Twelve Men. Theodore Dreiser
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for himself some in this world. If he don’t, no one else will.”
“Right you are, Henry,” echoed a truculent sea voice from somewhere.
I was becoming both amused and interested, intensely so.
“If he wasn’t that way, he’d be a darned sight better off than he is,” said a thirty-year-old helper, from a far corner of the room.
“What makes you say that?” I queried. “Isn’t it better to be kind-hearted and generous than not?”
“It’s all right to be kind-hearted and generous, but that ain’t sayin’ that you’ve got to give your last cent away and let your family go hungry.”
“Is that what Charlie Potter does?”
“Well, no, maybe he don’t, but he comes mighty near to it at times. He and his wife and his adopted children have been pretty close to it at times.”
You see, this was the center, nearly, for all village gossip and philosophic speculation, and many of the most important local problems, morally and intellectually speaking, were here thrashed out.
“There’s no doubt but that’s where Charlie is wrong,” put in old Mr. Main a little later. “He don’t always stop to think of his family.”
“What did he ever do that struck you as being over-generous?” I asked of the young man who had spoken from the corner.
“That’s all right,” he replied in a rather irritated and peevish tone; “I ain’t going to go into details now, but there’s people around here that hang on him, and that he’s give to, that he hadn’t orter.”
“I believe in lookin’ out for Number One, that’s what I believe in,” interrupted the boat-maker, laying down his rule and line. “This givin’ up everything and goin’ without yourself may be all right, but I don’t believe it. A man’s first duty is to his wife and children, that’s what I say.”
“That’s the way it looks to me,” put in Mr. Main.
“Well, does Potter give up everything and go without things?” I asked the boat-maker.
“Purty blamed near it at times,” he returned definitely, then addressing the company in general he added, “Look at the time he worked over there on Fishers Island, at the Ellersbie farm—the time they were packing the ice there. You remember that, Henry, don’t you?”
Mr. Main nodded.
“What about it?”
“What about it! Why, he give his rubber boots away, like a darned fool, to old drunken Jimmy Harper, and him loafin’ around half the year drunk, and worked around on the ice without any shoes himself. He might ‘a’ took cold and died.”
“Why did he do it?” I queried, very much interested by now.
“Oh, Charlie’s naturally big-hearted,” put in the little old man who sold cunners. “He believes in the Lord and the Bible. Stands right square on it, only he don’t belong to no church like. He’s got the biggest heart I ever saw in a livin’ being.”
“Course the other fellow didn’t have any shoes for to wear,” put in the boat-maker explanatorily, “but he never would work, anyhow.”
They lapsed into silence while the latter returned to his measuring, and then out of the drift of thought came this from the helper in the corner:
“Yes, and look at the way Bailey used to sponge on him. Get his money Saturday night and drink it all up, and then Sunday morning, when his wife and children were hungry, go cryin’ around Potter. Dinged if I’d ‘a’ helped him. But Potter’d take the food right off his breakfast table and give it to him. I saw him do it! I don’t think that’s right. Not when he’s got four or five orphans of his own to care for.”
“His own children?” I interrupted, trying to get the thing straight.
“No, sir; just children he picked up around, here and there.”
Here is a curious character, sure enough, I thought—one well worth looking into.
Another lull, and then as I was leaving the room to give the matter a little quiet attention, I remarked to the boatmaker:
“Outside of his foolish giving, you haven’t anything against Charlie Potter, have you?”
“Not a thing,” he replied, in apparent astonishment. “Charlie Potter’s one of the best men that ever lived. He’s a good man.”
I smiled at the inconsistency and went my way.
A day or two later the loft of the sail-maker, instead of the shed of the boat-builder, happened to be my lounging place, and thinking of this theme, now uppermost in my mind, I said to him:
“Do you know a man around here by the name of Charlie Potter?”
“Well, I might say that I do. He lived here for over fifteen years.”
“What sort of a man is he?”
He stopped in his stitching a moment to look at me, and then said:
“How d’ye mean? By trade, so to speak, or religious-like?”
“What is it he has done,” I said, “that makes him so popular with all you people? Everybody says he’s a good man. Just what do you mean by that?”
“Well,” he said, ceasing his work as though the subject were one of extreme importance to him, “he’s a peculiar man, Charlie is. He believes in giving nearly everything he has away, if any one else needs it. He’d give the coat off his back if you asked him for it. Some folks condemn him for this, and for not giving everything to his wife and them orphans he has, but I always thought the man was nearer right than most of us. I’ve got a family myself—but, then, so’s he, now, for that matter. It’s pretty hard to live up to your light always.”
He looked away as if he expected some objection to be made to this, but hearing none, he went on. “I always liked him personally very much. He ain’t around here now any more—lives up in Norwich, I think. He’s a man of his word, though, as truthful as kin be. He ain’t never done nothin’ for me, I not bein’ a takin’ kind, but that’s neither here nor there.”
He paused, in doubt apparently, as to what else to say.
“You say he’s so good,” I said. “Tell me one thing that he ever did that struck you as being preëminently good.”
“Well, now, I can’t say as I kin, exactly, offhand,” he replied, “there bein’ so many of them from time to time. He was always doin’ things one way and another. He give to everybody around here that asked him, and to a good many that didn’t. I remember once”—and a smile gave evidence of a genial memory—“he give away a lot of pork that he’d put up for the winter to some colored people back here—two or three barrels, maybe. His wife didn’t object, exactly, but my, how his mother-in-law did go on about it. She was livin’ with him then. She went and railed against him all around.”
“She didn’t like to give it to them, eh?”
“Well, I should say not. She didn’t set with his views, exactly—never did. He took the pork, though—it was right in the coldest weather we had that winter—and hauled it back about seven miles here to where they lived, and handed it all out himself. Course they were awful hard up, but then they might ‘a’ got along without it. They do now, sometimes. Charlie’s too good that way. It’s his one fault, if you might so speak of it.”
I smiled as the evidence accumulated. Houseless wayfarers, stopping to find food and shelter under his roof, an orphan child carried seven miles on foot from the bedside of a dead mother and cared for all winter, three children, besides two of his own, being raised out of a sense of affection and care for the fatherless.
One day in the local postoffice I was idling a half hour