The Debtor. Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman
is it?” asked the postmaster, with a peculiar smile.
“Out West somewhere. It ain't but fifty cents a share, an' it's goin' up like a skyrocket, an' there's others. There's a new railroad out there, an' other mines, an' a new invention for makin' fuel out of coal-dust, an' some other things.”
“Is Captain Carroll the president of them?” asked the small man, with an impressed air. He was very young, and eager-looking, and very shabby. He grubbed on a tiny ancestral farm, for a living for himself and wife and four children, young as he was. He had never had enough to eat, at least of proper food. He did not come to the “Tonsorial Parlor” to be shaved, for he hacked away at his innocent cheeks at home with his deceased father's old razor, but he loved a little gossip. In fact, John Flynn's barber-shop was his one dissipation. Sometimes he looked longingly at a beer-saloon, but he had no money, unless he starved Minna and the children, and for that he was too good and too timid. His Minna was a stout German girl, twice his size, and she ruled him with a rod of iron. She did not approve of the barber-shop, and so the pleasure had something of the zest of a forbidden one.
Every Sunday he was at his wit's end, which was easily reached, to invent a suitable excuse for his absence. To-day it had been to see if Mrs. Amidon did not want to buy some apples. Some of their last winter's store had been miraculously preserved, and Minna saw the way to a few pennies thereby. He could quite openly say that he had been to the barber-shop to-day, having seen Amidon there, therefore he was quite easy in his mind, and leaned back in his chair with perfect content. One of the children at home cried all the time. A yawning mouth of wrath at existence was about all he ever saw of that particular baby, and Minna almost always scolded, and this was a haven of peace to little Willy Eddy.
Here he felt like a man among men; at home he felt like nothing at all among women. The children were all girls. Sometimes he wondered if a boy-baby might not have been a refuge. He was not very clean; his hands were still stained with picking over potatoes the day before; his shoulders in their rusty coat had a distinct hunch; but he was radiantly happy talking of the rich Captain Carroll. He seemed to taste the honey of the other man's riches and importance in his own mouth. Willy Eddy did not know the meaning of envy. He had such a fund of sympathetic imagination that he possessed the fair possessions of others like a child with fairy tales.
“Is he president of all of them?” asked little Willy Eddy, with gusto, and looked as if he himself held them all in his meagre potato-stained hands.
“No,” replied the barber, with importance—“no, he's more than a president. A president is nothin' except a figger-head. I don't care what he's president of, whether it is of this great country or of railroads or what not. They could git along without the president, but they can't without this gentleman. He's the promoter.”
“Oh!” said the small man.
The milkman sighed wrathfully again. “Oh, hang it all!” he said. “I've seed promoters. It's mostly their own pockets they promote.”
“Well, I don't know,” said the postmaster, as one with authority. “I don't know. Captain Carroll was in the office the other day, and we had a little talk, and it struck me that some of the ventures he is interested in were quite promising. And it is different with a man of his wealth. When a poor man takes up anything of the kind, you can suspect, but this is different. He said to me that he had no occasion, so far as the money was concerned, to turn his finger over for any of them or to open his mouth concerning them. He said he would not be afraid to stake every dollar he had in the world on them if it was necessary.”
Flynn had daintily anointed Rosenstein's shaven face with witch-hazel and was now dusting it with powder. Tappan was slouching towards the chair.
“Have you bought some of the stock?” the barber asked, abruptly, of the postmaster, who smiled mysteriously and hedged.
“Well, maybe I have, and maybe again I haven't,” said he. “Have you, John?”
“Not yet,” replied the barber. “I am deflecting upon the matter. It requires considerable loggitation when a man has penuriously saved a circumscribed sum from the sweat of his brow.”
“That's so. Don't be rash, John,” said Amidon.
It was not especially funny, but since Amidon intended it to be, they all obligingly laughed, except Tappan, who set himself with a grunt in the chair and had the white sheet of which Rosenstein had been denuded tied around his neck.
Rosenstein, who was a lean man, with a much-lined face, cast a glance at himself in the looking-glass, and heaved an odd sigh as he turned away to get his hat.
“You don't seem to be much stuck on your looks, old man,” remarked Amidon.
Rosenstein cast a perfectly good-humored but rather melancholy look at Amidon. “No; I never was,” he replied, soberly. “Can't remember when I wouldn't have preferred to meet some other fellow in the looking-glass. It's such an awful thing, the intimacy with himself that's forced on a man when he comes into this world.”
“That's so,” assented Amidon, rather stupidly, but he was not to be abashed with the other man's metaphysics. Rosenstein did credit to his German ancestry at times, and was then in deep waters for his village acquaintances.
“Who would you ruther meet in the lookin'-glass than yerself?” pursued Amidon.
“Not you,” replied Rosenstein, with unexpected repartee, and was going out amid a chorus of glee at Amidon's discomfiture when another man darkened the doorway, and the storekeeper fell back as Captain Carroll entered amid a sullen silence.
The postmaster rose, and in a second the small man and Amidon followed his example. Carroll greeted them all with a cordiality which had in it a certain implication of admiring confidence. Not a man there but felt at once that this new-comer had a most flattering recognition of himself in particular, to the exclusion of all the others. It was odd how he contrived to produce this impression, but produce it he did. It was Arthur Carroll's great charm, the great secret of a remarkable influence over his fellow-men. He appealed with consummate skill to the selfish side of every one with whom he came in contact, he exalted him in his own eyes far above the masses with whom he was surrounded, by who could tell what subtle alchemy. Each man preened unconsciously his panoply of spiritual pride under this other man's gentle, courteous eyes. Even Rosenstein straightened himself. And besides, this was the respectful admiration which the man himself excited, by reason of his fine appearance and address, his good looks, his irreproachable clothes, and his reputed wealth.
Arthur Carroll made an entrance into the “Tonsorial Parlor.” Moreover, the other men could see out in front of the establishment, the coach, the coachman in livery—the first livery on record as actually resident in Banbridge; liveries had passed through, but never before tarried—the fretting steeds with their glittering equipment. Around the coach had already gathered several small boys, huddled together, and transfixed with awe too deep for impudence.
Carroll, having greeted the men, said good-morning urbanely to the barber, who had ceased lathering Tappan and was looking at him indeterminately. It seemed dreadful to him that this great man should have to wait for the milkman. The barber was a conservative to the core, and would speak of the laboring-classes and tradesmen as if he himself were on the other side of the highway from birth. Tappan himself, who, as said before, was naturally surly, was also a dissenter on principle, and had an enlarged sense of injury, had qualms at keeping waiting a man who patronized him to the extent of two quarts of cream and three quarts of milk daily. It was like quarrelling with his bread-and-butter, as he put it, when alluding to the affair later on.
“I ain't goin' through the world seein' no men as is better 'n I be,” he said, “but there's jest this much about it, I ain't a fool, an' I know enough to open the door when a man wants to walk through to pay me some money. Ef Carroll hadn't been takin' that much cream and milk, I'd set there in that barber's-chair ef I'd had a year's beard to shave, an' I'd kept him waitin', and enjoyed it, but, as it was, I did what I did.”
What Tappan did was to wave back Flynn's lathering-hand,