a few thousand dollars a year at most; but remember you’ll be doing it for millions. You’ll learn law enough to look after your own property when I’m out o’ the light, and you’ll have to be solid with the best men in the market (they are useful later); and above all, you’ll have to stow away the plain, common, sit-down-with-your chin-on your-elbows book-learning. Nothing pays like that, Harve, and it’s bound to pay more and more each year in our country — in business and in politics. You’ll see.”

“There’s no sugar in my end of the deal,” said Harvey. “Four years at college! ‘Wish I’d chosen the valet and the yacht!”

“Never mind, my son,” Cheyne insisted. “You’re investing your capital where it’ll bring in the best returns; and I guess you won’t find our property shrunk any when you’re ready to take hold. Think it over, and let me know in the morning. Hurry! We’ll be late for supper!”

As this was a business talk, there was no need for Harvey to tell his mother about it; and Cheyne naturally took the same point of view. But Mrs. Cheyne saw and feared, and was a little jealous. Her boy, who rode rough-shod over her, was gone, and in his stead reigned a keen-faced youth, abnormally silent, who addressed most of his conversation to his father. She understood it was business, and therefore a matter beyond her premises. If she had any doubts, they were resolved when Cheyne went to Boston and brought back a new diamond marquise ring.

“What have you two been doing now?” she said, with a weak little smile, as she turned it in the light.

“Talking — just talking, Mama; there’s nothing mean about Harvey.”

There was not. The boy had made a treaty on his own account. Railroads, he explained gravely, interested him as little as lumber, real estate, or mining. What his soul yearned after was control of his father’s newly purchased sailing-ship. If that could be promised him within what he conceived to be a reasonable time, he, for his part, guaranteed diligence and sobriety at college for four or five years. In vacation he was to be allowed full access to all details connected with the line — he had not asked more than two thousand questions about it, — from his father’s most private papers in the safe to the tug in San Francisco harbour.

“It’s a deal,” said Cheyne at the last. “You’ll alter your mind twenty times before you leave college, o’ course; but if you take hold of it in proper shape, and if you don’t tie it up before you’re twenty-three, I’ll make the thing over to you. How’s that, Harve?”

“Nope; never pays to split up a going concern. There’s too much competition in the world anyway, and Disko says ‘blood-kin hev to stick together.’ His crowd never go back on him. That’s one reason, he says, why they make such big fares. Say, the
We’re Here
goes off to the Georges on Monday. They don’t stay long ashore, do they?”

“Well, we ought to be going, too, I guess. I’ve left my business hung up at loose ends between two oceans, and it’s time to connect again. I just hate to do it, though; haven’t had a holiday like this for twenty years.”

“We can’t go without seeing Disko off,” said Harvey; “and Monday’s Memorial Day. Let’s stay over that, anyway.”

“What is this memorial business? They were talking about it at the boarding-house,” said Cheyne weakly. He, too, was not anxious to spoil the golden days.

“Well, as far as I can make out, this business is a sort of song-and-dance act, whacked up for the summer boarders. Disko don’t think much of it, he says, because they take up a collection for the widows and orphans. Disko’s independent. Haven’t you noticed that?”

“Well — yes. A little. In spots. Is it a town show, then?”

“The summer convention is. They read out the names of the fellows drowned or gone astray since last time, and they make speeches, and recite, and all. Then, Disko says, the secretaries of the Aid Societies go into the back yard and fight over the catch. The real show, he says, is in the spring. The ministers all take a hand then, and there aren’t any summer boarders around.”

“I see,” said Cheyne, with the brilliant and perfect comprehension of one born into and bred up to city pride. “We’ll stay over for Memorial Day, and get off in the afternoon.”

“Guess I’ll go down to Disko’s and make him bring his crowd up before they sail. I’ll have to stand with them, of course.”

“Oh, that’s it, is it,” said Cheyne. “I’m only a poor summer boarder, and you’re — ”

“A Banker — full-blooded Banker,” Harvey called back as he boarded a trolley, and Cheyne went on with his blissful dreams for the future.

Disko had no use for public functions where appeals were made for charity, but Harvey pleaded that the glory of the day would be lost, so far as he was concerned, if the
We’re Heres
absented themselves. Then Disko made conditions. He had heard — it was astonishing how all the world knew all the world’s business along the water-front — he had heard that a “Philadelphia actress-woman” was going to take part in the exercises; and he mistrusted that she would deliver “Skipper Ireson’s Ride.” Personally, he had as little use for actresses as for summer boarders; but justice was justice, and though he himself (here Dan giggled) had once slipped up on a matter of judgment, this thing must not be. So Harvey came back to East Gloucester, and spent half a day explaining to an amused actress with a royal reputation on two seaboards the inwardness of the mistake she contemplated; and she admitted that it was justice, even as Disko had said.

Cheyne knew by old experience what would happen; but anything of the nature of a public palaver was meat and drink to the man’s soul. He saw the trolleys hurrying west, in the hot, hazy morning, full of women in light summer dresses, and white-faced straw-hatted men fresh from Boston desks; the stack of bicycles outside the post office; the come-and-go of busy officials, greeting one another; the slow flick and swash of bunting in the heavy air; and the important man with a hose sluicing the brick sidewalk.

“Mother,” he said suddenly, “don’t you remember — after Seattle was burned out — and they got her going again?”

Mrs. Cheyne nodded, and looked critically down the crooked street. Like her husband, she understood these gatherings, all the West over, and compared them one against another. The fishermen began to mingle with the crowd about the town-hall doors — blue-jowled Portuguese, their women bare-headed or shawled for the most part; clear-eyed Nova Scotians, and men of the Maritime Provinces; French, Italians, Swedes, and Danes, with outside crews of coasting schooners; and everywhere women in black, who saluted one another with gloomy pride, for this was their day of great days. And there were ministers of many creeds, — pastors of great, gilt-edged congregations, at the seaside for a rest, with shepherds of the regular work, — from the priests of the Church on the Hill to bush-bearded ex-sailor Lutherans, hail-fellow with the men of a score of boats. There were owners of lines of schooners, large contributors to the societies, and small men, their few craft pawned to the mastheads, with bankers and marine-insurance agents, captains of tugs and water-boats, riggers, fitters, lumpers, salters, boat-builders, and coopers, and all the mixed population of the water-front.

They drifted along the line of seats made gay with the dresses of the summer boarders, and one of the town officials patrolled and perspired till he shone all over with pure civic pride. Cheyne had met him for five minutes a few days before, and between the two there was entire understanding.

“Well, Mr. Cheyne, and what d’you think of our city? — Yes, madam, you can sit anywhere you please. — You have this kind of thing out West, I presume?”

“Yes, but we aren’t as old as you.”

“That’s so, of course. You ought to have been at the exercises when we celebrated our two hundred and fiftieth birthday. I tell you, Mr. Cheyne, the old city did herself credit.”

“So I heard. It pays, too. What’s the matter with the town that it don’t have a first-class hotel, though?”

“ — Right over there to the left, Pedro. Heaps o’ room for you and your crowd. — Why, that’s what I tell ‘em all the time, Mr. Cheyne. There’s big money in it, but I presume that don’t affect you any. What we want is — ”

A heavy hand fell on his broadcloth shoulder, and the flushed skipper of a Portland coal-and-ice coaster spun him half round. “What in thunder do you fellows mean by clappin’ the law on the town when all decent men are at sea this way? Heh? Town’s dry as a bone, an’ smells a sight worse sence I quit. ‘Might ha’ left us one saloon for soft drinks, anyway.”

“Don’t seem to have hindered your nourishment this morning, Carsen. I’ll go into the politics of it later. Sit down by the door and think over your arguments till I come back.”

“What good is arguments to me? In Miquelon champagne’s eighteen dollars a case and — ” The skipper lurched into his seat as an organ-prelude silenced him.

“Our new organ,” said the official proudly to Cheyne. “Cost us four thousand dollars, too. We’ll have to get back to high-license next year to pay for it. I wasn’t going to let the ministers have all the religion at their convention. Those are some of our orphans standing up to sing. My wife taught ‘em. See you again later, Mr. Cheyne. I’m wanted on the platform.”

High, clear, and true, children’s voices bore down the last noise of those settling into their places.

“O all ye Works of the Lord, bless ye the Lord: praise him and magnify him for ever!”

The women throughout the hall leaned forward to look as the reiterated cadences filled the air. Mrs. Cheyne, with some others, began to breathe short; she had hardly imagined there were so many widows in the world; and instinctively searched for Harvey. He had found the
We’re Heres
at the back of the audience, and was standing, as by right, between Dan and Disko. Uncle Salters, returned the night before with Penn, from Pamlico Sound, received him suspiciously.

“Hain’t your folk gone yet?” he grunted. “What are you doin’ here, young feller?”