i
thus far, the rawn planet had moved but in restricted orbit, to wit: one bounded as to one extremity by the dingy yard and narrow walls of a home rented at twenty dollars a month; at the other, by the still dingier and more prosaic business surroundings of a railway's general offices. narrow and dull enough the rawn life had been, and in such a life, lived on into middle age, you scarce could have blamed a man had he settled back for ever into the grip of the upreaching fingers of monotony. the half mechanical and parrot-like repetition of set phrases in a restricted line of business correspondence for rawn himself, day after day; the dull and endless round of homekeeping duties for the wife—what but narrowness and dullness could come out of life such as this? wherefore you should not have been surprised had you been told that grace rawn was simply the outgrowth of this sort of home, this sort of life, not much different from other girls of her class.
we are coming more and more in america to use that word "class." the theory is that we came to this continent to escape class; but surely class has followed us, and restricted us, and counted us out into elect and damned, into those above and those below the salt. rather let us say the truth, which is that class has followed us because we ourselves have followed after class.
but continually the great laws of survival go on after their own fashion. in the production of human beings there continually are at work the five laws of evolution, the five factors of heredity, environment and selection, blended with variation and isolation. these five factors build human characters, continue ever to do their amazing sums in life and success and survival. sometimes they produce a grace rawn.
ii
perhaps it was the very factor of isolation that gave grace rawn her quality. she was a silent girl, somewhat reserved. silence and reserve she got from her father's solemn self-absorption, her mother's quiet self-abnegation. she was softened in part by the gentle training of her mother, who talked most when her husband was not present.
grace rawn stood two inches taller than her mother, and had a certain severe distinction which covered many sins in shorthand. her brows were dark and met above her eyes; and the latter, being somewhat myopic, usually were covered by glasses—which also not infrequently shield yet other multitudes of sins in stenography. her chin was well out and forward. her jaw was rounded, her teeth white and good, her carriage also good, if still a trifle stiff and awkward. in air she was slow and deliberate. her eyes were gray like her mother's, her voice deep like her father's. she was what would be called old for her years, indeed a woman at sixteen. most would have placed her age some years further on than the eighteen years which really were hers at this time.
grace rawn could not be said to have any circle of friends. her soul was eclectic. in short, isolation, selection and variation, the three less known laws of growth, had done as much for her as the more vaunted factors of heredity and environment. self-contained, adequate enough in appearance, although lacking that sort of magnetism which draws men to women, she would have passed with small notice in the average collection of her sex. for such as these, propinquity comes as a blessing in so far as natural selection is concerned.
iii
in st. louis, natural selection operated much as in the silurian or the elizabethan, or eke the jeffersonian age, choice being made from that which offered at the family doorstep in either era. in kelly row good folk sat upon the doorstep of an eventide. the evening assemblage upon the rawn front doorstep in kelly row grew larger as grace grew older. certain young men came. why did they come? why do we walk about and around a tree that hangs full in fruit not yet ripened, watching the bloom on this, the texture of that, the size or probable flavor of yonder example hanging as yet unfinished in the alchemy of the summer sun? at least the little company at times was larger on the rawn front stoop of an evening. it all went on in the easy, careless, hopeful, unconventional fashion of families of the rawn class. let it be remembered that class really is class in this country. there seemed little hope for grace, therefore, other than in a marriage after the stereotyped fashion of kelly row. perhaps if good fortune attended, she might marry a man who, at middle age, might, like her father, be drawing a salary of one hundred and twenty-five dollars a month; a great man in the eyes of the world of kelly row, which lived on an average of half that per month.
iv
in this evening company, as laura rawn had mentioned, occasionally might have been found one charles halsey, himself now some twenty-four years of age at next spring's lambing-time; as his father, a missouri farmer, would have said. halsey had come to the city, a serious-minded youth, to seek his fortune, just as john rawn had done at about the time halsey himself was born. but whereas rawn had concerned himself little in books, halsey had, by such means as only himself could have told, managed a degree in engineering in what new england calls a freshwater college, the same not so good as salt, yet, in halsey's belief better than none and cheaper than some. once out of college and finding himself belated, he had thrust into the thick of the fray of the business world to the best of his ability, though to his surprise not setting the world into any conflagration. these four years now, as chance had had it, he had been engaged in the drafting department of the engineer's offices in the same railway which employed john rawn. a thoughtful young chap enough, and one held rather student than good fellow by his fellow clerks, because for the most part he did not join them in their dissipations, their cheap joys, their narrow ways of thinking. also a chap regarded as not wholly desirable because he read much, and because he had ideas.
charles halsey, as well as grace rawn, in some sort seemed to set the laws of heredity and environment at defiance in favor of the lesser factors in evolution. he had originally no right to be anything but a farm lad, yet he had dreams, and so had fought his way through college. there, in the world of books, close to the world of thought, not far from the world of art, he had become what some of us might have called an idealist, what most of us would have called a fool, and now what all of us would have called a failure.
a studious bent, a wide and unregulated way of reading, a vague, inexact and untrained habit of mentality, took young halsey, as it does many another unformed mind, into studies of social problems for which he was but little fitted, to wit: into imaginings about human democracy, the inherent rights of man, and much other like folly. the questions of socialism, the rights and wrongs of capital, the initiative, the referendum and the recall; the direct primary, the open shop, and the living wage scale under the american standard—all these and many other things occupied him as much as tangents, curves and logarithms. as a result of his inchoate research, he started out in young manhood well seized of the belief—finely expressed in a certain immortal but wholly ignored document known in our own history—that there is a certain evenness in human nature before the eyes of the lord.
a young engineer with small salary, and a theoretical cast of mind, even though he reads text-books out of hours, has only himself to trust for his upward climb in life. surely he might be better occupied in wondering rather about his pull with the boss than about the eyes of the lord as bearing upon the future of this republic. but, at any rate, such was the plight of young mr. halsey. and, such being the nature and disposition of the doorstep-frequenting young, it chanced that, although grace rawn really was not yet fledged beyond the blue-tip stage of her final feathering, and although mr. halsey of the engineering, draftsman, himself still lacked the main quills which support a man in his ultimate flight through life, they came more and more to meet each other; after which, each in separate fashion came to enjoy the meeting and to look forward to the next.
it was not unusual for mr. halsey, faring homeward from the office, to meet grace, also faring home, at the turn of the car track on olive street. taking the same car they would travel, somewhat shy and silent, until they reached the distant corner where those bound for kelly row must leave the car. then, himself obliged by this to walk perhaps a mile farther, he would join her, still shy and more or less silent; and so perhaps again wander to that certain door in kelly row where by that time, perhaps, both mr. rawn and his helpmeet were sitting on the narrow porch. he was always welcome there, because rawn knew him for a steady chap; and because, in halsey's eyes, john rawn was considerable of a personage. rawn was aways ready to be consulted by the young, and, like most failures, was not averse to giving abundant good advice to others as to the problems of success. halsey, reserved and not expansive of nature, a poor boy in college, always had had a social world as narrow as this of kelly row; so that after all the parties of both the first and the second part were traveling mostly in their own class. on the whole it was rather a dour assemblage, that on the porch in kelly row. none seemed to have any definite plan or to suspect another of plan. life simply was running on, in the bisque shepherdess, china dog, dying gaul and rock of ages way.
v
let us except john rawn. he now had certain wide plans of his own, as we shall see—indeed, as we have seen—and these had somewhat to do with young mr. halsey himself.
mr. halsey himself was disposed at times rather to moroseness, not yet having discovered the full relation of liver and soul—a delicate and intimate association. sometimes despair oppressed him.
"once in a while i get an idea," said he, one evening, "and i think it might make good if i had a chance to put it over. but what's the use? i couldn't do anything with the best idea in the world, because i have no time nor money to work one out. i tell you, you've got to have money or pull to get anywhere to-day. this country's getting into a bad way. it doesn't look quite right to me, i tell you, the way human beings are ground under to-day."
and yet it was out of precisely such talk as this that john rawn originally got the reason for the enthusiastic conversation with his wife which earlier has been chronicled. behold the difference among men! here was one who wanted to set all the world right, to discover some panacea by which all men might rest in happiness for ever, by which all men might succeed, might indeed prove themselves free and equal, and entitled to, say, ten minutes out of the twenty-four hours for the pursuit of happiness—innocent happiness, such as reading books on electricity, socialism, the steaming quality of coke, or the tortional strength of i-beams laid in concrete. here also, one lift above him on the doorstep of kelly row, was another man, john rawn, who, thinking he was full of ideas, had none, but who had every confidence in himself; a man who early in his youth had proved his ability to leave to others the skin of their bananas while he himself took the meat, and paid naught therefor. not much of a stage, thus set in kelly row. but this is the stage as it was set.
vi
among these, there was one idea waiting to be born. for, look you, the air is full of ideas—even as john rawn in ignorant truthfulness had said. they float all about us, unborn children in the ether of the universe, waiting to be born, selecting this or that of us—you, me, gently, for a parent; the most of them to be pushed back unknown, unrecognized, into the frustrate void, and so left to await a better time. i doubt not that, at this time or that, each of us has had offered to him, thus gently, thus unknown, some idea which would have made any of us great, set us far above our fellow-man; ideas which for all of that, perhaps would have revolutionized the world. but we did not know them. what great things are left unborn, what great discoveries remain unmade, no man may measure. we do not lay hold upon that thin and vaporous hand which touches our shoulder. we do not wrestle unwearied with the angel unto the coming of the dawn. so we go on, bruised and broken, and at length buried and forgot, most of us never grasping these unseen things, not even having a hint of their immaterial presences. it is only as the jest-loving fates have it that, once in a while, something in revolutionary thought drops to earth, is caught by some materialistic mind, bred up by some materialistic hand.
it must have been first at some chance meeting here on the doorstep in kelly row that young halsey let drop reference to an idea. it was the whisper of some passing wing in the universal ether, but he did not know that. it is not always the mind of the idealist which produces. but now this thin, faint, mystic sound had fallen upon the material mind of john rawn, covetous, eager, receptive of any hint to further his own interest, concerned not in the least with science, not in the least with altruism, troubling not in the least over the fate of this republic or the welfare of mankind, concerned only with his own fate, interested only in his own welfare. whereupon john rawn—barring that certain prophetic outburst of his egotism with which he favored his wife but recently—in silence had accepted this sign and taken it as his own, devised for his use and behoof, and for that of none other than himself.
vii
this difference, then, lay between rawn of the personal injury department of the railway office, and halsey of the drafting offices; rawn believed in himself, halsey had not yet figured out whether or not he believed in anything. they met on the doorstep at kelly row, and out of their meeting many things began in kelly row which matured swiftly elsewhere, and in surprising fashion.
we now come on, sufficiently swiftly, to the history of the birth and organization of the international power company, limited; a concern which grew out of nothing except the five factors of survival—environment, heredity, variation, selection and isolation. its cradle was in kelly row.
