the short grizzled man who now got up from his chair in the rear of the platform, but when he began to speak silence settled gradually over the house.
“You didn’t hear my name,” he said in a voice which trembled a little, “and when they first planned this surprise meeting I wasn’t expected to speak at all. I’m John Jackson’s head clerk. Fowler’s my name, and when they decided they were going to hold the meeting, anyhow, even though John Jackson had gone away, I thought perhaps I’d like to say a few words”—those who were closest saw his hands clench tighter—“say a few words that I couldn’t say if John Jackson was here.
“I’ve been with him twenty years. That’s a long time. Neither of us had gray hair when I walked into his office one day just fired from somewhere and asked him for a job. Since then I can’t tell you, gentlemen, I can’t tell you what his—his presence on this earth has meant to me. When he told me yesterday, suddenly, that he was going away, I thought to myself that if he never came back I didn’t—I didn’t want to go on living. That man makes everything in the world seem all right. If you knew how we felt around the office——” He paused and shook his head wordlessly. “Why, there’s three of us there—the janitor and one of the other clerks and me—that have sons named after John Jackson. Yes, sir. Because none of us could think of anything better than for a boy to have that name or that example before him through life. But would we tell him? Not a chance. He wouldn’t even know what it was all about. Why”—he sank his voice to a hushed whisper—“he’d just look at you in a puzzled way and say, ‘What did you wish that on the poor kid for?’”
He broke off, for there was a sudden and growing interruption. An epidemic of head turning had broken out and was spreading rapidly from one corner of the hall until it had affected the whole assemblage. Someone had discovered John Jackson behind the post in the corner, and first an exclamation and then a growing mumble that mounted to a cheer swept over the auditorium.
Suddenly two men had taken him by the arms and set him on his feet, and then he was pushed and pulled and carried toward the platform, arriving somehow in a standing position after having been lifted over many heads.
They were all standing now, arms waving wildly, voices filling the hall with tumultuous clamor. Someone in the back of the hall began to sing “For he’s a jolly good fellow,” and five hundred voices took up the air and sang it with such feeling, with such swelling emotion, that all eyes were wet and the song assumed a significance far beyond the spoken words.
This was John Jackson’s chance now to say to these people that he had got so little out of life. He stretched out his arms in a sudden gesture and they were quiet, listening, every man and woman and child.
“I have been asked——” His voice faltered. “My dear friends, I have been asked to—to tell you what I have got out of life——”
Five hundred faces, touched and smiling, every one of them full of encouragement and love and faith, turned up to him.
“What have I got out of life?”
He stretched out his arms wide, as if to include them all, as if to take to his breast all the men and women and children of this city. His voice rang in the hushed silence.
“Everything!”
At six o’clock, when he walked up his street alone, the air was already cool with evening. Approaching his house, he raised his head and saw that someone was sitting on the outer doorstep, resting his face in his hands. When John Jackson came up the walk, the caller—he was a young man with dark, frightened eyes—saw him and sprang to his feet.
“Father,” he said quickly, “I got your telegram, but I—I came home.”
John Jackson looked at him and nodded.
“The house was locked,” said the young man in an uneasy way.
“I’ve got the key.”
John Jack son unlocked the front door and preceded his son inside.
“Father,” cried Ellery Jackson quickly, “I haven’t any excuse to make—anything to say. I’ll tell you all about it if you’re still interested—if you can stand to hear——”
John Jackson rested his hand on the young man’s shoulder.
“Don’t feel too badly,” he said in his kind voice. “I guess I can always stand anything my son does.”
This was an understatement. For John Jackson could stand anything now forever—anything that came, anything at all.
— ◆ —
The Pusher-in-the-Face.
Woman’s Home Companion (February 1925)
The last prisoner was a man—his masculinity was not much in evidence, it is true; he would perhaps better be described as a “person,” but he undoubtedly came under that general heading and was so classified in the court record. He was a small, somewhat shriveled, somewhat wrinkled American who had been living along for probably thirty-five years.
His body looked as if it had been left by accident in his suit the last time it went to the tailor’s and pressed out with hot, heavy irons to its present sharpness. His face was merely a face. It was the kind of face that makes up crowds, gray in color with ears that shrank back against the head as if fearing the clamor of the city, and with the tired, tired eyes of one whose forebears have been underdogs for five thousand years.
Brought into the dock between two towering Celts in executive blue he seemed like the representative of a long extinct race, a very fagged out and shriveled elf who had been caught poaching on a buttercup in Central Park.
“What’s your name?”
“Stuart.”
“Stuart what?”
“Charles David Stuart.”
The clerk recorded it without comment in the book of little crimes and great mistakes.
“Age?”
“Thirty.”
“Occupation?”
“Night cashier.”
The clerk paused and looked at the judge. The judge yawned.
“Wha’s charge?” he asked.
“The charge is”—the clerk looked down at the notation in his hand—“the charge is that he pushed a lady in the face.”
“Pleads guilty?”
“Yes.”
The preliminaries were now disposed of. Charles David Stuart, looking very harmless and uneasy, was on trial for assault and battery.
The evidence disclosed, rather to the judge’s surprise, that the lady whose face had been pushed was not the defendant’s wife.
On the contrary the victim was an absolute stranger—the prisoner
