Read Ebook: John Rawn Prominent Citizen by Hough Emerson Bracker M Leone Illustrator

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Ebook has 1536 lines and 98888 words, and 31 pages

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.

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.

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.

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.

POWER

"Charles," said John Rawn one evening, with that directness of habit which perhaps we have earlier noted, "I have been thinking over some scientific problems."

"Yes?" replied Halsey. "What is it--a patent car coupler? There isn't a fellow in our office who hasn't patented one, but I didn't know it was quite so catching as to get into the Personal Injury department--they only settle with the widows there."

"In my belief," went on Rawn, frowning at this flippancy, "I am upon the eve of a great success, Charles."

"What sort of success, Mr. Rawn?" inquired Halsey, more soberly.

Rawn smiled largely. "You will hardly credit me when I tell you, almost all sorts of success! To make it short, I have formed a power company--a concern for the cheap generation and general transmission of power. In the course of a few months we'll proceed in the manufacture of electrical transmitters and receivers for what I call the lost current of electricity."

Halsey stood cold for a moment, and looked at him in amazement.

"I don't doubt many have been thinking of it," rejoined Rawn. "It had to come. These things seem to happen in cycles. It's almost a toss-up what man will first perfect an invention when once it gets in the air, so to speak. Now, this invention of mine has been due ever since the developments in wireless transmission. In truth, I may say that I have only gone a little beyond the wireless idea. What I have done is to separate the two currents of electricity."

Halsey leaned against the wall. "My God!" he half whispered. He smiled foolishly.

"Why, Mr. Rawn," he said finally, "I've been studying that, I don't know how long--ever since the researches in my university were made public. I thought for some time I might be able to figure it out further than our professors have as yet. Pfl?ger, of Bonn, in Germany, has been working for years and years on that theory of perpetual motion in all molecules."

"Mollycules? I don't know as I ever really saw any," hesitated Rawn.

"Very likely, Mr. Rawn!"

"I've never cared much for mere scientific rot," said Rawn, coloring a trifle. "That gets us nothing. But what were you saying?"

Halsey's enthusiasm carried him beyond resentment and amusement alike.

"Molecules are everywhere, in everything, Mr. Rawn," he explained gently; "and now we know they move, though we can see them only in mass and as though motionless."

"I don't see how that can be," began Rawn; but checked himself.

"Yes, I know. That's what I've been getting at, precisely--"

"I was going to figure it out sometime," said Halsey ruefully.

"A great many haven't known about a great many things," said Rawn, walking up and down, his hands in his pockets, his air gloomily dignified. "A few men always have to do the things which others don't know about. For instance, what did all the work of your professors--what-d'ye-call-'ems--amount to? Nothing at all. Maybe they'd print a paper about it. That would about end it, just as it ended it for you. You admit you got the idea from them; but I say it wasn't any idea at all. I saw it--in the papers. Didn't pay much attention to it, because there's nothing in this scientific business for practical men like me."

"I know, I know," Halsey nodded. "That's true. Here it all is." He took from his coat pocket a creased and folded newspaper page of recent date. "Here's the story--I was proud, because it was my own university did the work:

"'That the molecules composing all material substances are constantly in rapid motion, ricocheting against one another in the manner of a collection of billiard-balls suddenly stirred up, the speed of the air's components being about half that of a cannon ball, was the proof announced to-day from the University of Chicago as a further development of the experiments by Professor R. A. Threlkeld, which for the last year have been attracting the attention of scientists from all parts of the world. The absolute nature of the proof, upon which physicists all over the world have been working without result for several years, was assented to by Professor Pfl?ger, of Bonn University, Germany, who arrived in Chicago last Monday to witness the demonstration.'"

He paused in his literal reading from the printed page. "I told you about Pfl?ger," he began.

"Yes, some Dutchman," assented Rawn graciously. "They're great to dig."

Halsey, being in the presence of the man whom he proposed making his father-in-law, was perforce polite, although indignant. He went on icily, with his reading, since he had begun it:

"'The belief that the molecules of which all matter is composed are in a perpetual dance of motion has been held tentatively by scientists for several years, but, owing to the general inability to make any progress in proving it, considerable skepticism has developed among the physicists of several of the leading scientific nations. It was generally known as the kinetic theory. Professor Threlkeld's proof is a further development of his experiments, showing electricity to be a definite substance, which were announced last year and were pronounced the most important discovery concerning the nature of electricity since Benjamin Franklin.

"'The simple expedient of performing his experiments in almost a complete vacuum--a method which had not occurred to scientists before--was given by Professor Threlkeld as the foundation stone of his discovery. Minute drops of oil, sprayed into a vacuum chamber, one side of which is of glass, demonstrate by their own motions the truth of the theory.

"'Surrounded by the ordinary amount of air, the oil drops are bombarded by moving air molecules in so many thousand places at once that their motion is so rapid as to be invisible. With few molecules of air surrounding them, the drops are driven back and forth as though being used as a punching-bag.

"That's all right," said John Rawn, "all very well as far as it goes, but it doesn't go far enough."

Halsey smiled. "Well, here's what the discoverer says about it," he commented. "I reckon that's plain, too, as far as it goes:

"'For the benefit of the general public, Professor Threlkeld has prepared the following statement concerning the experiments he has been conducting:

"'"The method consisted in catching atmospheric ions upon minute oil drops floating in the air and measuring the electrical charge which the drops thus acquired. This year the following extensions of this work have been made:

"'"The action of ionization itself is now being studied, each of the two electrical fragments into which a neutral molecule breaks up being caught upon oil drops at the instant of formation. This study has shown that the act of ionization of a neutral air molecule always consists in the detachment from it of one single elementary charge rather than of two or three such charges.

"Fine! Fine! Charley!" interrupted Rawn sardonically. "Everybody's read that who cared to read it. It's too dry for most folks. It's public; it's wide open, no secret about it. But who wants it? What use has a mollycule and a drop of oil in a glass jar got in actual business? What ice does it cut?"

"I know--I know, Mr. Rawn; very little indeed. But, one idea grows out of another. Now, what I was experimenting with was this same second current of electricity--whatever it is. It's got something to do--I don't just know what--with this same movement of the molecules. Now, can't you see, something has got to move them. If you've got perpetual motion, you've got a perpetual power somewhere back at it, and a power that is endless, universal--

"Mr. Rawn," he resumed earnestly, "when I got that far along, I got to--well--sort of dreaming! I followed that dance of the atoms on out--into the universe--into the manifestation of--"

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