A Certain Rich Man

by William Allen White

CHAPTER XXV

Down comes the curtain. Only a minute does John Barclay sit there with his head in his arms, and then, while you are stretching your legs, or reading your programme, or looking over the house to see who may be here, up rises John Barclay, and while the stage carpenters are setting the new scene, he is behind there telephoning to Chicago, to Minneapolis, to Omaha, to Cleveland, to Buffalo,—he fairly swamps the girl with expensive long-distance calls,—trying to see if there is not some way to stop the filing of that indictment. For to him the mere indictment advertises to mankind that money is not power, and with him and with all of his caste and class a confession of weakness is equivalent to a confession of wrong. For where might makes right, as it does in his world, weakness spells guilt, and with all the people jeering at him, with the press saying: "Aha, so they have got Mr. Barclay, have they? Well, if all his money and all his power could not prevent an indictment, he must be a pretty tough customer,"—with the public peering into his private books and papers in a lawsuit, confirming as facts all that they had read in the newspapers, in short with the gold plating of respectability rubbed off his moral brass, he feels the crushing weight of the indictment, as he limps up and down his room at the mill and frets at the long-distance operator for being so slow with his calls.

But he is behind the scenes now; and so is Neal Ward, walking the streets of Chicago, looking for work on a newspaper, and finally finding it. And so are Mrs. Jane Barclay and Miss Barclay, as they sail away on their ten days' cruise of the Mediterranean. And while the orchestra plays and the man in the middle of row A of the dress circle edges out of his seat and in again, we cannot hear John Barclay sigh when the last telephone call is answered, and he finds that nothing can be done. And he is not particularly cheered by the knowledge that the Associated Press report that very afternoon is sending all over the world the story of the indictment. But late in the afternoon Judge Bemis, in whose court the indictment was found, much to his chagrin, upon evidence furnished by special counsel sent out from Washington—Judge Bemis tells him, as from one old friend to another, that the special counsellor isn't much of a lawyer. The pleasant friendly little rip-saw laugh of the judge over the telephone nearly a thousand miles away is not distinct enough to be heard across the stage even if the carpenters were not hammering, and the orchestra screaming, and the audience buzzing; but that little laugh of his good friend, Judge Bemis, was the sweetest sound John Barclay had heard in many a day. It seemed curious that he should so associate it, but that little laugh seemed to drown the sound of a clicking key in a lock—a large iron lock, that had been rattling in his mind since noon. For even in the minds of the rich and the great, even in the minds of men who fancy they are divinely appointed to parcel out to their less daring brethren the good things of this world, there is always a child's horror of the jail. So when Mr. Barclay, who was something of a lawyer himself, heard his good friend, Judge Bemis, laugh that pleasant little friendly laugh behind the scenes, the heart of Mr. Barclay gave a little pulse-beat of relief if not of joy.

But an instant later the blight of the indictment was over him again. Hammer away, and scream away, and buzz away with all your might, you noises of the playhouse; let us not hear John Barclay hastening across the bridge just before the early winter sunset comes, that he may intercept the Index and the Banner in the front yard of the Barclay home, before his mother sees them. Always heretofore he has been glad to have her read of his achievements, in the hope that she would come to approve them, and to view things as he saw them—his success and his power and his glory. But to-night he hides the paper under his gray coat and slips into the house. She and her son sit down to dinner alone. This must be a stage dinner they are eating—though it is all behind the scenes; for Mr. Barclay is merely going through the empty form of eating. "No, thank you," for the roast. "Why, Mr. Barclay did not touch his soup!" "Well," says the cook, tasting it critically, "that's strange." And "No, thank you" for the salad, and "Not any pie to-night, Clara." "What—none of the mince pie, John? Why, I went out in the kitchen and made it for you myself." "Well, a little."

Heigh-ho! We sigh, and we drum on our table-cloth with our fingers, and we are trying to find some way to tell something. We have been a bad boy, maybe—a bad little boy, and must own up; that is part of our punishment—the hardest part perhaps, even with the curtain down, even with the noise in front, even with the maid gone, even when a mother comes and strokes our head, as we sit idly at the organ bench, unable to sound a key. Shall the curtain go up now? Shall we sit gawking while a boy gropes his way out of a man's life, back through forty years, and puts his head in shame and sorrow against a mother's breast? How he stumbles and falters and halts, as the truth comes out—and it must come out; on the whole the best thing there is to say of John Barclay on that fateful December day in the year of our Lord 1903 is that he did not let his mother learn the truth from any lips but his. And so it follows naturally, because he was brave and kind, that instead of having to strengthen her, she sustained him—she in her seventies, he in his fifties.

"My poor dear child," she said, "I know—I know. But don't worry, John—don't worry. I don't mind. 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 would not mind if it made men see that money isn't the thing—if it made you see it, my boy; if you could come out of a jail with that horrible greed for money purged from you—"

But no—we will not peep behind the curtain; we will not dwell with John Barclay as he walked all night up and down the great living room of his home. And see, the footlights have winked at the leader of the orchestra, to let him know he is playing too long; observe, how quickly the music dies down—rather too quickly, for the clatter of cast iron is heard on the stage, and the sound of hurried footsteps is audible, as of some one moving rapidly about behind the curtain. The rattling iron you hear is the stove in Watts McHurdie's shop; they have just set it up, and got it red hot; for it is a cold day, that fifteenth day of December, 1903, and the footsteps you hear are those of the members of the harness shop parliament.

Ah! There goes the curtain, and there sits Watts astraddle of his bench, working with all his might, for he has an order to sew sleigh-bells on a breast strap, for some festivity or another; and here sits the colonel, and over there the general, and on his home-made chair Jacob Dolan is tilted back, warming his toes at the stove. They are all reading—all except Watts, who is working; on the floor are the Chicago and St. Louis evening papers, and the Omaha and Kansas City morning papers. And on the first pages of all of these papers are pictures of John Barclay. There is John Barclay in the Bee, taken in his Omaha office by the Bee's own photographer—a new picture of Mr. Barclay, unfamiliar to the readers of most newspapers. It shows the little man standing by a desk, smiling rather benignly with his sharp bold eyes fixed on the camera. There is a line portrait of Mr. Barclay in the Times, one of recent date, showing the crow's-feet about the eyes, the vertical wrinkle above the nose, and the furtive mouth, hard and naked, and the square mean jaw, that every cartoonist of Barclay has emphasized for a dozen years. And there are other pictures of Mr. Barclay in the papers on the floor, and the first pages of the papers are filled with the news of the Barclay indictment. All over this land, and in Europe, the news of that indictment caused a sensation. In the Times, there on the floor, is an editorial comment upon the indictment of Barclay cabled from London, another from Paris, and a third from Berlin. It was a big event in the world, an event of more than passing note—this sudden standing up of one of the richest men of his land, before the front door of a county jail. Big business, and little business that apes big business, dropped its jaw. The world is not accustomed to think of might making wrong, so when a Charles I or a Louis XVI or a John Barclay comes to harm, the traditions of the world are wrenched. Men say: "How can these things be—if might makes right? Here is a case where might and right conflict—how about it? Jails are for the poor, not for the rich, because the poor are wrong and the rich are right, and no just man made perfect by a million should be in jail."

And so while the members of the parliament in Watts McHurdie's shop read and were disturbed at the strange twist of events, the whole world was puzzled with them, and in unison with Jacob Dolan, half the world spoke, "I see no difference in poisoning breakfast foods and poisoning wells, and it's no odds to me whether a man pinches a few ounces out of my flour sack, or steals my chickens."

And the other half of the world was replying with Colonel Culpepper, "Oh, well, Jake, now that's all right for talk; but in the realms of high finance men are often forced to be their own judges of right and wrong, and circumstances that we do not appreciate, cannot understand, in point of fact, nor comprehend, if I may say so, intervene, and make what seems wrong in small transactions, trivial matters and pinch-penny business, seem right in the high paths of commerce."