Juggernaut: A Veiled Record

Juggernaut: A Veiled Record
George Eggleston

Dolores Marbourg

Eggleston George Cary, Marbourg Dolores

Juggernaut: A Veiled Record

I

Edgar Braine was never so blithe in all his life as on the morning of his suicide.

Years after, in the swirl and tumult of his extraordinary career, the memory of that June morning, and of the mood in which he greeted it, would rush upon him as a flood, and for the moment drown the eager voices that besought his attention, distracting his mind for the briefest fraction of an instant from the complex problems of affairs with which he wrestled ceaselessly.

In the brief moment during which he allowed the vision of a dead past thus to invade his mind, he would recall every detail of that morning with photographic accuracy, and more than photographic vividness.

In such moments, he saw himself young, but with a mature man's ambition, and more than the strength of a man, as he strode sturdily down the streets of the little Western city, the June sunshine all about him in a golden glory, while the sunshine within exceeded it a hundredfold.

His mood was exultant, and with reason. He had already conquered the only obstacles that barred his way to success and power. He had impressed himself upon the minds of men, in a small way as yet, to be sure, but sufficiently to prove his capacity, and confirm his confidence in his ability to conquer, whithersoever he might direct his march.

Life opened its best portals to him. He was poor, but strong and well equipped. He had won possession of the tools with which to do his work; and the conquest of the tools is the most difficult task set the man who confronts life armed only with his own abilities. That accomplished, if the man be worthy, the rest follows quite as a matter of course, – an effect flowing from an efficient cause.

Edgar Braine had proved to himself that he possessed superior capacities. He had long entertained that opinion of his endowment, but his caution in self-estimate was so great that he had been slower than any of his acquaintances to accept the fact as indisputably proved.

It had been proved, however, and that was cause enough for rejoicing, to a mind which had tortured itself from boyhood with unutterable longings for that power over men which superior intellect gives, – a mind that had dreamed high dreams of the employment of such power for human progress.

His was not an ambition achieved. It was that immeasurably more joyous thing, an ambition in sure process of achievement.

But this was not his only cause of joy. Love, as well as life, had smiled upon him, and the woman who had subdued all that was noblest in him to that which was still nobler in her, was presently to be his wife.

And so Edgar Braine's heart sang merrily within him as he strode through the cottonwood-bordered streets toward his editorial work-shop.

He entered the composing-room in front, and greeted the foreman with even more of cordiality than was his custom, though his custom was a cordial one.

He tried not to observe that Mikey Hagin, the Spartan-souled apprentice of the establishment, was complacently burning a hole in the palm of his hand, in a heroic endeavor to hide the fact that he had been smoking a cigarette in risk of that instant discharge which Braine had threatened as the fore-ordained punishment of that crime, if he should ever catch the precocious youth committing it again.

He saw the cigarette, of course, – it was his habit to see things, – and the blue wreath floating upward from the hand in which a hasty attempt had been made to conceal it, was perfectly apparent. But his humor was much too joyous for him to enforce the penalty, though he had decreed it with a fixed purpose to enforce it. Somehow the grief of Mrs. Hagin, Mikey's mother and Braine's laundress, at the discharge of her not over hopeful son, was much more vividly present to his imagination this morning than when he had promulgated the decree. He was too happy a man to be willing to make any human being needlessly unhappy.

And yet he was too strict a disciplinarian to overlook the offence entirely. He turned to the boy and said:

"It is lucky for you that I didn't catch you smoking the cigarette you have in your hand. As it seems to be smoking you instead, I don't so much mind."

With this, as the lad threw the burning roll into a barrel of waste paper – which he presently extinguished with a bucket of water – Braine took the over-proofs from their hook, and passed on into the back room, which served as the editorial office of the Thebes Daily Enterprise.

The four men sitting there presented but one bodily presence. They were: the Local Editor, the River Editor, the Society Editor, and "Our Reporter," and their name was Moses Harbell, or, if universal usage is authority in nomenclature, "Mose" Harbell.

Mose was a bushy-haired man of fifty, who had been Local Editor, River Editor, Society Editor, and "Our Reporter" on the newspapers of small river towns from a time whereof the memory of man runneth not to the contrary.

He had never once dared aspire to a more independent position as his own master. Perhaps the fact that he had imprudently married early, and now had a family consisting of a mother, a mother-in-law, an imbecile sister, a shrewish wife, nine children in various stages of progress toward grown-up-hood, and four dogs of no recognized breed, had dampened the ardor of his ambition, and inclined him to the conservative view that to draw a salary from somebody else, even though it be not a munificent one, is on the whole safer for a prudent family man, than to take ambitious risks on his own account.

Mose was known all up and down the river by his first name in its abbreviated form, and by no other on any occasion. He was never spoken of in print without the adjective prefix "genial," and he never omitted to call anybody "genial" whom he had occasion to mention in his own paragraphs, from the morose curmudgeon who invited everybody in town to his parties except Mose himself, to the most ill-natured mud clerk who stood in the rain on the levee at midnight to check freight received by the steamboat that employed him in that capacity, at nothing a month and his board.

Life had dealt rather hardly with Mose, but it had not succeeded in curdling any of the milk of human kindness mingled with his blood.

His notion of newspaper editing, apart from calling everybody "genial," was to mention everybody on every possible occasion, to praise everybody without regard to the possibility or impossibility of the occasion, and to chronicle the personal happenings of the town after the following fashion:

"Ned Heffron, the genial ticket dispenser of the Central Railroad, borrowed a boiled shirt yesterday, got his boots blacked on tick, and started on a free pass to Johnsonboro, there to wed the acknowledged belle of that young and thriving city, Miss Blankety Blank, who will henceforth be a chief ornament to the society of Thebes."

Mose was a thorn in the flesh of his young chief, who was a very earnest person, possessed of a conviction that a newspaper owes some sort of duty to the public, and that its province is to discriminate somewhat in the bestowal of praise and blame. But Mose was necessary to the Thebes Daily Enterprise. Braine could not afford to dispense with his "geniality" as a part of the newspaper's equipment; for Mose knew everybody within the Daily Enterprise's bailiwick and everybody knew Mose. Everybody made haste to tell Mose all the news there might be; and, although there was not much of importance in what he gathered, still it was news, and the news seemed to Braine a necessary part of a newspaper. Thus it happened that Mose went on calling everybody "genial" in the news department, even when his chief was excoriating the same persons in the editorial columns for conduct wholly inconsistent with Mose's imputation of unbounded geniality.

On this particular morning, however, – the morning of Edgar Braine's suicide – even Mose's presence, recalling, as it always did, his exasperating methods, could not ruffle the young man's exultant spirits. He was so exuberantly happy that he omitted to remonstrate with Mose about anything, and that tireless manufacturer of praise, observing the omission, immediately wrote and sent to the composing-room an elephantinely playful paragraph in which he said:

"Our genial chief was so much pleased this morning over the impression made yesterday by his apparently severe, but really good-natured leader on the recent defalcation of our genial city clerk, Charley Hymes, that he took the local to his arms and stood treat to a number-one mackerel, and the ever appreciative local picked the bones of the aforesaid saline preserved denizen of the deep, in the bosom of his family at dinner to-day."

That was Mose Harbell's idea of humor. It was not Braine's idea of humor at all, and so Mose was greeted with the harshest reproof he had ever received in his life when he next met his chief. He accepted it "genially."

Having sent out the offending paragraph, Mose went out himself to gather river news, and such gossip as he might, concerning the genial folk of Thebes.

Then Abner Hildreth entered the office, and for two hours was closeted with Braine.

Then Braine committed suicide.

Then he wrote his own obituary, to be printed in that evening's Enterprise.

Then he went supperless to his room over a store, where he paced the floor till dawn.

Then began the man's extraordinary career.

II

When Braine returned to his bare little room after his suicide, he was in a strange, paradoxical mood. His thought was intensely introspective, and yet, with a whimsical perversity, his mind seemed specially alert to external objects, and full of fantastic imaginings concerning them.

The bareness of the room impressed him, and he likened it to a cell in some prison.

"Never mind," he said to himself, "I may have to sleep in a cell some time, and the habit of living here will come handy."

Then, with a little laugh, in which there was no trace of amusement, he stood before his desk, and added:

"But I believe they don't put strips of worn out carpet by the prison beds; and I never heard of a cell having a desk in it surmounted by empty collar-boxes for pigeon holes. Let me see – six times five are thirty. What an extravagant fellow I have been, to use up thirty boxes of paper collars in a year! Ten in a box, that's three hundred – almost one a day! I might have done with half the number by turning them, as I had to do at college before paper collars came in. Psha!" and he seemed to spurn the trivial reverie from him as a larger recollection surged up in his mind, and he began to pace the little room again with the purposeless tramp of a caged wild beast, whose memory of the forest is only a pained consciousness that it is his no more.

The June twilight faded into darkness, and the evening gave place to midnight, but the ghost-walk went ceaselessly on.

In those hours of agonizing thought, the young man – to be young no more henceforth – recalled every detail of his life with a vividness which tortured him. He was engaged, unwillingly, in obedience to a resistless impulse, in searching out the roots of his own character, and finding out what forces had made him such as he knew himself to be.

In the process he learned, for the first time, precisely what sort of man he really was. He saw his own soul undressed, and contemplated its nakedness. One's soul is an unusual thing to see en déshabillé, and not always a pleasing one.

He remembered a letter his mother had written him at college – that mother of half Scotch descent, and touched with Scottish second-sight, who had silently studied his character from infancy, and learned to comprehend it not without fear. He could repeat the letter word for word. It had given him his first hint that he had a character, and a duty to do with respect to it. He had cherished the missive for years, and had read it a thousand times for admonition. Alas! how poor a thing is admonition after all!

"There is one danger point in your character, my son" – he recalled the very look of the cramped words on the page of blue-ruled letter paper – "where I have kept watch since you lay in my arms as a baby, and where you must keep watch hereafter. You have high aims and strong convictions, and you mean to do right. You will never be led astray by others – you are too obstinate for that. If you ever go astray, you must take all the blame on your own head.