CHAPTER IX
Mr Barnett did not rise.
He held between his hands such “teeming destinies,” he controlled in the pursuit of his high mission so many various men, that his life necessarily suffered from the tension of artificial effort.
He was the more inclined to relax upon those occasions when he felt himself in the presence of friends who were bound to him by ties of gratitude. That evening in Norwood such a temptation was enhanced by the influence of a cosy room, soda water, spirits, a deeply padded chair, two magazines, Scotch whisky, and all the atmosphere of refinement.
He relaxed, I say, and a more truly lovable, because a more real Mr Barnett shone outwards through the surface of the man: a Mr Barnett not anxious for his accent or any other thing; a Mr Barnett interior, domestic, and at ease.
In such a mood he saw no need to rise; but his courtesy did not forsake him, nor the inbred habit of a man of the world. He lifted himselfsome inches from the chair by a pressure of his left hand and stretched out his right towards the owner of the house.
The high cosmopolitan sphere in which Mr Barnett had been formed is naturally indifferent, as our eager English gentry also are, to the conventions of the suburbs; but my readers will already have learnt that nothing could offend Mr Burden more than a breach of the usages of Norwood.
Mr Barnett’s attitude was at first incredible to him: to this incredulity succeeded a burst of anger.
The late hour, the recent quarrel with his oldest friend, and, doubtless, the approach of illness, might have betrayed Mr Burden into an irrevocable step. He might have left the room without speaking. He might even, so thoroughly was he put out, have manœuvred for his guest’s departure by that process of persistent, patient pressure which is called “kicking a man out of one’s house.” He might have sworn—had not Cosmo, with an excellent comprehension of his father’s petty vagaries, saved the position.
For Cosmo stepped out to greet his father warmly; he congratulated him heartily on having been able to return in time; he told the flurried merchant how long and anxiouslythe financier had waited; with the pardonable exaggeration of filial care, he ante-dated Mr Barnett’s advent and his own by a little over three hours; he insinuated in every tone that nothing but the overwhelming importance of his father’s judgment could have led Mr Barnett to so great an effort.
Mr Burden was but partially appeased; he sat down in a stiff chair, not his own, and faced Mr Barnett sternly as one might a witness in a court; the Leader of Men returned his gaze with a beam of comatose good nature. His head leaned slightly to the right, his upper eyelids (which were double, as are those of the great Andean bird) dropped deeply down, but from the little slit of prominent eye beneath a liquid humour still gleamed. That humour played upon Mr Burden steadily for some forty seconds, and then the voice spoke.
“I am ver’ happy to zee you, Mr Burten.”
A doubt, a disgusting suspicion, ran through Mr Burden’s mind; it leapt into a formed phrase; he felt the words coming—but it never reached his lips. He controlled himself during the pause that followed, and, during that pause, it was most evident that Mr Barnett’s vast organising mind was plunging deeper and deeper into the baths of silence and recuperation.
When he spoke next, it was with eyes quiteshut, and head bending forward irregularly at intervals.
“About that fellow Âppott?” he said.
Mr Burden did not answer.
“That fellow Âppott,” Mr Barnett’s big head wagged slowly in disapproval, “he is obstinate—but he is O.K. Alright. Aha? Not so?” Mr Barnett groped with his right hand as though to lay it upon Mr Burden’s knee; but, finding in the way the arm of the deep chair on which he sat, he patted that affectionately instead, and closed his eyes again, and was silent.
The younger and more active, though lesser, mind of Cosmo, came to the aid of Mr Barnett, whom fatigue, coupled with his remaining difficulties in the English tongue, had led into some vagueness of expression. Cosmo was the better fitted to speak, from the fact that Mr Barnett, earlier in the evening, when his mood had been for some reason more sprightly, had fully explained how and why Mr Abbott was necessary to the M’Korio.
“Father,” said Cosmo, rapidly, “you know how very few men there are in London who know one subject; Mr Abbott really does know the Delta. That is the whole point. But I am not sure that Mr Barnett quite understands....”
MR BARNETT THOROUGHLY AT HOME
MR BARNETT THOROUGHLY AT HOME
MR BARNETT THOROUGHLY AT HOME
Mr Barnett smiled and grunted; he was following, but indistinctly.
“Of course you know the difficulty, and I suppose I know it too. It all comes from what is finest in his nature; but the suspicion is intolerable, father. And that is another reason why he ought to come in.”
After this lucid sequence of ideas, Cosmo, who was standing with his hand on the table looking anxiously at his father across the lamplight, said, with real earnestness, “Wemustget him to come in.”
Mr Barnett opened his eyes rather widely and suddenly, and said:
“Ah! Yes! He môst come in. That is so.”
He nodded wisely; then, had not breeding forbidden him, he would have gone to sleep.
He fought against the temptation successfully, straightened himself a little in his chair, and pursued the attack upon Mr Burden in a manner the efficiency of which was only marred by his extreme drowsiness. There was in his manner that which should connote so high a respect for Mr Burden’s powers as to permit of confidence. He leant forward heavily and pressed his thumb against the merchant’s ribs, not as do lighter men and less consistent, with a jerk or dig, but with a continuous pressure such as one uses against an electric bell.
When he had done this, Mr Barnett said, with increasing wakefulness, and a kind of mock sadness in his voice:
“Sômetimes they do nôt come in.... No? ... Then we ...” And Mr Barnett made with the thumb and forefinger of his right hand a peculiar screwing motion, a gesture native to the conqueror; having done so, he concluded: “we môst use pres-sure,” and, as he said these words, he got up and stood steadily upon his feet.
It was a thing remarkable and arresting to the eye to see the fumes of lethargy pass from that great mind as mist does from the face of a mountain at morning; by an effort of the will it had thrown off sleep and the blessing of repose. The power of concentration had returned with every word during the last five minutes; the accent had grown purer; the attention more decisive. Mr Barnett noted the hour, he noted the cast of Mr Burden’s face in the shade of the light, and interpreted it to mean a comprehension of his scheme. He exaggerated, I believe, the intelligence of his host and colleague.
He took his hat from the table and put it firmly and ceremoniously upon his head, as was his custom before he left a room; he took up his cane, the top of which was of leadcovered with gold; he buttoned round him a great coat of fur, and, being so prepared, went out through the drawing-room into the hall. There, with great emphasis, he said good-night.
Cosmo not only opened the door for him, but leant his right hand upon his shoulder, to afford support to a man older and perhaps more infirm than himself. He so supporting him, they went down the drive together, to where, at the gate, stood the electric brougham, throwing great cones of light upon the thick air of the small hours: it was the first in London to bear upon its panels a small coat of arms.
As they went, Mr Barnett spoke twice. The first thing he said was: “You should have a drive up herein. So a carriage can come. There is no good if a carriage cannot come.” When he had said this, some rapid process of thought led him to another topic, and he continued: “Your father is a very fônny man.”
Cosmo although he had received so much wider a training than his father, retained a trace, perhaps hereditary, of those conventions which I have already condemned. He felt the colour come into his face; but the darkness screened him, and his knowledge of the world restored him his balance in a moment.
“He’ll be all right,” he said cheerfully. He opened the carriage door (not without thethanks of his chief) and tenderly arranged a warm rug around Mr Barnett’s knees. The young man in livery, hired for such purposes, stood by in somnolent respect. Then they bade each other good-night, and the last word Cosmo heard that evening as he turned back towards the house was the great and comforting word “Hôme,” rolled out by Mr Barnett to his servant in the accent of command.
When Cosmo had re-entered the house and approached, with great reluctance, the room whose atmosphere still seemed full of failure, he found that his father had gone to bed, and he was glad; for, like most men possessed of wisdom, he trusted half his fortunes to the influence of other men’s sleep.
If the effect of a misunderstanding or a quarrel were immediate, with what rapidity would not the tragedies of the world develop! With what certitude could one not foresee, and perhaps provide against, the climax of an evil fortune.
If things led on from logical step to step, what simple stories would crowd the world. Then indeed the epic and the lyrical, which we perpetually seek in fiction, would divert us in the common affairs of our own lives.
But the real world around us, the world onecorner of which it is here my business to describe, is not arranged in that fashion. A crime, a miscalculation, will produce consequences, not immediate but ultimate. Suspicions confirmed, quarrels brought perhaps to the point of violence, seem rather to sink into the mind and to make a soil there, than to bear their full fruit at once; so that, when the catastrophe falls, it is commonly at an insignificant and nearly always at an unsuspected moment.
So it was with what I can only call the tragedy of my friend.
It was inevitable that when his even, narrow, and placid mind should finally come face to face with the broad and rugged power of Mr Barnett, sharp pain, and possibly misfortune, should follow from such a meeting. The unhappy accident of the visit to Mr Abbott, and of a couple of hours delay, had brought those two minds in the presence one of the other; and a very grave hour had passed. But so are men made, that this experience led to nothing at the time. A night’s long sleep, the activities of the following day, sufficed to blur the image. Is it not Seneca who tells us that our own judgment is qualified by the expressed judgment of others? The public character of Mr Barnett recovered its place in Mr Burden’s mind. Many days at his business, a suddenchange in the weather, a small but lucky investment, a very active quarrel with his cook, who demanded and received instant dismissal—these good and evil things soon put the misfortune of Mr Barnett’s visit into its true perspective. It produced no visible, certainly no deplorable, result; what it did do was to leave Mr Burden all ready for further irritation, and for a growing misconception of his surroundings, until at last the great misfortune fell, after apparently the most trivial of accidents. The heart of his confidence had been eaten out; it held by the outer shell alone, and a touch was enough to make it crumble. But, for the moment, his faith held firm.
Moreover, if Mr Burden had been inclined to let the incident weigh upon him Cosmo’s efforts alone would have dispersed such an inclination. He returned home quite regularly day after day; he entertained his father with a thousand things. It was not till a week had passed that he permitted so much as a letter concerning the affairs of the Company to come under the old man’s eyes. When such a letter did arrive, he had carefully provided that it should be a short note of congratulation from a country gentleman, a distant acquaintance, a man of great possessions, wholly ignorant of the Delta and of most other things; one thathoped, if all went well, to be a shareholder, and who very warmly said so in his letter to Norwood.
At intervals of several days business details, of no great importance, but such as gradually reawakened in Mr Burden the old interest, began to come to his table; later he dined with Mr Harbury and met a very charming American actress, the manager of the Banque des Pyrénées, Lord John Mackintosh and his wife, and Lothingbury Grail, a gentleman who had written verses. They talked of Art.
A week later Cosmo and he lunched with Lord Benthorpe at Cosmo’s club, and the very next day, walking in the best of moods towards the City, they met by accident Mr Barnett himself, fresh with the morning, and in the most sympathetic of moods.
And all this while around Mr Burden, in the papers, in the conversation of men, the M’Korio grew and grew. The season continued, the debates in Parliament languished, the heat increased, and the spirit of the great African River ran through the veins of London.
The prospectus was drafted: many little inconclusive conversations were held; in a word, by all those small preliminaries which are necessary to a great and worthy enterprise, Mr Burden was re-introduced to the routinehe knew. His active interest returned. But deeper down the pall lay over his mind, and could not be lifted.
The struggle between these two things, his fatal lack of comprehension, his eager and patriotic pride, has been hitherto the matter of my record. Alas! the victory of the former must now lead on to my conclusion!
Mr Burden permitted his colleagues to undertake the necessary details, and he was even glad that they should look after such wearisome business. The registration of the Company, the finding of Brokers for it, and of Bankers, and of Solicitors, would have interfered with what he honestly believed to be his own engrossing labours in connection with his trade.
He was profoundly thankful that no further word was spoken of Mr Abbott; but it was the thankfulness of respite, not of reprieve. He saw before him an inevitable day, and he dreaded it. He consoled himself with guesses; he tried to forget that his great friendship had turned into an instrument—an instrument which could wound as well as work for him.
Eddies of uncertainty swirled in his mind. The Bankers were as firm as the Bank of England, the Brokers were of immense respectability, the very name of the Solicitorsseemed like a part of the Constitution; but all these things did but increase his disease—they seemed to him to be at the same time England, and not England. It was as though a man should be given a picture framed in a solid familiar frame—a frame suited to hold the portrait of his father—and hung before his table; and as though, in such a setting, the picture within constantly shifted and changed, now terrifying, now evil, now grotesque, now merely irritant, but always a nightmare of discord. In this mood a critical day found him—the day when his presence in the new offices was demanded to hear the prospectus read, and to pass it finally for printing.
The new offices were in Broad Street. Their position I have described in an earlier part of this book; with their magnificence perhaps most of my readers are acquainted. I have but to recall the two plaster lions that guard the staircase, symbolising, it is believed, the majesty of our race; the splendid negro, in Vienna ware of life-size, holding the lamp in the central gallery, and clothed as to his middle with a belt of ostrich feathers—whose ring of white against the shining darkness of his skin naturally led on to the row of smiling teeth above and the very conspicuous eyes. This masterpiece, which Mr Barnett had acceptedlong ago in lieu of payment of a debt, was already familiar to London—little reproductions of it were to be seen in the shops of the West End—the symbols of the M’Korio. The interiors were worthy of such apparatus. The doors of the main rooms were of oak; the doorplates and the locks were Marie Antoinette bronze gilding, embossed, single and reversible. It was a matter of pride to the Promoters that no two were exactly alike. A large male black cat, bearing round its neck a silver collar, added the note of domesticity, and was already familiar to Britain through the personal paragraphs of the daily press. The whole was rendered complete by a porter, than whom nothing more splendid could serve a sovereign in arms, whether in London or Berlin.
THE PORTER OF THE M’KORIO’S DELTA DEVELOPMENT CO.(FROM A GROUP)
THE PORTER OF THE M’KORIO’S DELTA DEVELOPMENT CO.(FROM A GROUP)
THE PORTER OF THE M’KORIO’S DELTA DEVELOPMENT CO.(FROM A GROUP)
This man was a Swedish Protestant; in height he was fully six feet seven, his hair was of the colour of tow, his eyes were of a faded blue, his face was white and yellow; in intellect, while not deficient, he was of a deliberation which admirably suited the nature of his employment; nor could any length of hours passed in the public gaze at the Main Entrance weary the Northern steadfastness of his mind. Proud of his uniform, content with his wages, enormous in his manner as in his dimensions, he was a further and a crowningproof of Mr Barnett’s instinct for what those adjuncts are, which cheer on to success the energies of an Imperial race.
I would I had the space or leisure to deal at further length with this remarkable and simple figure; indeed, long before Mr Burden’s death, it was my intention to devote to the portrayal of this porter’s life and character that literary skill which has now been turned into another, a far graver, and I fear a more monotonous channel. I had intended to relate exactly his career. How, stranded in the docks of London, this towering Scandinavian had obtained employment as a Life-guard; how, deserting from his Corps on account of the bullying to which he was subjected by his comrades, he found his way into the Metropolitan Police. Dismissed from this force for drunkenness, he became a chucker-out in a Music Hall, in which post his grievous muscular weakness, universal in men of his type, soon proved him unfit to deal with that athletic youth which frequents such haunts in the hey-day of its vigour; how, finally, while posing as a giant in a Fair, a position he occupied in return for his bare food, he was tempted to break his contract at the prospect of a higher wage. At the persuasion of Mr Barnett himself, he fled by night, accepted the service and livery of theM’Korio, and so reached the culmination of his career.
His interesting personality has detained my pen too long, I must return to Mr Burden entering the Great Room, where he should find his colleagues on the day when the Prospectus in its final form was to be passed for Press.
Mr Burden had played a great part in the world. He had been Sheriff in the early eighties; he had been Treasurer to the Bowmakers’ Company, and had drawn up in that capacity the scheme for endowing a new Chair of Comparative Religion at Dublin, a city sadly in need of broadening its outlook upon God; he had been called as an honoured witness before many Royal Commissions, and had sat on the Committee for the Adjustment of Port Dues; he had even enjoyed, now for some years, the honourable title of Justice of the Peace; and on the occasion of the Mansion House dinner, but eight months before, he had sat between the Chancellor of the Exchequer of the moment and some other member of the Cabinet whose name I cannot recall.
He was therefore not unfamiliar with the honourable pomp wherewith we surround the conduct of Empire; he was accustomed to thescenes and the personalities which accompany the furtherance of our Fate.
As he had entered daily deeper and deeper into the machinery by which that fate is advanced, its complexity had overwhelmed his simple mind.
I have sufficiently described the vortex of conflicting moods into which his soul had been drawn; yet must that whirlpool continually appear in this short story of his end, for without some sympathy with his grievous torment a view quite false to his nature might be conveyed. He could not comprehend.
It must be so. The past and the name of such men are necessary to the grist of expansion; but expansion and the newer kind of responsibilities kill them. So doubtless Venice in the sixteenth, Spain in the seventeenth, Holland in the eighteenth centuries were compelled to use, and destroy in using, what had been their most national type. It was the price they paid for the varied glory they proceeded to achieve. My friend was a necessary sacrifice, I know; but he was my friend. The victim moves me.
Consider him here in this great modern room—how much it was a torture-place for him.
He and they were ending their work. That day the last stone would be laid; yet was he further than ever from repose.
He and the three other men before him were now occupied in the actual work of forging anew province. The dignity of such an occasion should have touched him (he thought) more profoundly than it could his colleagues, whose lives had been spent in no other atmosphere. But, alas! unrest, most cogent, most bewildering, robbed that great occasion of any note of the solemn. Reality and unreality mixed in his mind continually. The world, so long a quite familiar thing, grew unfamiliar to him, more and more with every hour. The constraint which he felt in Mr Barnett’s presence; the certitude he had that Mr Barnett was a genius and a maker of England; the natural awe wherewith he regarded Lord Benthorpe’s experience; the astonishing phenomenon whereby Lord Benthorpe nevertheless showed himself purely passive; Harbury’s manifestly clear and decisive intelligence, coupled with his complete subservience—all these contradictions put his mind into a whirl.
Full of an aged complaint, not very distant from despair, he sat him down wearily in the vacant chair set for him. It was of the kind known to the trade as “Dutch Mediæval Easy”; fashioned of American hickory so treated as to resemble old English oak, and handsomely upholstered in a green imitation of Spanish leather.
He noticed Mr Harbury’s quiet, impressiveface; Lord Benthorpe’s somewhat nervous ease; above all, Mr Barnett’s powerful ill-dressed figure, sitting at random, bent over the scattered papers before him; and in his heart he groaned, remembering his fortune risked, the friendship of his life in jeopardy, and his hopeless see-saw of misunderstanding.
As usual, it was Mr Harbury who spoke first; as usual, he spoke rapidly and clearly.
“I think, gentlemen,” he said, “there is very little for us to do ... Payleys will bank for us, as you know. Charles & Charles will naturally do our legal work. The Directors I think we know.” He smiled as he said this, a slight conventional smile which fluttered on the face of Lord Benthorpe, and died on that of Mr Burden. “All we have to do is to read over the prospectus for the last time.” He sighed, and there was a pause. Then he turned to Mr Burden, saying: “Perhaps Mr Burden can suggest something.”
Mr Burden frowned solemnly. How often at his breakfast-table, when he opened his morning’s letters, had he not come upon such documents, prospectuses—the bricks and stones of Dominion? How often had he not held them before him, judging them steadily through his spectacles of gold? How rarely had he been misled by the false; how rarely had he despised the true? His investments had notbeen many. The expansion of his business had absorbed the greater part of his savings. But such ventures as he had made were safe enough. He could remember but one that had failed, and that was through no fault of his own judgment, or of that of his directorate. It was the Foreign Office which, as usual, had failed to put its foot down, and had permitted the ruffianly Alemami of Yollabù to repudiate his most solemn engagements. On all these things Mr Burden pondered in a confused silence; then he said, in that measured tone which marks the man of affairs:
“I can remember nothing that needs alteration, Mr Harbury; nothing material.”
Mr Harbury suggested that they should read the draft of the prospectus immediately, and that if anything occurred to any of them for the last time he should mention it.
Mr Harbury had not got very far into the body of the work when Lord Benthorpe stopped him at the word “exploitation.” It seemed to him a foreign word, and it had a flavour of something grasping and unjust about it. He hoped that no atmosphere of that kind would mar the effect of the prospectus.
Mr Harbury was evidently interested, and asked Mr Burden’s opinion. Mr Burden, who had been lost in thought, gazing at the great map of the M’Korio Delta that hung on thewall, patched with yellow for gold and with grey for coal, looked round somewhat flurried, and said that he had nothing to say.
Lord Benthorpe suggested the word “development,” but Mr Harbury pointed out that the word already occurred at the head of the sheet in the phrase “M’Korio Delta Development Company.”
Lord Benthorpe murmured:
“True, true.”
After about ten minutes of discussion, the word “exploitation” was allowed to stand.
Such are the limits of a modern book, that it is impossible for me to give at full length every remark that was made during this historic meeting. I abandon the attempt with reluctance. So many subtle shades of meaning were thrashed out between these four men; so powerfully did their various characters come into play; so many aspects of the forces that build up new colonies appeared in them, that the subject possesses an irresistible fascination to the writer, and perhaps to the reader of this chronicle. It is a fascination which they must resist: each in his own sphere.
Briefly, then, to mention only the more important matters, the word “but” in the fifth line was changed to “and”; the Anglo-Saxon word “employee” was substituted for theprinter’s “employé”; and (a very striking example of Mr Barnett’s grasp of the public pulse), the word “lagoon” (though it had become familiar to the Island race in the last two months) was changed to “lake.”
The whole discussion did not absorb more than an hour and a half of their time; and, at the close of it, Mr Barnett rang for a servant. He was that man of magnificence whom we have seen: a giant amenable and of service, he brought in wine and sandwiches upon a tray. The four men ate and drank, relaxing for a moment their attention to business, and touching upon lighter things. Three-quarters of an hour was all that Mr Barnett allowed for this pleasant interval: he rang again, and their discussion was resumed. They went carefully over all the points which had previously been decided, deleted a comma after the words “brightest gem,” and put a full stop after “in the British crown.”
At last, as the afternoon was drawing on, one or the other would rise at intervals, stroll to the window with his hands in his pockets and gaze out, or saunter to the fireplace, and lean upon the mantel-piece looking into the glass above it. Conversation of a more general kind occasionally relieved the strain and tension of their great task. Lord Benthorpe had quite an interesting argument with Mr Harburyupon the value of the inter-colonial postal system, and Mr Burden slept, for perhaps five or six minutes, towards the close of the afternoon.
By four o’clock, however, there remained nothing to decide, and Mr Barnett suggested that he himself should read over the prospectus for the last time, that they might have a final opportunity of touching upon any matters that had not hitherto occurred to them.
Outside in Broad Street, men passed and repassed, and most of them glanced up at that great window. There were many of the shrewdest, and many of the most solid, who envied the little group within; and even the great run of people, the crowd which turns the curving lane to a river through the middle hours of the day, felt the magic of what was passing behind those walls.
There were some random enthusiasts—vague, belated democrats from an earlier age—who were filled with sudden anger as they considered invincible powers of evil forging, in that room above, the chains which were to bind a new country. To these the names of Benthorpe and Burden were the names of implacable fiends; oppressors of humanity, but oppressors of such more than human genius, that humanity could do nothing against their power.
On the top of a passing omnibus a father of the name of Bailey, said to his son, who sat beside him:
“You see that window? Those are the M’Korio offices.”
He wagged his head wisely and said:
“It’s a big thing,” and the expression upon his face was at once illuminate and reverent; that of a familiar but devoted worshipper at the shrine of some god. The boy, careless as all boys are of all religions, said, “Oh,” and the ’bus rolled on.
Even the policemen and other poor men, who might have no share in these high things, felt the awe of what was toward. The hawkers and the newspaper boys, members of a rank where finance is forgotten, yet remembered England, and felt a pride of their own in the venture upon which these four men had entered; nor is there to-day any great city in the world, save London, where every citizen can forget envy and the differences of wealth in the passion of patriotism.
Meanwhile Mr Barnett, within, was reading the prospectus for the last, and, if I remember rightly, the fifth time.
He held the paper down on the table by the weight of his large left hand, and read it through most carefully; the volume of his voicewas emphasised by the slight guttural accent and the broad vowels which alone betrayed his foreign experience.
It was a peculiarity of his—common to most men of dominant character—that he suffered no interruption: a chance remark from Mr Harbury, an interjection from Lord Benthorpe passed by totally unheeded. His voice, slowly proceeding from word to word, or jolting at the stops, went steadily over the other men’s remarks, and crushed them as a great stone roller crushes clods in its going. It had also this in common with the roller, that its pace was even. He emphasised no syllables; every letter—contrary to our modern English usage—was pronounced; and this, in words such as “undesirability,” “advantageous,” or “irrecognisable” produced an effect both rich and strange.
When he had finished reading, he smoothed the papers out, gathered them up, and sighed as over a thing completed. He rose, and the three others with him; and you may say that one of the greatest days in the recent history of our country had gloriously ended.
“Not once or twice,” as someone says somewhere, “in our rough island story, the path of duty was the road to glory.”