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The Face Of Failure
by
This, Nelson thought, was success. Here were the successful men. The man who had failed looked at them. Eve roused him by a shrill cry, “There they are. There’s May and the girls. Let me out quick, Uncle!”
He stopped the horse and jumped out himself to help her. It was the first time since she came under his roof that she had been away from it all night. He cleared his throat for some advice on behavior. “Mind and be respectful to Mrs. Arlington. Say yes, ma’am, and no, ma’am—-” He got no further, for Eve gave him a hasty kiss and the crowd brushed her away.
“All she thinks of is wearing fine clothes and going with the fellers!” said her brother, disdainfully. “If I had to be born a girl, I wouldn’t be born at all!”
“Maybe if you despise girls so, you’ll be born a girl the next time,” said Nelson. “Some folks thinks that’s how it happens with us.”
“Do YOU, Uncle?” asked Tim, running his mind forebodingly over the possible business results of such a belief. “S’posing he shouldn’t be willing to sell the pigs to be killed, ’cause they might be some friends of his!” he reflected, with a rising tide of consternation. Nelson smiled rather sadly. He said, in another tone: “Tim, I’ve thought so many things, that now I’ve about given up thinking. All I can do is to live along the best way I know how and help the world move the best I’m able.”
“You bet I ain’t going to help the world move,” said the boy; “I’m going to look out for myself!”
“Then my training of you has turned out pretty badly, if that’s the way you feel.”
A little shiver passed over the lad’s sullen face; he flushed until he lost his freckles in the red veil and burst out passionately: “Well, I got eyes, ain’t I? I ain’t going to be bad, or drink, or steal, or do things to git put in the penitentiary; but I ain’t going to let folks walk all over me like you do; no, sir!”
Nelson did not answer; in his heart he thought that he had failed with the children, too; and he relapsed into that dismal study of the face of Failure.
He had come to the city to show Tim the sights, and, therefore, though like a man in a dream, he drove conscientiously about the gay streets, pointing out whatever he thought might interest the boy, and generally discovering that Tim had the new information by heart already. All the while a question pounded itself, like the beat of the heart of an engine, through the noise and the talk: “Shall I give up Richards or be turned out myself?”
When the afternoon sunlight waned he put up the horse at a modest little stable where farmers were allowed to bring their own provender. The charges were of the smallest and the place neat and weather-tight, but it had been a long time before Nelson could be induced to use it, because there was a higher-priced stable kept by an ex-farmer and member of the Farmers’ Alliance. Only the fact that the keeper of the low-priced stable was a poor orphan girl, struggling to earn an honest livelihood, had moved him.
They had supper at a restaurant of Tim’s discovery, small, specklessly tidy, and as unexacting of the pocket as the stable. It was an excellent supper. But Nelson had no appetite; in spite of an almost childish capacity for being diverted, he could attend to nothing but the question always in his ears: “Richards or me–which?”
Until it should be time for the spectacle they walked down the hill, and watched the crowds gradually blacken every inch of the river-banks. Already the swarms of lanterns were beginning to bloom out in the dusk. Strains of music throbbed through the air, adding a poignant touch to the excitement vibrating in all the faces and voices about them. Even the stolid Tim felt the contagion. He walked with a jaunty step and assaulted a tune himself. “I tell you, Uncle,” says Tim, “it’s nice of these folks to be getting up all this show, and giving it for nothing!”