“The world will some day grope its way into
some kind of an understanding of its extraordinary
men. Now they suffer terribly. In success
or in such failures as has come to this imaginative,
strangely perverted Irishman their lot is pitiful.
It is only the common, the plain, unthinking man who
slides peacefully through this troubled world.”
At the house Jane McPherson sat waiting for her boy.
She was thinking of the scene in the church and a
hard light was in her eyes. Sam went past the
sleeping room of his parents, where Windy McPherson
snored peacefully, and up the stairway to his own
room. He undressed and, putting out the light,
knelt upon the floor. From the wild ravings of
the man in the jail he had got hold of something.
In the midst of the blasphemy of Mike McCarthy he
had sensed a deep and abiding love of life. Where
the church had failed the bold sensualist succeeded.
Sam felt that he could have prayed in the presence
of the entire town.
“Oh, Father!” he cried, sending up his
voice in the silence of the little room, “make
me stick to the thought that the right living of this,
my life, is my duty to you.”
By the door below, while Valmore waited on the sidewalk,
Telfer talked to Jane McPherson.
“I wanted Sam to hear,” he explained.
“He needs a religion. All young men need
a religion. I wanted him to hear how even a man
like Mike McCarthy keeps instinctively trying to justify
himself before God.”
John Telfer’s friendship was a formative influence
upon Sam McPherson. His father’s worthlessness
and the growing realisation of the hardship of his
mother’s position had given life a bitter taste
in his mouth, and Telfer sweetened it. He entered
with zeal into Sam’s thoughts and dreams, and
tried valiantly to arouse in the quiet, industrious,
money-making boy some of his own love of life and
beauty. At night, as the two walked down country
roads, the man would stop and, waving his arms about,
quote Poe or Browning or, in another mood, would compel
Sam’s attention to the rare smell of a hayfield
or to a moonlit stretch of meadow.
Before people gathered on the streets he teased the
boy, calling him a little money grubber and saying,
“He is like a little mole that works underground.
As the mole goes for a worm so this boy goes for a
five-cent piece. I have watched him. A travelling
man goes out of town leaving a stray dime or nickel
here and within an hour it is in this boy’s pocket.
I have talked to banker Walker of him. He trembles
lest his vaults become too small to hold the wealth
of this young Croesus. The day will come when
he will buy the town and put it into his vest pocket.”
For all his public teasing of the boy Telfer had the
genius to adopt a different attitude when they were
alone together. Then he talked to him openly
and freely as he talked to Valmore and Freedom Smith
and to other cronies of his on the streets of Caxton.
Walking along the road he would point with his cane
to the town and say, “You and that mother of
yours have more of the real stuff in you than the
rest of the boys and mothers of the town put together.”
