Зображення сторінки
PDF
ePub

umph touching a man who, whatever the popular outcry, never answered. To explain meant to excuse himself, in a way to beg for milder verdicts. If a man had wrought that upon old Porson, he had done well.

Porson was drumming noiselessly now upon the desk, keeping time as he talked, and Marshall watched the knotted fingers. Janie, out of her cage, never turned her eyes from the old man's face.

You say he"-Porson touched the bundle of disordered proof lightly with a species of disparagement not superb enough for scorn-" you say here my clerk, Luther Tileston, got ahead of me. You say he found out before I did that Blackstone Avenue was going through the old Dumping Fields, and he cut in ahead of me and bought up that land. Well, Mr. Marshall, you're wrong. I bought that land."

"Oh, no, you didn't," said Marshall, his mind on the trapping of vanity. "The deeds stood in his name. He made a fortune. His wife and daughter are living on it to-day."

"Yes," said Porson mildly, as if in tolerance of incomplete methods. "But I furnished the money. I bought in Tileston's name."

"What for?"

[ocr errors]
[ocr errors]

"It didn't do for me to go into it unless I did it some such way. I'd begun to be a marked man- a slight assertiveness animated his voice. "If I'd gone into it in the light of day, there'd have been a hundred others ready to jump and pick up all the land near by. I wanted that, too, but I hadn't the means I have now. I wasn't prepared to take it till I knew whether they were going to extend the avenue to the river front and make the drive."

"The rest was sold later," said Marshall vaguely. He was not yet sensitized. "You did buy that. But Tileston bought the first lot. He got the Dumping Fields."

"Don't I tell you I bought in his name?" inquired Porson.

"Well," said Marshall, unwillingly convinced, “so you want me to make the correction ?"

"I want you to drop the whole matter." "Why?"

There was a long pause, and Janie, watching, saw Porson's face concentrate as if he were travelling a difficult way, bor

dered by sadder or more serious things. Suddenly he came back.

"Tileston," said he, "was an honest man."

[ocr errors]

'Why, yes," Marshall returned, "nobody's ever known anything against Tileston. Except that land coup, of course. But I suppose he had a friend in the city council. I suppose he knew pretty well which way the boom was going, and it seemed to him venial to snap something up."

"He didn't have any friend in the city council," said Porson patiently. "I had the friend-more than one of 'em. I sent Tileston abroad on business at the time of that deal. He knew no more about it than the dead. And a week after he got home he died himself."

"So, if you bought for him, as you say you did, he never knew it?”

"No." A curious expression came over Porson's face and crumpled it into another sort of document. It bespoke remembrance of the uphill paths he had travelled to his gilded cell. "Tileston never knew anything about the matter. We had a kind of an unpleasantness at that time. He got hold of some things he didn't-understand." Janie, with a light vault into the saddle of intuition, thought he had been about to say, "stand for," and on that hint coursed along after him. "In regard to the business, that is. He meant to leave me. We talked that out a day or two before he died."

"What made you let the other matter rest? Wasn't it of a sort to be settled on the dot? You couldn't have meant to leave it that way, at loose ends. The avenue was voted on in less than a month."

Porson's mouth worked a little. "I did mean to clinch it," he said. "I put it off."

Instantly Janie felt she was running back over the difficult path, her mind with his, and she thought she saw exactly how it had been. Porson was younger then, less toughened to the world's assaults, and momentarily he had found himself unable to stand before the temperamental onslaught of Tileston's scorn. Marshall, too, had his conclusions.

"He would have repudiated it?" he put in irresistibly.

Porson did not seem to hear.

"I'd only to tell him and the transfer

would have been made," he averred. "Tileston was an honest man.' And then, with no implication of the sequence, "He was no sort of a clerk for me. I shouldn't have taken him in the first place-but we were boys together."

"Then, when he died, the property stood in his name. You got left, so to speak. "It stood in his name," said Porson briefly.

"Mr. Porson," said Marshall, "I wish you'd let me use this as an interview. It's magnificent copy."

"No," said Porson immovably, "I don't want you to use it and I don't want you to speak of the land. Tileston left a widow and a crippled daughter. That property appreciated."

"I should say it did!"

"They're living on it to-day. If they knew how it come-well, I don't feel sure what they'd do about it. I rather guess it wouldn't be safe."

"What makes you think so?"

"You see the widow come to me after Tileston's death. She was a kind of a highspirited woman. Interested in charities. Wanted to reform the city government. Nice pleasant woman, too. Well, somebody'd got hold of her and told her Tileston was smart as a trap to fall in with the city government and pick up that land before the deal went through, and she come to me with tears in her eyes. Said her husband couldn't do a thing like that. If he could, she'd throw the money into the sea. Said she only hoped the firm had been doing it through him. Ready to sign it over to us. Seemed as if she couldn't do it soon enough."

"What did you say?" Marshall asked it breathlessly.

The ghost of a relaxation that might have served Porson for a smile, was wrinkling his lean face.

"I told her Tileston would have cut off his right hand before he'd have dickered with the city government."

"Did that convince her?"

"Oh, yes. She never liked me very well. Said she could trust me to tell her the worst, because if there was a chance of the property's comin' to the firm she knew I'd be eager and ready. Oh, no! She never liked me."

[ocr errors][merged small][merged small]
[ocr errors][merged small]
[ocr errors]

And she and the crippled daughter"They'd go to the wall."

The two men sat for a minute or two in silence, Porson not even beating his impatient fingers upon the table. Janie, hearing her own hurried heart, hardly dared watch them now. When her husband spoke, hot tears came into her eyes. The tone was the one of infinite softness he was accustomed to use for her only.

"Now, you see I've mentioned the deal already. I can't take that back. I've got to speak of it again. How would it do if I should refer to it as one of those curious strokes of chance by which an honest man, not especially fitted for business, should have picked up some land nobody wanted -picked it up at the crucial moment just as the tide turned its way?"

"That's it," said Porson, with an evident relief. "But this-" he pointed to the proof which he evidently regarded with the deference of unaccustomed eyes, "this is printed."

"It hasn't gone into the magazine. I can arrange that. I can elaborate the stock transaction toward the close and cut this for space."

Porson picked up the proof and began reading the concluding paragraphs. Janie slipped out into the kitchen and Marshall heard running water through the filter. He watched Porson now with a softened, even an eager, curiosity. What would it mean to the man to read the record of this other transaction, perhaps the most disgraceful, and yet legally, the safest of his whole. career. Porson laid the paper down, a veiled yet retrospective look upon face.

his

"Have I-" Marshall hesitated-“Mr. Porson, do you challenge that?"

But Porson, taking his hat to go, looked merely inscrutable.

"I see you've put it in '71," he answered. "Yes, April, '71. I believe that's the right date."

Janie was flying into them with a tray, two glasses and a pitcher. Her eyes held points of light. She flushed all over her face, as if at some extraordinary event.

"I made you some lemonade, Mr. Porson," she said. "Won't you try it, please?" The request was even urgent, as if Porson could do her the most distinct favor. He accepted a glass gravely, and drank without pause. Marshall, tasting, stopped and threw Janie a whimsical, terrified look, because she had left out the ice. Then he remembered that a part of their personal data was to the effect that Porson's unvarying beverage was unchilled lemonade, and smiled over the drink at Janie, who had scored.

Porson set down his glass.

was going out, veiled again in his poor inscrutability. But Janie dashed at him, in a warm impulsive hurry.

"Good-by, Mr. Porson," she said. "Won't you shake hands?”

He looked briefly surprised; the gnarled. old hand enveloped hers, and again he said good-night. They heard the shambling, undignified tread lessening down the stairs. Then they looked at each other. There were tears in Janie's eyes, and Marshall frankly swore.

"He's made it over," she said tumultuously, "the world I saw to-night. It was dark with evil, and Porson's hung a light in it."

Marshall was looking toward the door, closed upon the meagre figure. His hand lay upon the proofs where he had put all that his clever mind had been able to gather concerning another man.

"So that," he said, in a curious tone, "is "I'll bid you good evening," he said. He Porson. That's the man himself.”

ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH

FROM AN AMERICAN POINT OF VIEW

WHO ARE THE ENGLISH?

F this question: Who are the English? were asked, either of the average Englishman, or of the average American visitor to England, the answer would probably be both inaccurate and confusing. The average Englishman knows little of the origins of his race, and is not of the mental makeup that sets much store by such matters in any case; and the American pays little heed to anything except to what comes directly under his notice as he travels about to and from London as his centre.

London itself is a city of some four million, six hundred odd thousand inhabitants. It is a small nation in itself. The total population of the Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland is only 43,660,000 (1906). But London is not England. The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland is

not England, with its total area of 121,000 square miles. No, what the world knows as England is the British Empire, which includes the above, and in addition, some 11,400,000 square miles, and a population of about 410,000,000. The known surface of the globe is estimated at about 55,000,ooo square miles-its total population is believed to be about 1,800,000,000. The British Empire therefore occupies more than one-fifth of the earth's surface, and its population is also more than one-fifth, or about twenty-two per cent. of the inhabitants of the globe.

That is England! In Asia they have a population of some 237,000,000; in Africa, a population of some 31,000,000; in America, a population of some 6,000,000; in the West Indies, some 2,000,000; in Australasia, some 5,500,000, and so on. When you walk the streets of London,

therefore, you are in the capital of something over one-fifth of the world. These gentlemen in clubs, and offices, and in the streets, are the masters of the world. There must be a great many of them, and they must be very wonderful men, one says to oneself. No, the population of Great Britain and Ireland is, as we have seen, only about 43,500,000, and what of them?

It is stated on trustworthy authority, that the aggregate income of these 43,000,000 of people is $8,550,000,000. Of this total, 1,250,000 people have $2,925,000,000, these are the rich; 3,750,000 people have $1,225,000,000, these are the comfortable class; the other 38,000,000 have $4,400,000,000, to divide, and if we do the dividing for them, we see that these 38,000,000 have nearly one hundred and sixteen dollars apiece. Not a large income by any means. But we are not socialists, these figures are not put down here to bolster any argument for or against the distribution of wealth, but to call attention to quite another matter. It is evident from these figures, that we may deduct 38,000,000 from the 43,000,000 of population and still have in the 5,000,000 that remain the sum total of those who do the real governing, the real ruling of this enormous empire. The other 38,000,000, with their average income of $116, have in all probability neither leisure nor ability to look after anybody but themselves, and they even do that precariously. We may go still further, and say that out of these 5,000,000 probably not more than 1,000,000 are male adults. I know very well the admirable phrase of Walter Bagehot that: there are lies, damned lies, and statistics; but I may claim for this anlaysis that it is a matter of facts, and not of statistics. It requires no juggling with figures, no poetic exaggeration for the petty purpose of making a point, to arrive at this rather startling conclusion: that about 1,000,000, Englishmen of the ruling class control one-fifth of the known surface of the globe, and one in every five of all the inhabitants thereof.

Out of the various wars and invasions of the island of Great Britain, from the time of Cæsar's first landing in 55 B. C., there has percolated down a million men who rule the world.

This is sufficiently interesting to make it

worth while to find out who these Englishmen are. We can, any and all of us, make our notes about them as we see them here and now. According as our eyes differ, our tastes differ, our education and experience differ, we come to different conclusions. Personally, I am inclined to think that the Englishman is an acquired taste, but for the moment that is neither here nor there. When any comparatively small number of men come to play such a rôle as this in the world, one must begin further back to study them. This is not a sociological or psychological freak, this maintenance of superiority over the world. Not a matter that can be explained by snippity chapters written at short range about the Englishman's religion, his parliament, his clubs, his home life, his sports, his clothes, and so on, indefinitely. These are merely the outside trappings, which are interesting enough in their way and well worthy of the reporter and his camera, because there are plenty of people about who only want to know what the great man looks like, and what he smokes, and what he drinks, and whether he wears a turned-down collar or not-and some of them, perchance, will make themselves great in his likeness by copying his wardrobe, his diet, and his potables.

But we are so superficial as to believe that in these two thousand years, since Cæsar's day, there must be, here and there, interesting and important documents dealing with the origins, the ancestry, the lineage, and training of this superb band of a million men who hold the world in their hands.

We know the misty moist island in which they have lived all this time. We know that even Tacitus wrote that its climate was repulsive because of its rains and continual mists. Cæsar and his Romans did not go there for a holiday on account of the charms of the climate. No Roman, of those days, or these, would choose this island as a place of residence. The Roman invasion was merely to control the resident Britons, and to prevent their sending aid to the Gauls who were fighting Rome. The Romans stayed there for three hundred and fifty years. They built two great walls across the land to check the invasions of the Britons; they built roads for the passage of the legions; they constructed in

trenched camps, which are the origin of many of the names of places ending in cester, or chester, from the Latin word castrum, and when the legions were called away in 408 A. D. to check the invasion of the barbarians on the Continent, they left the island as British as it was before, with no trace of their language, their customs, or their laws. England is not, therefore, in any sense Roman.

These Britons of Cæsar's time were a mixed race of Iberian stock -Iberian meaning of southwestern Europe, at the present time the Basque is the last and best representative. But as there is no Roman so there is no Briton, or very little, in the English ancestry. From northwestern Germany came Saxons, Engles and Jutes who, from time to time, invaded the England of the Briton, and finally crowded him out. By 829 the Germanic tribes had poured in, and completely invested England, or what we now know as England. But of these tribes the one that really made the England of to-day, the one from which England, and the English, get their chief characteristics, was the tribe of the Saxons. Sussex, Essex, Middlesex, the familiar names of English counties, are nothing more nor less than South Saxony, East Saxony and Middle Saxony. They were not of the marauding or piratical type. They came in the first instance as companions of their neighbors the Jutes. But while the Jutes came for adventure and for booty, the Saxons came because they wanted land to settle on. They came because their own country was becoming overcrowded. They were an agricultural people of the peasant class. There was no trace of feudalism amongst them. They were landowners with equal rights, who gradually pushed their way over the land, taking more and more territory; beating back the Britons, and securely occupying the territory they had won. The conquered Britons finally fled to the Welsh mountains and passed over in large numbers to the other side of the Channel to Amorica, and the Brittany of to-day is the land of this body of exiles from England.

These Saxons were independent farmers; they acknowledged no chief, no king, and when they were called upon to fight together they answered the call of the leader or answered it not as they chose. When

King Alfred called upon them the first time to join him in driving out the Danes, they refused to aid him. Finally they came to his aid but at a time of their own choosing. When they came together to discuss questions of common and general interest, their meeting or assembly was not one of subjects, or followers, but of freemen. They had apparently little taste for public meetings, and those of them who were much occupied with their own estates and their own affairs, got into the way of staying away altogether. Those who had leisure, or talent for such matters, went. Finally what was then known as the Witenagemot, or the Meeting of Wise Men, and what has since become the English Parliament, took over the settlement of these questions, and left the farmers free to attend to their own affairs. Even in matters of justice and punishment each group appointed one of their number richer or more expert in such matters, to choose juries and to preside over such cases. Finally the sovereign got into the habit of naming such persons, already marked out as fit for such duties by their neighbors, as magistrates, and in this, as we should call it, free and easy fashion, the business of government was carried on. You may go to the Bow Street Police Court and see the business of the day carried on in much the same fashion now. The magistrate is a wise gentleman dealing with the problems of his less fortunate neighbors. That is all. They were people with little aptitude for public affairs, and with a rooted distaste for overmuch government, and so law-abiding, and naturally industrious and peaceable, that they needed and need less machinery of government than other peoples. They wanted independence on their own estates, and they wanted not to be meddled with.

It is not my intention to provide origins for the English people in order to trace later, and thus easily from my own hypothesis, the development of their present characteristics.

"They are the finest of all the German tribes, and strive more than the rest to found their greatness upon equity." "A passionless, firm and quiet people, they live a solitary life, and do not stir up wars nor harass the country by plunder and theft.” "And yet they are always ready to a man to take up arms and even to form an army

« НазадПродовжити »