There are thousands upon thousands of men and women this day who may thank God Almighty that the man who has rescued them from an utter overwhelming of body and soul has been given the opportunity of exercising the temperament with which he was born.
But, like all leaders, Frederick Charrington is adored by his subordinates. He must lead, but he cannot be tyrannical. A kinder and more considerate man never breathed. All sorts of little details in my own pleasant friendship with him, not less than those things which men who have known him for thirty and forty years have told me, go to prove the indubitable fact.
As a novelist one is, first and foremost, intensely interested in temperament and the psychology of the mind. I came to Osea Island to study this man of whom I have been writing. I have done so to the best of my ability, and I think that very little about him has escaped me.
I once saw him in a rage royal.
I cannot detail the circumstances, it would not be fair to the other party concerned. It is sufficient to say that a young man of good society was behaving himself in a thoroughly indefensible way. If this young fellow had done what he proposed to do, and it was something which Mr. Charrington had no legal right to restrain him from doing, the result would have been disastrous.
The young man defied the elder one. Several people were present at the scene, and the situation was becoming one of great tension.
As a man of the world I knew what nine out of ten men would have done at the beginning of the incident.
I saw Frederick Charrington's face change to an almost steely hardness. The provocation was enormous, be it remembered. His eyes gleamed with a blue fire. The strong jaw set, the hands clenched themselves—and then as suddenly unclenched. None of us knew what was going to happen.
What did happen was this: Mr. Charrington, still in the quiet, persuasive voice that he had used throughout, conquered by sheer weight of moral force. He is a strong and athletic man himself. I knew, as certainly as that I am writing this, that the natural Adam in him would have simply rejoiced in the swift blow, the physical rejoinder. Nothing of the sort happened, and a quarter of an hour afterwards, as I was sitting with him in his motor-boat and we were slipping over the dancing waves of the Blackwater, he was quietly lighting his pipe and laughing over the whole incident. Not a great thing, perhaps, you will say, but an indication of the man....
The greatest characteristic, indeed, of Frederick Charrington is his courage.