The Romance of a Plain Man

As he turned his head in my direction, I left the hall, and came out upon the porch, acutely conscious, all the time, that there was too much of me, that my hands and feet got in my way, that I ought to have put on a different shirt in the afternoon.

Sally was stooping over to snip off the head of a geranium, and when she looked up the next instant, with her hair blown back from her forehead, her starry, expectant gaze rested full on my own.

"Why, it's the boy I used to know," she exclaimed, moving toward me. "Boy, how do you do?" She put out her hand, and as I took it in mine, I saw for the first time that she was a large girl for her age, and would be a large woman. Her figure was already ripening under her thin white gown, but her hands and feet were still those of a child, and moulded, I saw, with that peculiar delicacy, which, I had learned from the doctor, was the distinguishing characteristic of the Virginian aristocracy.

"It is a long time since – since I saw you," she remarked in a cordial voice.

"It's been eight years," I answered. "I wonder that you remember me."

"Oh, I never forget. And besides, if I didn't see you for eight years more, I should still recognise you by your eyes. There aren't many boys," she said merrily, "who have eyes like a blue-eyed collie's."

With this she turned from me to George, and after a word or two to the General, and a nod in my direction, they passed through the gate, and went slowly along the street, her pale brown hair still blown like a bird's wing behind her.

The General's sister, young George's Aunt Hatty, a severe little lady, with a very flat figure, had come out on the porch, and was offering her brother a dose of medicine.

"A good girl, Hatty," remarked the great man, in an affable mood. "A little too much of her Aunt Matoaca's spirit for a wife, but a very good girl, as long as you ain't married to her."

"She would be handsome, George, except for her mouth. It's a pity her mouth spoils her."

"What's the matter with her mouth? I haven't got your eyesight, Hatty, but it appears a perfectly good mouth to me."

"That's because you have naturally coarse tastes, George. A lady's mouth should be a delicate bow."

A delicate bow, indeed! Those full, sensitive lips that showed like a splash of carmine in the clear pallor of her face! As I walked home under the broad, green leaves of the sycamores, I remembered the features of the pretty maiden at the Old Market, and they appeared to me suddenly divested of all beauty. It was as if a bright beam of sunshine had fallen on a blaze of artificial light, and extinguished it forever. Henceforth I should move straight toward a single love, as I had already begun to move straight toward a single ambition.

CHAPTER XI

IN WHICH I ENTER SOCIETY AND GET A FALL

My first successful speculation was made in my twenty-first year with five hundred dollars paid to me by Bob Brackett when the Nectar blend had been six months on the market. By the General's advice I put the money in the Old South Chemical Company, and selling out a little later at high profits, I immediately reinvested. As the years went by, that smoking mixture, discovered almost by accident in an idle moment, began to yield me considerably larger checks twice a year; and twice a year, with the General's enthusiastic assistance, I went in for a modest speculation from which I hoped sometime to reap a fortune. When I was twenty-five, a temporary depression in the market gave me the opportunity which, as Dr. Theophilus had informed me almost daily for ten years, "waits always around the corner for the man who walks quickly." I put everything I owned into copper mining stock, then selling very low, and a year later when the copper trade recovered quickly and grew active, I rushed to the General and enquired breathlessly if I must sell out.

"Hold on and await developments," he replied from his wicker chair over his bandaged foot, "and remember that the successful speculator is the man who always runs in the other direction from the crowd. When you see people sitting still, you'd better get up, and when you see them begin to get up, you'd better sit still. Fortune's a woman, you know; don't try to flirt with her, but at the same time don't throw your boots at her head."

Five years before I had left the tobacco factory to go into the General's office, and my days were spent now, absorbed and alert, beside the chair in which he sat, coolly playing his big game of chess, and controlling a railroad. He was in his day the strongest financier in the South, and he taught me my lesson. Tireless, sleepless, throbbing with a fever that was like the fever of love, I studied at his side every movement of the market, I weighed every word he uttered, I watched every stroke of his stout cork-handled pen. An infallible judge of men, my intimate knowledge soon taught me that it was by judging men, not things, he had won his success. "Learn men, learn men, learn men," he would repeat in one of his frequent losses of temper. "Everything rests on a man, and the way to know the thing is to know the man."

"That's why I'm learning you, General," I once replied, as he hobbled out of his office on my arm.

"Oh, I know, I know," he retorted with his sly chuckle. "You are letting me lean on you now because you think the time will come when you can throw me aside and stand up by yourself. It's age and youth, my boy, age and youth."

He sighed wearily, and looking at him I saw for the first time that he was growing old.

"Well, you've stood straight enough in your day, sir," I answered.

"Oh, I've had my youth, and I shan't begin to put on a long face because I've lost it. I didn't have your stature, Ben, but I had a pretty fair middling-size one of my own. They used to say of me that I had an eye for the big chance, and that's a thing a man's got to be born with. To see big you've got to be big, and that's what I like about you – you ain't busy looking for specks."

"If I can only become as big a man as you, General, I shall be content."

"No, you won't, no, you won't, don't stop at me. Already they are beginning to call you my 'wonderful boy,' you know. 'I like that wonderful boy of yours, George,' Jessoms said to me only last night at the club. You know Jessoms – don't you? He's president of the Union Bank."

"Yes, I talked to him for two solid hours yesterday."

"He told me so, and I said to him: 'By Jove, you're right, Jessoms, and that boy's got a future ahead of him if he doesn't swell.' Now that's the Gospel truth, Ben, and all the body you've got ain't going to save you if you don't keep your head. If you ever feel it beginning to swell, you step outside and put it under a pump, that's the best thing I know of. How old are you?"

"Twenty-six."

"And you've got fifty thousand dollars already?"

"Thanks to you, sir."

"So you ain't swelled yet. Well, I've given you six years of hard training, and I made it all the blamed harder because I liked you. You've got the look of success about you, I've seen enough of it to know it. They used to say of me in Washington that I could sit in my office chair and overlook a line of men and spot every last one of them that was going to get on. I never went wrong but once, and that was because the poor devil began to swell and thought he was as big as his own shadow. But if the look's there, I see it – it's something in the eye and the jaw, and the grip of the hands that nobody can give you except God Almighty – and by George, it turns me into a downright heathen and makes me believe in fate. When a man has that something in the eye and in the jaw and in the grip of the hand, there ain't enough devils in the universe to keep him from coming out on top at the last. He may go under, but he won't stay under – no, sir, not if they pile all the bu'sted stocks in the market on top his shoulders."

"Anyway, you've started me rolling, General, whether I spin on or come to a dead stop."

"Then remember," he retorted slyly, as we parted,' "that my earnest advice to a young man starting in business is – don't begin to swell!"

There was small danger of that, I thought, as I went on alone with my vision of the Great South Midland and Atlantic Railroad. From my childhood I had seen the big road, as I saw it to-day, sweeping in a bright track over the entire South, lengthening, branching, winding away toward the distant horizon, girdling the cotton fields, the rice fields, and the coal fields, like a protecting arm. One by one, I saw now, the small adjunct lines, absorbed by the main system, until in the whole South only the Great South Midland and Atlantic would be left. To dominate that living organism, to control, in my turn, that splendid liberator of a people's resources, this was still the inaccessible hope upon which I had fixed my heart.

In my room I found young George Bolingbroke, who had been waiting, as he at once informed me, "a good half an hour."

"I say, Ben," he broke out the next minute, "why don't you get the housemaid to tie your cravats? She'd do it a long sight better. Are your fingers all thumbs?"

"They must be," I replied with a humility I had never assumed before the General, "I can't do the thing properly to save my life."

"I wonder it doesn't give you a common look," he remarked dispassionately, while I winced at the word, "but somehow it only makes you appear superior to such trifles, like a giant gazing over molehills at a mountain. It's your size, I reckon, but you're the kind of chap who can put on a turned-down collar with your evening clothes, or a tie that's been twisted through a wringer, and not look ridiculous. It's the rest of us that seem fops because we're properly dressed."

"I'd prefer to wear the right thing, you know," I returned, crestfallen.

"You never will. Anybody might as well expect a mountain to put forth rose-bushes instead of pine. It suits you, somehow, like your hair, which would make the rest of us look a regular guy. But I'm forgetting my mission. I've brought you an invitation to a party."

"What on earth should I do at a party?"

"Look pleasant. Did I take you to Miss Lessie Bell's dancing class for nothing? and were you put through the steps of the Highland Fling in vain?"

"I wasn't put through, I never learned."

"Well, you kicked at it anyway. I say, is all your pirouetting to be done with stocks? Are you going to pass away in ignorance of polite society and the manners of the ladies?"

"When I make a fortune, perhaps – "

"Perhaps is always too late. To-morrow is better."

"Where is the party?"

"The Blands are giving it. Uncle George was puffing and blowing about you when we dined there last Sunday, and Sally Mickleborough told me to bring you to her party on Wednesday night."

Rising hurriedly I walked away from young George to the fireplace. A mist was before my eyes, I smelt again the scent of wallflowers, and I saw in a dream the old grey house, with its delicate lace curtains parted from the small square window-panes as if a face looked out on the crooked pavement.

"I'll go, George," I said, wheeling about, "if you'll pledge yourself that I go properly dressed."