The Courage of the Commonplace | Page 7

were so proud and so glad that it was almost too much for the boy who had been a failure three years ago.
On the urgent insistence of every one he made a speech. He got to his six-feet-two slowly, and his hands went into his trousers pockets as usual. "Holy mackerel," he began--"I don't call it decent to knock the wind out of a man and then hold him up for remarks. They all said in college that I talked the darnedest hash in the class, anyway. But you will have it, will you? I haven't got anything to say, so's you'd notice it, except that I'll be blamed if I see how this is true. Of course I'm keen for it--Keen! I should say I was! And what makes me keenest, I believe, is that I know it's satisfactory to Henry McLean." He turned his bright face to his father. "Any little plugging I've done seems like thirty cents compared to that. You're all peaches to take such an interest, and I thank you a lot. Me, the superintendent of the Oriel mine! Holy mackerel!" gasped Johnny, and sat down.
The proportion of fighting in the battle of life outweighs the "beer and skittles"; as does the interest. Johnny McLean found interest in masses, in the drab-and-dun village on the prairie. He found pleasure, too, and as far as he could reach he tried to share it; buoyancy and generosity were born in him; strenuousness he had painfully acquired, and like most converts was a fanatic about it. He was splendidly fit; he was the best and last output of the best institution in the country; he went at his work like a joyful locomotive. Yet more goes to explain what he was and what he did. He developed a faculty for leading men. The cold bath of failure, the fire of success had tempered the young steel of him to an excellent quality; bright and sharp, it cut cobwebs in the Oriel mine where cobwebs had been thickening for months. The boy, normal enough, quite unphenomenal, was growing strong by virtue of his one strong quality: he did what he resolved to do. For such a character to make a vital decision rightly is a career. On the night of the Tap Day which had so shaken him, he had struck the key-note. He had resolved to use his life as if it were a tool in his hand to do work, and he had so used it. The habit of bigness, once caught, possesses one as quickly as the habit of drink; Johnny McLean was as unhampered by the net of smallnesses which tangle most of us as a hermit; the freedom gave him a power which was fast making a marked man of him.
There was dissatisfaction among the miners; a strike was probable; the popularity of the new superintendent warded it off from month to month, which counted unto him for righteousness in the mind of the president, of which Johnny himself was unaware. Yet the cobwebs grew; there was an element not reached by, resentful of, the atmosphere of Johnny's friendliness--"Terence O'Hara's gang." By the old road of music he had found his way to the hearts of many. There were good voices among the thousand odd workmen, and Johnny McLean could not well live without music. He heard Dennis Mulligan's lovely baritone and Jack Dennison's rolling bass, as they sang at work in the dim tunnels of the coal-mine, and it seemed quite simple to him that they and he and others should meet when work hours were over and do some singing. Soon it was a club--then a big club; it kept men out of saloons, which Johnny was glad of, but had not planned. A small kindliness seems often to be watered and fertilized by magic. Johnny's music-club grew to be a spell to quiet wild beasts. Yet Terence O'Hara and his gang had a strong hold; there was storm in the air and the distant thunder was heard almost continually.
Johnny, as he swung up the main street of the flat little town, the brick school-house and the two churches at one end, many saloons en route, and the gray rock dump and the chimneys and shaft-towers of the mine at the other, carried a ribbon of brightness through the sordid place. Women came to the doors to smile at the handsome young gentleman who took his hat off as if they were ladies; children ran by his side, and he knocked their caps over their eyes and talked nonsense to them, and swung on whistling. But at night, alone in his room, he was serious. How to keep the men patient; how to use his influence with them; how to advise the