The Conflict Part 41

I had hopes of you. You were such a hopeless wreck. But no. And you call yourself an intelligent man!"

"I'll never do it again," said Hastings, pleading, but smiling, too--Charlton's way of talking delighted him.

"You think this is a joke," said Charlton, shaking his bullet head.

"Have you any affairs to settle? If you have, send for your lawyer in the morning."

Fear--the Great Fear--suddenly laid its icy long fingers upon the throat of the old man. He gasped and his eyes rolled. "Don't trifle with me, Charlton," he muttered. "You know you will pull me through."

"I'll do my best," said Charlton. "I promise nothing. I'm serious about the lawyer."

"I don't want no lawyer hanging round my bed," growled the old man.

"It'd kill me. I've got nothing to settle. I don't run things with loose ends. And there's Jinny and Marthy and the boy--share and share alike."

"Well--you're in no immediate danger. I'll come early to-morrow."

"Wait till I get to sleep."

"You'll be asleep as soon as the light's down. But I'll stop a few minutes and talk to your daughter."

Charlton found Jane at the window in the dressing room next her father's bedroom. He said loudly enough for the old man to overhear:

"Your father's all right for the present, so you needn't worry. Come downstairs with me. He's to go to sleep now."

Jane went in and kissed the bulging bony forehead. "Good night, popsy."

"Good night, Jinny dear," he said in a softer voice than she had ever heard from him. "I'm feeling very comfortable now, and sleepy. If anything should happen, don't forget what I said about not temptin'

your brother by trustin' him too fur. Look after your own affairs.

Take Mr. Haswell's advice. He's stupid, but he's honest and careful and safe. You might talk to Dr. Charlton about things, too. He's straight, and knows what's what. He's one of them people that gives everybody good advice but themselves. If anything should happen----"

"But nothing's going to happen, popsy."

"It might. I don't seem to care as much as I did. I'm so tarnation tired. I reckon the goin' ain't as bad as I always calculated. I didn't know how tired they felt and anxious to rest."

"I'll turn down the light. The nurse is right in there."

"Yes--turn the light. If anything should happen, there's an envelope in the top drawer in my desk for Dr. Charlton. But don't tell him till I'm gone. I don't trust n.o.body, and if he knowed there was something waiting, why, there's no telling----"

The old man had drowsed off. Jane lowered the light and went down to join Charlton on the front veranda, where he was smoking a cigarette.

She said:

"He's asleep."

"He's all right for the next few days," said Charlton. "After that--I don't know. I'm very doubtful."

Jane was depressed, but not so depressed as she would have been had not her father so long looked like death and so often been near dying.

"Stay at home until I see how this is going to turn out. Telephone your sister to be within easy call. But don't let her come here. She's not fit to be about an ill person. The sight of her pulling a long, sad face might carry him off in a fit of rage."

Jane observed him with curiosity in the light streaming from the front hall. "You're a very practical person aren't you?" she said.

"No romance, no idealism, you mean?"

"Yes."

He laughed in his plain, healthy way. "Not a frill," said he. "I'm interested only in facts. They keep me busy enough."

"You're not married, are you?"

"Not yet. But I shall be as soon as I find a woman I want."

"IF you can get her."

"I'll get her, all right," replied he. "No trouble about that. The woman I want'll want me."

"I'm eager to see her," said Jane. "She'll be a queer one."

"Not necessarily," said he. "But I'll make her a queer one before I get through with her--queer, in my sense, meaning sensible and useful."

"You remind me so often of Victor Dorn, yet you're not at all like him."

"We're in the same business--trying to make the human race fit to a.s.sociate with. He looks after the minds; I look after the bodies.

Mine's the humbler branch of the business, perhaps--but it's equally necessary, and it comes first. The chief thing that's wrong with human nature is bad health. I'm getting the world ready for Victor."

"You like him?"

"I wors.h.i.+p him," said Charlton in his most matter-of-fact way.

"Yet he's just the opposite of you. He's an idealist."

"Who told you that?" laughed Charlton. "He's the most practical, sensible man in this town. You people think he's a crank because he isn't crazy about money or about stepping round on the necks of his fellow beings. The truth is, he's got a sense of proportion--and a sense of humor--and an idea of a rational happy life. You're still barbarians, while he's a civilized man. Ever seen an ignorant yap jeer when a neat, clean, well-dressed person pa.s.sed by? Well, you people jeering at Victor Dorn are like that yap."

"I agree with you," said Jane hastily and earnestly.

"No, you don't," replied Charlton, tossing away the end of his cigarette. "And so much the worse for you. Good-night, lady."

And away he strode into the darkness, leaving her amused, yet with a peculiar sense of her own insignificance.

Charlton was back again early the next morning and spent that day--and a large part of many days there-after--in working at the wreck, Martin Hastings, inspecting known weak spots, searching for unknown ones, patching here and there, trying all the schemes teeming in his ingenious and supremely sensible mind in the hope of setting the wreck afloat again. He could not comprehend why the old man remained alive.

He had seen many a human being go who was in health, in comparison with this conglomerate of diseases and frailties; yet life there was, and a most tenacious life. He worked and watched, and from day to day put off suggesting that they telegraph for the son. The coming of his son might shake Martin's conviction that he would get well; it seemed to Charlton that that conviction was the one thread holding his patient from the abyss where darkness and silence reign supreme.

Jane could not leave the grounds. If she had she would have seen Victor Dorn either not at all or at a distance. For the campaign was now approaching its climax.

The public man is always two wholly different personalities. There is the man the public sees--and fancies it knows. There is the man known only to his intimates, known imperfectly to them, perhaps an unknown quant.i.ty even to himself until the necessity for decisive action reveals him to himself and to those in a position to see what he really did. Unfortunately, it is not the man the public sees but the hidden man who is elected to the office. Nothing could be falser than the old saw that sooner or later a man stands revealed. Sometimes, as we well know, history has not found out a man after a thousand years of studying him. And the most familiar, the most constantly observed men in public life often round out a long career without ever having aroused in the public more than a faint and formless suspicion as to the truth about them.

The chief reason for this is that, in studying a character, no one is content with the plain and easy way of reaching an understanding of it--the way of looking only at its ACTS. We all love to dabble in the metaphysical, to examine and weigh motives and intentions, to compare ourselves and make wildly erroneous judgment inevitable by listening to the man's WORDS--his professions, always more or less dishonest, though perhaps not always deliberately so.

In that Remsen City campaign the one party that could profit by the full and clear truth, and therefore was eager for the truth as to everything and everybody, was the Workingmen's League. The Kelly crowd, the House gang, the Citizens' Alliance, all had their ugly secrets, their secret intentions different from their public professions. All these were seeking office and power with a view to increasing or perpetuating or protecting various abuses, however ardently they might attack, might perhaps honestly intend to end, certain other and much smaller abuses. The Workingmen's League said that it would end every abuse existing law did not securely protect, and it meant what it said.

Its campaign fund was the dues paid in by its members and the profits from the New Day. Its financial books were open for free inspection.