Juggernaut: A Veiled Record

"You are generous, and I never knew you to do a meanly selfish thing in your life. And yet your point of danger is selfishness of a kind. I have observed you from infancy, and this is what I have seen. Your desire to accomplish your purposes is too strong. You are not held back by any difficulty. You make any sacrifice in pursuit of your ends. You use any means you can find to carry your plans through, and you are quick at finding means, or making them when you want them.

"I was proud of the pluck you showed in doing almost a slave's work for two years, because you had made up your mind to go through college. But I shuddered at the thought of what such determination might lead to.

"Oh! my son, you will succeed in life. I have no fear of that. But how? Beware the time when your purpose is strong, your desire to succeed great, and the only means at command are dishonest and degrading. That time will come to you, be sure. When it comes you must make a hard choice – harder for you than for another. You will then sacrifice a purpose that it will seem like death to surrender – or you will commit moral suicide! I shall not live to see you so tried; but if I see you practise giving up a little and trying to keep guard at this weak place, I may learn before I die to think of that hour of your trial without the foreboding it gives me now."

That letter was the last his mother ever sent him. It had been a consolation to him that before death summoned her, she had at least read his reply, assuring her of his determination to maintain his integrity in all circumstances.

"You say truly," he wrote, "that I never surrender a purpose or fail to carry it out. Reflect, mother dear, that the strongest purpose I ever had is this – to preserve my character. I will not fail to find means for that when the time comes, as I never fail to accomplish objects of less moment."

"The prophecy of the dear old mother is fulfilled," he muttered, while his nails buried themselves in his unconscious palms. "The time she foresaw has come, and I have committed suicide. Thank God the mother did not live to see! Thank God her vision was no clearer! She had hope for me at least. She did not know."

III

As he called up pictures there in the dark, Edgar Braine saw himself a little country boy in Southern Indiana, growing strong in the sweet, wholesome air of the river and the hills, and torturing his young mind with questions to which he could not comprehend the answers.

At first his questioning had to do with nature, whose wonders lay around him. He wanted to know of the river. Whence it came, and how; he asked Wherefore, of the hills; he made friends of all growing things, and companions of those that had conscious life.

Then came his father's death to turn his mind into new and darker chambers of inquiry, and for a time he brooded, disposed, in loyalty to that wisdom which age assumes, to accept the conventional dogmas given to him by the ignorance about him, as explanations of the mysteries, but unable to conceal their absurdity from a mind whose instinct it was to stand face to face with Doubt and to compel Truth to lift her mask of seeming.

The loneliness of his life was good for him for a time. It taught him to find a sufficient companionship in his own mind – a lesson which all of us need, but few learn. But the time came when his wise mother saw the necessity of a change, and, scant as her resources were, she took him to the little city of Jefferson, where the schools were good and companionship was to be found.

The city was at that time a beautiful corpse. It had just died, and had not yet become conscious of the fact. Ten or fifteen years before, a railroad running from the State capital had made its terminus at Jefferson, making the river town the one outlet of the interior. A great tide of travel passed through the place, and a large trade centred there. But the course of railroad development which gave the city life, destroyed it later. Other railroads were built through the interior to other river outlets, and Cincinnati and Louisville took to themselves what had been Jefferson's prosperity.

And so when Edgar Braine first knew the town, it had lost its hold upon life, though it had not yet found out what had happened to it. The great rows of warehouses along the levee, with the legends "Forwarding and Commission," "Groceries at Wholesale Only," "Flour, Grain and Provisions," "Carriage Repository," and all the rest of it, staringly inscribed upon their outer walls, were empty now, and closed. In West Street, two only of the once great wholesale houses maintained a show of life. In one, an old man sat alone all day, and contemplated three bags of coffee and two chests of tea, for which no customer made inquiry. In the other there remained unsold half a ton of iron bars, and a few kegs of nails, to justify the assertion of the signboard that the proprietors were dealers in "Iron and Nails." The two partners who owned the place appeared there every morning, as regularly as when their sales were reckoned in six figures. They were always scrupulously neat, always courteously polite to each other, and always as cheerful and contented a pair of business partners as one need desire to see. Why not, seeing that they both liked the game of checkers, and had nothing to do but sit in the doorway and play from the beginning to the end of "business hours" every day?

But the town did not realize its condition yet. Weyer & McKee were putting up a new and imposing building for the better accommodation of their wholesale grocery business, inattentive to the fact that their wholesale grocery business had ceased to be. Polleys & Butler were still issuing their Market Bulletin for the information of their "customers," not having yet realized that their customers had permanently transferred their custom to Cincinnati. In this interesting little sheet they had not yet begun to discuss "The Present Depression in Trade – Its Cause and Cure." That came a little later.

The city was very well satisfied with itself. It had water-works and gas, broad streets, and comfortable houses in such abundance that every family might have had two for the asking. The people did not greatly mind their loss of prosperity. Those who did mind had already gone away; those who remained had succeeded, during the days of activity, in getting out of other people enough to live on comfortably, and were content to enjoy leisure and occupy themselves with church work and the like for the rest of their lives.

The boy did not discover that anything was amiss with Jefferson until two or three years after his arrival there. Having seen no other city he did not observe that there was anything peculiar in the condition of this one, until he saw a "to let" notice on the gorgeously decorated front of Fred Dubachs' "Paintery" and learned that Fred was about to remove to Keokuk. Fred was a notably expert painter, and the front of his shop had always a strong fascination for Edgar. Fred had lavished his best skill and industry upon its ornamentation during the two or three years since he had ceased to have any painting to do for others. Now he had given up and was going away.

The thing set the boy thinking. He reflected that it would be a sad waste of time and labor for Fred to paint any more signs for a town which already had some thousands no longer serving any useful purpose. As he followed out this suggestion it dawned upon him that perhaps Jefferson was a city in decay, and when he had questioned the matter a little further, the evidence all about him left no room for doubt.

Then he went home and said to his mother: "I will not live in Jefferson after I finish at Hanover. This town is done for. I must have opportunities, and there will never be any here."

But Jefferson's condition had been educating him all the time, and shaping his character in ways which affected all his future. He saw this clearly now as he paced his room in Thebes that night after the suicide, and recalled it all.

Among his schoolmates in Jefferson there were some, the sons of vulgar people who had grown rich in the rapid rise of the town. These were mainly stupid and arrogant, and their insolence was unceasing. At first it had stung the sensitive boy to that kind of protest which involves blows and bloody noses.

He was lithe of limb and strong, and he usually managed to get a sufficient revenge in that way to satisfy him. But something occurred at last to spoil the enjoyment he got out of pommelling the young bullies, and to show him that, with all his strength and agility, he was meeting his adversaries on unequal terms. He accidentally saw his mother toiling late at night over the clothes in which he had that day fought Cale Dodge to a finish. Cale, he knew, would simply put on a new suit next day.

"I will have no more fights of that kind," he said to himself. Then, after a period of silent thought, he said aloud:

"I have better weapons. I will show them in class who is master."

From that hour the inattention to books which had given his mother some uneasiness, ceased. He mastered every lesson days before it was assigned to him, and when an opportunity offered he submitted himself to examinations in advance, and passed into the higher grades of the high school, leaving his adversaries behind.

In this process he acquired two unquenchable thirsts – the one for knowledge, the other for power. He searched the town library for books that might supplement the meagre instruction of the schools. In his search for knowledge he found culture. General literature opened its treasures to him, and he read everything, from Shakespeare to Burke's Works, that the library could supply.

But while all this went on, his delight in his superiority to the youths who had been insolent to him, and were so still, crystallized more and more into a great longing for power, and a relentless determination to achieve it. Cost what it might he must be great, and look down upon these his foes. His ambition became a passion, wild and unruly, but he resolutely curbed it as one controls a spirited horse, and for the same reason. He did not mean to let the ambition run away with his life and wreck it before the destination was reached.

In the little college ten miles away, when at last he entered there, he was said to have no ambition, because he lightly put aside the petty prizes and honors for which others struggled so eagerly. His mates did not dream how ambitious he was. He was thinking of larger things. There was a scholarship to be won, and he took that, because it would spare him his tuition fees; but for the class and society "honors" he cared not at all.

He made his own all of value that the college libraries held and when the senior examinations were over he was without a rival near him on that record of achievement which determines who shall be valedictorian. But he placed no value on the empty honor so coveted by others. A month remained before Commencement, and he had no mind to lose a month. He said to the President:

"I am going away to-morrow. If you choose to give me my degree please take care of the diploma for me, if it is not too much trouble. Perhaps I shall send for it some day."

"But you are surely not going to leave before Commencement?"

"Why not? I have got all I can out of college. I can't afford to waste a month for nothing."

"But you are first-honor-man, Braine!"

"Yes, so I hear. Give that to some one who cares for it. I don't."

The next morning Edgar Braine quitted the village on foot, and without returning to Jefferson, passed out of the little world of youth into the great world of manhood. His equipment consisted of his character, his education, and fifty dollars.

He thought the character a good one then. He revised his opinion as he paced the little room in Thebes, and remembered.

IV

The youth's sole thought when he walked out into the world was to find opportunities – for exactly what, he neither knew nor greatly cared. He knew himself possessed of power, and he sought a chance to make it felt. He was ambitious beyond measure, but he believed his ambition to be safely under a curb bit. He would achieve great things, but their greatness should minister to the good of his fellow men.

His selfishness was of that kind which looks for its best satisfaction in self-sacrifice. He would spend himself in the service of mankind, and take his reward in seeing the results of his labor. He had been bred to high conceptions of human conduct, and had filled his mind with exalted principles.

It was for the exercise of powers thus directed that he sought opportunities. He would know what to do with them, he was very sure, when they came. He selected Thebes as the scene of his first endeavors because it presented the completest possible contrast to Jefferson. As Jefferson was a city that had ceased to thrive, so Thebes was one that was just about to begin to thrive, as its citizens took pains to notify the rest of the world. Braine wanted to help it thrive, and share its thrift.

The bread-and-butter problem gave him no trouble. Thebes had plenty of work to do in getting ready to prosper, and Braine was prepared to do any work. The shrewd speculators who were engineering the town's scheme of greatness, were quick enough to discover the youth's capacities, as the race-course speculator is to see the fine points of a horse. In whatever fell to him to do he acquitted himself so well that faith in "young Braine" soon gave place to respectful admiration, and Mose Harbell wrote numberless paragraphs in the Thebes Daily Enterprise concerning "our genial and gifted young townsman, Edgar Braine," in which, for reasons that Mose could not have explained, there was notably less of the "genial" insolence of familiarity than was common in Mose's literary productions. When some one mentioned this in Mose's presence, his reply was:

"Well, somehow Braine isn't the sort of fellow you feel like slapping on the back."

It was Abner Hildreth who first drew Braine into relations with the Enterprise.

There was "one of Thebes's oldest and most genial citizens" – Jack Summers by name – who, in addition to a mercantile business, carried on a bank of the kind that opens in the evening by preference, while Abner Hildreth, in all his career as a banker, had preferred daylight hours for business.

Jack Summers corrupted the youth of the town, and when one promising young clerk in the Express office was caught opening money packages, his fall was clearly enough traced to his losses in Summers's establishment.

Hildreth, as a banker and business man, objected to gambling – of that kind. He saw how surely it must undermine the other kind by destroying the trustworthiness of clerks and cashiers. He deprecated it, also, as a thing imperilling the young prosperity of Thebes, in which his investments, as merchant, banker, hotel proprietor, mill owner and the like, were greater than those of any other ten men combined, while even with the other ten he was a silent partner so far as their ventures seemed to him sound.

"The town mustn't get a hard name," he said; "Jack Summers must shut up his gambling shop, or get out of Thebes."

Then he sent for Edgar Braine.

"That young fellow," he reflected, "knows how to write with vim, force, pathos, and energy" – a favorite phrase with Hildreth – "and he has sand in him too. He can skin Summers, and rub aqua fortis into the raw, and he ain't afraid to do it."

This latter point Hildreth knew to be important. Jack Summers was a reckless person of whom most men in Thebes were inclined to be somewhat in awe. He had lived in the place when the only law there was the will of the boldest, enforced with a pistol, and he had not yet reconciled himself to milder methods.

"I want you to score Jack Summers in the Enterprise, Edgar." It was Hildreth's habit to go straight to the marrow of his undertakings. "I want you to drive him out of town, or compel him to shut up his den. He is ruining all the boys, and giving the town a bad name."