word frightened him. In all his forty-five years he had never said such a thing before. His greatest tragedies had not embittered him, only made him sad. But here beside the warm friendly rain that tumbled from his eaves onto the familiar lawn, he knew at last that life had stripped him clean of all happiness and all illusion.
He knew this because of the crumpled ball which closed out his hope in his only son. It told him what a hundred hints and indications had told him before; that his son was weak and vicious, and the language in which it was conveyed was no less emphatic for being polite. The letter was from the dean of the college at New Haven, a gentleman who said exactly what he meant in every word:
“Dear Mr. Jackson : It is with much regret that I write to tell you that your son, Ellery Hamil Jackson, has been requested to withdraw from the university. Last year largely, I am afraid, out of personal feeling toward you, I yielded to your request that he be allowed another chance. I see now that this was a mistake, and I should be failing in my duty if I did not tell you that he is not the sort of boy we want here. His conduct at the sophomore dance was such that several undergraduates took it upon themselves to administer violent correction.
“It grieves me to write you this, but I see no advantage in presenting the case otherwise than as it is. I have requested that he leave New Haven by the day after tomorrow. I am, sir,
“Yours very sincerely,
“Austin Schemmerhorn
“Dean of the College.”
What particularly disgraceful thing his son had done John Jackson did not care to imagine. He knew without any question that what the dean said was true. Why, there were houses already in this town where his son, John Jackson’s son, was no longer welcome! For a while Ellery had been forgiven because of his father, and he had been more than forgiven at home, because John Jackson was one of those rare men who can forgive even their own families. But he would never be forgiven anymore. Sitting on his porch this morning beside the gentle April rain, something had happened in his father’s heart.
“What have I had out of life?” John Jackson shook his head from side to side with quiet, tired despair. “Nothing!”
He picked up the second letter, the civic-welfare letter, and read it over; and then helpless, dazed laughter shook him physically until he trembled in his chair. On Wednesday, at the hour when his delinquent boy would arrive at the motherless home, John Jackson would be standing on a platform downtown, delivering one hundred resounding platitudes of inspiration and cheer. “Members of the association”—their faces, eager, optimistic, impressed, would look up at him like hollow moons—“I have been requested to try to tell you in a few words what I have had from life——”
Many people would be there to hear, for the clever young secretary had hit upon a topic with the personal note—what John Jackson, successful, able and popular, had found for himself in the tumultuous grab bag. They would listen with wistful attention, hoping that he would disclose some secret formula that would make their lives as popular and successful and happy as his own. They believed in rules; all the young men in the city believed in hard-and-fast rules, and many of them clipped coupons and sent away for little booklets that promised them the riches and good fortune they desired.
“Members of the association, to begin with, let me say that there is so much in life that if we don’t find it, it is not the fault of life, but of ourselves.”
The ring of the stale, dull words mingled with the patter of the rain went on and on endlessly, but John Jackson knew that he would never make that speech, or any speeches ever again. He had dreamed his last dream too long, but he was awake at last.
“I shall not go on flattering a world that I have found unkind,” he whispered to the rain. “Instead, I shall go out of this house and out of this town and somewhere find again the happiness that I possessed when I was young.”
Nodding his head, he tore both letters into small fragments and dropped them on the table beside him. For half an hour longer he sat there, rocking a little and smoking his cigar slowly and blowing the blue smoke out into the rain.
II
Down at his office, his chief clerk, Mr. Fowler, approached him with his morning smile.
“Looking fine, Mr. Jackson. Nice day if it hadn’t rained.”
“Yeah,” agreed John Jackson cheerfully. “Clear up in an hour. Anybody outside?”
“A lady named Mrs. Ralston.”
Mr. Fowler raised his grizzled eyebrows in facetious mournfulness.
“Tell her I can’t see her,” said John Jackson, rather to his clerk’s surprise. “And let me have a pencil memorandum of the money I’ve given away through her these twenty years.”
“Why—yes, sir.”
Mr. Fowler had always urged John Jackson to look more closely into his promiscuous charities; but now, after these two decades, it rather alarmed him.
When the list arrived—its preparation took an hour of burrowing through old ledgers and check stubs—John Jackson studied it for a long time in silence.
“That woman’s got more money than you have,” grumbled Fowler at his elbow. “Every time she comes in she’s wearing a new hat. I bet she never hands out a cent herself—just goes around asking other people.”
John Jackson did not answer. He was thinking that Mrs. Ralston had been one of the first women in town to bar Ellery Jackson from her house. She did quite right, of course; and yet perhaps back there when Ellery was sixteen, if he had cared for some nice girl——
“Thomas J. MacDowell’s outside. Do you want to see him? I said I didn’t think you were in, because on second thoughts, Mr. Jackson, you look tired this morning——”
“I’ll see him,” interrupted John Jackson.
He watched Fowler’s retreating figure with an unfamiliar expression in his eyes. All that cordial diffuseness of Fowler’s—he wondered what it covered in the man’s heart. Several times, without Fowler’s knowledge, Jackson had seen him giving imitations of the boss for the benefit of the other employees; imitations with a touch of malice in them that John Jackson had smiled at then, but that now crept insinuatingly into his mind.
“Doubtless he considers me a good deal of a fool,” murmured John Jackson thoughtfully, “because I’ve kept him long after his usefulness was over. It’s a way men have, I suppose, to despise anyone they can impose on.”
Thomas J. MacDowell, a big barn door of a man with huge white hands, came boisterously into the office. If John Jackson had gone in for enemies he must have started with Tom MacDowell. For twenty years they had fought over every question of municipal affairs, and back in 1908 they had once stood facing each other with clenched hands on a public platform, because Jackson had said in print what everyone knew—that MacDowell was the worst political influence that the town had ever known. That was forgotten now; all that was remembered of it went into a peculiar flash of the eye that passed between them when they met.
“Hello, Mr. Jackson,” said MacDowell with full, elaborate cordiality. “We need your help and we need your money.”
“How so?”
“Tomorrow morning, in the ‘Eagle,’ you’ll see the plan for the new
