Notify all agents and customers price clothespins five tens off list. Effective to-day.
Notify all agents and customers price clothespins five tens off list. Effective to-day.
Again something to do had arisen and Jim had done it swiftly, suddenly. He had added fresh and stronger claims on his new name.
Jim awoke next morning to a sense not altogether one of satisfaction with the events of the night before. He realized he had inaugurated a clothespin war which further parleying might have postponed or prevented. Again he had acted swiftly, suddenly, surprisingly to himself. Yet as he thought it over he was less inclined to censure himself. He felt he was right when he insisted on building and operating his mill to suit himself—so long as he built and operated with fairness. He knew Welliver and the Club would not recede from their position, and that there remained only to surrender, play for delay, or fight. There is a certain satisfaction in striking first.
Jim’s watch told him it would not be six o’clock for another half-hour, and breakfast was not until seven. He dressed leisurely and descended to the piazza, where, grouped about the step of the buggy, stood Welliver, Michael Moran, and the old justice of the peace.
“Good morning,” called Welliver, chipper as a wren. “You’re an early bird. Thought I’d have to leave without saying good-by.”
“Hope you have a pleasant drive,” said Jim. He turned down the walk and strode away with the intention of tramping a mile or two before the dining-room opened.
“Wait a minute, son,” Welliver called. “Come here and shake hands with Mr. Moran—you’ll be meeting each other in a business way considerable. He owns this thirty-mile streak of rust you call a railroad. And Judge Frame.”
Jim shook hands. Moran returned his pressure heartily; but, while he offered a cordial welcome to Diversity, Jim was aware the man’s clear gray eyes were studying and appraising him. As for Zaanan Frame, he merely grunted.
“Haven’t had a change of heart since last night?” asked Welliver.
Jim smiled and shook his head. “Our folks will be quoting a discount of five tens this morning,” Be said.
“Son, when you’ve been in this business twenty years you’ll go slower.”
“Colts,” said Zaanan Frame, “kicks out the dashboard jest for fun. But most gen’ally, when an old hoss starts in to use his heels he means business.”
James said nothing. He was to discover that Zaanan Frame was given to making remarks to which it was difficult to retort; that Zaanan had a way of dropping a statement over a conversation as one would lower a candle-snuffer over the flame, and that a new subject to talk about became immediately desirable. The old justice was a final sort of person. Jim’s dislike for him grew like one of these huge white mushrooms which daring individuals pick and fry and eat—and sometimes survive.
“You are determined?” asked Mr. Welliver, making one last effort.
“I’m determined to run my own business,” said Jim.
Mr. Welliver shrugged his erect and beautifully tailored shoulders.
“When you’ve got enough—” he began, suggestively, but did not trouble to finish the sentence.
“Glad to have met you, gentlemen,” Jim said. “I’m off for a walk to stir up enthusiasm for breakfast.”
A man who has to have his clothes wet through before he can recognize it is raining may succeed as a professor of Greek or as an artificer of a ditch, but he is not likely to elbow aside numerous captains of industry. Though unequipped with that which the proverb declares to be the best teacher, Jim Ashe did have in its proper place inside his skull a brain reasonably able to travel from patent cause to obvious effect, or to reach a conclusion that birds which flock together are likely to be similarly feathered. The height of stupidity for a man in Jim’s situation would have been not to speculate on the manifest acquaintance between Mr. Welliver, Michael Moran, and Justice of the Peace Frame. He was not guilty of that stupidity, and as he walked along the road whose hot sands had cooled under the summer moon, he speculated on the significance of their early morning meeting. His thoughts ran something to the effect that to a man up a tree it looked as if Mr. Welliver had allies in the very heart of the territory of the Ashe Clothespin Company.
Jim walked briskly past his mills, then turned into an inviting lane which led upward toward a wood-lot. Presently he turned again, to return cross-lots along the hypotenuse of the triangle. To do this it was necessary to surmount the first line of defense, a five-strand, barb-wire fence, then to climb a knoll surmounted by a lonely hickory-tree. From the top of this knoll Jim hoped to have a general view of the country and so to acquaint himself at a glance with the topography of his new home. He scrambled up, and reached the top breathless. The last dozen feet had been steep, hiding the tiny plateau at the peak from sight. Immediately he straightened up. He was made to feel that he was not wholly welcome—indeed, that he was decidedly an intruder, for frowning at him with black brows and sullen black eyes was the young woman at whom he had stared on the station platform.
Her expression was hostile. If eyes and compressed lips can speak, that young woman was saying peremptorily and not at all politely, “Get out!”
“I beg your pardon,” Jim panted. “I had no idea—?”
“You must have seen me,” she said, coldly.
“But I didn’t see you,” said Jim. “I should not have intruded.”
“This spot is visible for a mile in any direction,” she said, shortly. Apparently she was determined to believe he had seen her and had climbed up to her, probably in the prosecution of the common masculine ambition to scrape up acquaintance with a stray and unprotected girl. Jim felt an embarrassing warmth about his ears.
“You stared at me yesterday,” she said, before he could speak.
“I did not stare at you,” he replied, unguardedly. “I was staring at the expression in your eyes—the hungry expression with which you looked after the train.”
She bit her lips; her eyes darkened; she was startled.
“Can people see it?” she asked, aloud, not of Jim, not of herself, not of anybody or anything that could frame an answer.
Jim ignored her exclamation and entered his defense. “I was walking to pass the time till breakfast. When I got to the wood-lot there I turned to cut across lots. I did not see you. I had other things on my mind than unexpected young women on hilltops at unholy hours in the morning. I am sorry I disturbed you.” He did not go, but stood looking down at her. She was looking past him down the valley toward the distant shimmer that was the great lake. For the moment he was negligible to her; again her eyes, her face, wore that expression as of the woman in the bread-line—of hunger.
In a moment her face relaxed till it spoke merely of discontent, dissatisfaction. Jim thought she would have been homely were it not for the graceful setting of her head on her shoulders, the splendid ease and symmetry of her position.
“I don’t have to explain to every chance stranger why I get up early in the morning and come here,” she said, not so much sullenly as with repression, as though she were damming up something within her.
“Of course not,” said Jim, inadequately.
Suddenly she flashed to her feet with a beautiful litheness and stood facing him, her hands clenched into little fists, her breast heaving.
“I will tell you. I’ve got to tell somebody. It’s because I hate this”—she swept her hand over Diversity. “It’s because it’s horrible, unbearable. It’s because I’m chained down here like a prisoner in a dungeon. That’s why I go to watch the train—it is going away, going out there where people live. That’s why I come up here. It’s my little window to look out of. I can see beyond Diversity. Sometimes a vessel passes. I imagine I am on it, going away—to Chicago—to New York—to San Francisco. Here I can turn my back on Diversity and see where its dead hand cannot reach. I hate the town, I hate the people, but most of all I hate the children. Oh, look shocked! But sit in a room with thirty of them ten months a year; watch their smugness; try to cram spelling and geography and arithmetic into them; try to make an impression on their dullness. They’re a nightmare! That’s why I come here—to look away from them, beyond them, to see a spot that’s not tainted with them. I was born here.” She said the last as though it were the summing up of all evil.
“My dear young lady,” said Jim, in a tone that was ludicrously paternal, “you’re working yourself up to—hysterics or something.”
She leaned against the old hickory-tree, panting, clutching the folds of her skirt with convulsive fingers.
“I want to go—go—go! I want to see things—to be a part of them. I’m smothered. This is living in a graveyard where there’s a perpetual fog. Other people live. Other people have things happen to them, and I—I don’t even dare read about them in books. I couldn’t stand it.”
Jim wanted to run, yet he wanted to stay. Here was a manifestation far outside the purview of his experience. It was a little adventure into a human soul, and Jim’s contact with the human soul had been superficial.
“If you want to go, why—why in thunder don’t you go?” he said, boyishly.
She flashed a gleam of scorn upon him. “I’m a girl—a girl—the most helpless, most defenseless, most easily damaged thing under the sun. Why don’t I go?” Her tone snapped with scorn. “What would I do? Who would take me in? What would become of me? Here I’m safe. I may die of it, but I’m safe. It might be less hideously barren if I weren’t. I’m alone. I’ve been alone since I was fifteen. Some day it’ll be too much for me and I’ll go. But I won’t be fooled into it. I’ll go with my eyes open, knowing why I go. If I go nobody’ll be to blame—except Diversity—for I’ll have made my choice deliberately. Don’t look shocked. I suppose there have been millions of others before me who had the same choice to make. I’m not unique. You men have made the world, and when you get a glimpse of it once in a while you’re shocked.”
“Miss”—Jim paused and bit his finger in bewilderment—“I don’t just know what you’re accusing us men of, nor the world in general. But I’ve lived a bit more than you. I’ve lived enough to know this—that there’s more good than evil. There are more folks who are trying to do right than who deliberately do wrong. I know that even in the bad ones there’s more good than bad. I believe if you were to take all the law and machinery of the law, all the police, all the social protection out of the world to-day, that to-morrow the force for right which is in the world would assert itself. There is so much more good than bad in the world that the bad would be held down by the mere weight of the good. You hear about the evil, because the evil thing is news, something to talk about, something to make readers for the newspapers. And it’s news because it’s out of the normal. So there seems to be a lot more bad than there is. Goodness is normal—so normal that nobody notices it.”
“Men always defend themselves plausibly.”
“I’m not defending men; I’m defending humanity.”
She fell silent, and gazed past him again to the twinkling blue of the lake. When she spoke it was less hardily, more wistfully than she had spoken before:
“The world is so big and so interesting. In any direction, if my eyes reached far enough, they would see something thrilling. To think there is so much—and I am refused a crumb!”
“I’m afraid something has happened to disturb you.”
She laughed shortly. “If something should I’d thank Heaven for it! It’s all so drowsy, so placid, and I’m tied to it as if to a stake, with a slow fire lighted round me.”
“But if you want to go so badly, if life here is so unendurable, what ties you to it?”
“The trifling accident of having been born a girl, added to the trifling episode of having lost my parents, added to the inconsequential condition that the forty dollars a month I get for teaching school is all that stands between me and starvation.”
She turned abruptly from him and started down the knoll. He followed.
“Don’t come with me,” she said, stopping. “I don’t know you. I don’t want to know you. After this I never want to see you again. I had to say these things to somebody. By accident it was you, but I hate you for it. You know. Never try to speak to me.”
She went away swiftly, leaving him to stare after her in bewilderment. He was startled. His sensation was such as if he had picked up a pebble and found it suddenly to be a live coal.
Later in the day he found her name to be Marie Ducharme, daughter of a French-Canadian lumber-lack who had risen to be a walking boss. He found that Diversity returned her dislike, or, if it did not return it, viewed her askance as a person who was “queer.”
To be “queer” in a village of less than a thousand souls is no inconsiderable crime.
For the next fortnight Jim Ashe was too busy to give thought to his new environment, to study the new world to which he had been translated. He was studying the clothespin business. It is true he did not come to his work wholly unprepared; being Clothespin Jimmy’s son, that was impossible. His father had talked it, thought it, dreamed it. Jim had assimilated it with his meals. Also, as a boy, before his college days, in vacation times when college days arrived, he had worked in the mills and acquired for the business that distaste which he once vainly fancied was to lead him down widely different vocational paths.
As a lad he had counted and packed pins; later he had dogged in the sawmill; one vacation he had calloused and slivered his hands feeding the drum. He had scaled timber; he had been chore-boy for old Pazzy Miller, the pinmaker. These various jobs were given him out of his father’s wisdom to show him the how and the why of all steps in the manufacture. Nor was he ignorant of other branches of the business, for clothespins were not the sole product, though they were its backbone. He was not unacquainted with the mysteries of the veneer lathe nor with the making of wood ashes. He understood somewhat the technic of the turner, and the processes which went to the making of wooden spoons, rolling-pins, drumsticks, and the like—all turned from seasoned lumber.
Those things he knew as a workman. Something of the marketing problems his father had been able to drop unsuspected into his mind, but this was all incoherent, not card-indexed and pigeonholed and ready for instant use. Jim spent his time—not occupied by immediately pressing concerns and events—in preparing the knowledge he had, in adding to it; in short, in preparing himself as best he could to handle and husband the property that was his. It was surprisingly like trying to swim after a course of twenty lessons from a correspondence school.
A week before the machinery was ready to turn over, the office force with its paraphernalia arrived from the old office and was installed in the new. It consisted of one stenographer, picked by Clothespin Jimmy wholly for efficiency and not at all for adornment; of a middle-aged bookkeeper, who seemed to have been born with something more than the normal quantity of organs, for there grew from his forehead a green eye-shade, without which he was never seen, and there sprouted in his right hand a pen. There was also an assistant bookkeeper, whose business in life was to act and look as much like the bookkeeper, Mr. Grierson, as possible; and a shipping-clerk, whose familiarity with freight-rates and with the occult business of routing freight-cars so they would arrive where they were intended to go, instead of at the other side of the continent, was such as to arouse Jim’s admiration.
The clothespin war was as yet a minor trouble. He had one letter from the secretary of the Club, informing him that the price he had quoted was cut by another five per cent. This cut he met immediately. A flood of orders came in from brokers, traveling-men, wholesalers—all rushing to take advantage of the low market to stock up. These Jim culled over carefully, accepting only enough to keep his plant running to capacity, not overloading himself with orders which he would have to fill in case of a cessation of hostilities and consequent soaring of price.
He called into conference his superintendent, millwright, master mechanic, and the foremen of his departments, but it was not a conference, as the event proved. It consisted merely of a brief statement by Jim.
“The job you fellows are up against,” he said, “is to manufacture better and cheaper than anybody else. Prices are down. I believe we can still show a profit. Any man who has an idea that will save a tenth of a cent on a box of pins will find it profitable to bring it to me. What’s the best day’s average you made in the old plant, Pete?”
“Seventy-five boxes a machine,” said the old pinmaker.
“I’m expecting eighty here,” Jim told him. “It costs as much to operate a machine making sixty boxes as it does eighty. If you can make eighty, the extra five will come close to being profit. Don’t let a machine, a lathe, a saw, waste machine hours. Everything has got to run; it has got to run constantly, and it has got to produce the greatest quantity that is physically possible. I’m depending on you men. We have a new crew in large part. I want them to feel I’m depending on them. Tell every girl, every man of the crew, that the Ashe Clothespin Company is depending on her or on him, and that each may depend on me. If I expect them to give me a square deal, I expect myself to give them a square deal. Tell them that. There’ll be no dissatisfaction or labor trouble here if I can help it—and I can. I guess that’s all. Now get at it.”
The men looked at one another; old Pete scratched his head and grinned, and they filed out. Their feeling, if one was to judge from their faces, was one of satisfaction and confidence. They believed in the new boss, and that is the first step toward a feeling of affection.
It was that afternoon that Zaanan Frame drove his old horse Tiffany—named, as Jim found out, after the greatest of legal books, Tiffany’sJustices’ Guide—up to the mill and rheumatically climbed to the office.
“Afternoon,” said he. “Name’s Jim, hain’t it?”
Jim nodded curtly. He suspected the justice of being no friend of his, but an ally of the other camp.
“All right, Jim. Last names was made for fellers that git to be postmasters. Couldn’t sort the mail without ’em. Hain’t for every-day use no more ’n plug hats.”
“What can I do for you, Judge?” Jim asked, offishly.
The old fellow regarded him a moment in silence.
“Wa-al, you might put more sugar into your coffee. Need sweet’nin’ up. Still livin’ to the hotel, eh? All the comforts of home? Suits you to a tee?”
“The meals are all right,” said Jim, unbending a trifle, “but that’s all you can say.”
“Um! What’s home without a motto over the door? Hain’t met Mis’ Stickney? Course not. Widder woman twice repeated. Machinery runnin’? Um! Got her goin’ quicker ’n folks expected.”
“We hurried things up a bit.”
“To be sure. Never seen sich a woman as the Widder Stickney for house-cleanin’. Best housekeeper in the county. Mill makes a heap of difference in Diversity. Kind of irritatin’ to Lafe Meggs up to the store. Says somebody’s always comin’ in and disturbin’ him to buy somethin’ or other. Calc’lates he’ll have to hire a clerk. Lafe’s ambitions mostly requires a sittin’ posture.”
“How big is this town, Judge?”
“About a dozen people and five hundred folks. Take in the newspaper, Jim?”
“I take a Grand Rapids paper.”
“Take in the Diversity paper, Jim?”
“No.”
“Um! Comes out Thursdays. Int’restin’ readin’ into it sometimes. The Widder Stickney got her second husband on the strength of her cookin’. Calc’late she could git a third with it, but she allows husbands is so fleetin’ and funeral expenses is so high ’twouldn’t hardly pay. Name of the paper is theDiversity Eagle. Business perty good, eh? Keepin’ up brisk?”
“We manage to keep from loafing.”
“To be sure. Loafin’s the leadin’ sport here. Calc’late Dolf Springer’s our champion jest now. Interestin’ piece in the paper this week. Several interestin’ pieces. Don’t take it in, eh? Early riser, hain’t you? See you walkin’ ’fore breakfast.”
Jim wondered if the old justice had any ulterior meaning in this observation. He had arisen early each morning and tramped out into the country. Sometimes he had been close to admitting to himself that this was not wholly for the air and exercise. Indeed, he had wondered if something much more material and human had not been at the root of the matter. There, for instance, was that young woman whom he had encountered on top of the knoll. She walked of mornings, too—and she was an interesting if not attractive individual. She puzzled him. He even went so far as to be vaguely anxious about her, for her state of mind had not appealed to him as one conducive to normal and conventional behavior. He wondered if Zaanan Frame knew of that encounter, or knew of that subsequent meeting—and passing—a week later when Miss Ducharme had come face to face with him at a turn of the road and had gone by with nothing to indicate she was aware of his existence except a scornful flash of her black eyes.
“Somebody was sayin’,” he heard Zaanan observe, “that the Widder Stickney had a spare room she was thinkin’ of rentin’. Yes, sir, if I was goin’ to read theDiversity EagleI figger this week’s issue’d be the one I’d look for. Um! Calc’late Tiffany’s tired of standin’. Have to humor him. Powerful high-spirited boss. Second-floor room on the front, it was. G’-by, Jim.Eagleoffice is next to Lafe Meggs’s store.”
The old man went out, and it seemed as if he creaked in every joint. Jim heard him pass slowly along the hall and out of the door—and wondered what his visit meant. He reviewed the rambling conversation as best he could; found that in spite of himself he was attracted by Zaanan’s personality. But why had the old fellow come? What had he talked about? Why, about the Widow Stickney and her room, and about theDiversity Eagle. Jim was not yet familiar with Zaanan Frame’s methods, but it did seem clear to him that the old justice wanted him to go to board with Mrs. Stickney; wanted him also to read the current issue of theEagle.
That evening Jim procured a copy of theEagle. Its leading article gave the news that Michael Moran had purchased a controlling interest in the Diversity Hardwood Company, and had been elected its president in the place of Henry W. Green, resigned. This was worth while. It was important, for the prosperity of the Ashe Clothespin Company depended on the Diversity Hardwood Company. It was the latter that furnished the birch, beech, and maple from which the clothespins were manufactured. It was with that company that Clothespin Jimmy had negotiated a twenty-year timber contract calling for the delivery in his mill-yard of not less than five millions nor more than ten millions of feet of timber a year. Pursuant to this contract the new mills had been erected. Here was news indeed. What did it signify? What would be its results that touched Jim Ashe? And why had Zaanan Frame wanted him to be apprised—warned—of the event? If Zaanan’s hint to read the paper was of such undoubted value, would not his other suggestion be worth looking into? Jim thought so, and inquired his way to the Widow Stickney’s. She occupied a pleasant, maple-shaded house surrounded by riotous flower-beds and more practical kitchen gardens. It was attractive with the flavor of home. Jim rang the bell.
The result of his call and inspection was that he rented from the widow her second-floor front and arranged to be fed at her table. As he was leaving she hesitated, hemmed, and hawed, as Clothespin Jimmy would have put it, and finally said:
“I got one other boarder. Jest one. Hain’t no objections to that, have you?”
“None whatever, Mrs. Stickney,” said Jim, which was perfectly true. He had neither objections nor curiosity regarding the fact. However, as he walked between the flower-beds to the gate some one turned in and approached him. He looked up, felt himself draw a little sudden breath of surprise, for the individual was Marie Ducharme. Jim knew instantly that she was the other boarder. She passed him, cheeks slightly flushed, eyes straight ahead, without deigning to look at him. He felt a warmth about his ears.
That evening he sat late on the hotel piazza, working on a puzzle.
He could not piece it together. Why had Zaanan Frame wanted him to know of Michael Moran’s new business venture? But, even more difficult of solution, why had Zaanan wanted him to board with the Widow Stickney?
Marie Ducharme insisted on obtruding herself into his puzzlings. It was absurd, he knew, but had she anything to do with the matter?
On the day the mills commenced operating Jim Ashe called for a statement of the company’s condition from Mr. Grierson. As Jim expected, it proved to be disquieting. The facts were that the mills had cost upward of two hundred thousand dollars; there was still owing for machinery and materials some thirty thousand dollars; there was seven thousand dollars cash in the bank. The weekly payroll was over two thousand dollars. Other operating expenses, with the cost of supplies and timber, brought this sum up to five thousand dollars a week—and as yet not a penny’s worth of manufactured product had been turned out or shipped.
“According to this,” Jim said to Mr. Grierson, “we can run a week. Then what?”
“Then,” said Mr. Grierson, his voice dry and rattling like one of the leaves of his ledger, “we’ll have to have some more money.”
“Oh,” said Jim, grimly, “that’s all there is to it, eh? Well, where’ll we get it? Supposing we are able to begin shipments by the end of next week—how soon can we expect returns?”
“Thirty days at the best.”
“And in that thirty days we’ll be spending nearly thirty thousand dollars—which we haven’t got. I have heard of working capital before, but I never comprehended what a pleasant thing it was to have. Where does one get money, Grierson?”
“From the bank.”
“To be sure. I guess I’m beginning to understand what father was talking about when he said he milked the business. That fifty thousand of his would make a fine plug to put in this hole. But that’s gone. If I know father, he took it to make me hustle. His sense of humor works that way. Well, I’ll see what I can puzzle out, Grierson.”
Jim was in a measure prepared to be helmsman of his commercial ship, so far as the manufacturing and selling of his wares were concerned; but when the vessel entered financial waters, with a storm blowing and a tortuous channel to thread, he felt he ought to toot the whistle frantically and signal for a pilot. But there was no pilot to be had. There was nothing for it but to slow down and dodge through the reefs, taking frequent soundings with the lead of good judgment, striving with his eyes to pierce the vexed waters for hidden rocks. In short, the time had arrived to spread the bread of uncertainty with the butter of optimism.
He must have money. Two methods of procuring it presented themselves, but he liked the features of neither of them. The first was to borrow—if possible; the second, to sell stock. Without hesitation he eliminated the latter. He put on his hat, stopped long enough in the outer office to tell Grierson he was going to the bank, and went out.
He handed his card to Mr. Wills, cashier of the institution, and Mr. Wills shook hands with him in the manner that cashiers shake hands with individuals who are to deposit some hundreds of thousands of dollars a year with them.
“Glad to know you, Mr. Ashe. I was wondering when you’d find time to drop in to see us.”
“I hope you’ve got lots of money, now that I am here,” said Jim, with specious confidence.
“Enough to warrant us in locking the vault,” said Mr. Wills. “Anything special we can do for you to-day?”
“Well,” said Jim, “you could lend me a few dollars.”
“Your father said you might be wanting to borrow,” said Mr. Wills. “He had, as you know, of course, a conference with our board this spring, and we stand ready to do what we can for you. We’re a small bank, you know. Some of our directors were against making a loan of any size to a corporation, but Zaanan Frame and Mr. Moran were in favor—which wound up that ball of string. How much will you be wanting?”
“Thirty thousand dollars,” said Jim, half expecting the cashier to jump to his feet and call a strong assistant to escort him to the street.
“That’s just inside the limit. Need it right away?”
“Yes.”
Mr. Wills fumbled in a pigeonhole and passed Jim a note.
“Make this out, sign it as an officer of your company, and put your personal indorsement on the back. It’s a demand note, you observe. We prefer that kind.”
Jim wasn’t clear just what the difference was between that kind and the other. It didn’t matter. He was going to get the money he needed—without an effort. It was a shock to him. Were money matters arranged thus easily? Was money in considerable sums so easy to come by? He signed the note, and was told the amount would be credited to his accounts as of that day.
After he had chatted a moment, and thanked Mr. Wills as profusely as he believed it wise, he turned away. But a sudden recollection stopped him. Mr. Wills had said Zaanan Frame and Mr. Moran had favored the loan. Did you ever eat cherry pie, delicious cherry pie, and suddenly encounter a pit which the cook had overlooked? Jim felt much the same way.
“What Mr. Moran is on your board?” he asked.
Wills looked his astonishment.
“Why, Michael Moran, of course!” he said.
As Jim turned off the road on to the mill lot, a man two inches shorter than he and four inches broader accosted him.
“You’re Mr. Ashe, ain’t you?” the man asked.
Jim nodded and stopped. The man, who wore a calico shirt that, stout as it was, threatened to rip out at the seams when the big muscles played beneath, was an individual whose life had not fallen in places of ease. Work, hard work, had made him. He had triumphed over it. His will and a splendid body had triumphed, until Jim paid the tribute of his admiration to the result of it.
“Got any place for a cant-hook man?”
“I think we can use one in the log-yard. Out of a job?”
“Walked out of it. When I heard Mike Moran was goin’ to run the Diversity Hardwood outfit I quit—sudden.”
Jim waited.
“I worked for him three year back on the South Branch.” The man spat savagely in the dust. “Self-respectin’ lumberjack wouldn’t ’a’ stayed twenty-four hours gittin’ what some of them fellers got. Me, it wasn’t so bad. ‘What was the matter?’ says you. ‘Plenty,’ says I. First, he starts in gittin’ rid of as good a crew as ever stuck their legs under a cook-shanty table, and filled up the woods with Polacks and Italians and Hunkies. Just critters with arms and laigs like folks. Grub was rotten—rotten! Them poor foreigners got it comin’ and goin’. Knocked round, fed spoiled meat—and then cheated out of their pay. Oh, foreigners hain’t the only ones that’s been cheated out of their pay in Michigan camps. I wisht I had what was comin’ to me fair, Mr. Ashe. Why, I knowed two Polacks that come out of Moran’s Camp Three, after workin’ from November till April—and they come out owin’ him eighteen dollars!”
“Now, now,” said Jim.
“I’m tellin’ the truth. Wanigan. Jest robbed off’n ’em. Get a plug of tobacco at the wanigan—charged for six. Like that. And fines. No wonder he’s gittin’ richer ’n hell. Gittin’ out his timber don’t cost him nothin’ to speak of. Men like him is drivin’ real woodsmen out of Michigan. You can go so far with robbin’ an Irishman or a Norwegian or a Nova-Scotian—and then somethin’ busts. But with them lingo-talkin’ foreigners, why there hain’t no fight to ’em. And he’ll do the same here. ’Fore another spring the camps’ll be full of ’em—and him robbin’ ’em. I’ve heard ugly things of Mike Moran. Not dealin’s with men, I mean. I’ve had stories whispered to me by men I believed. And one I know is so. Ask somebody that knows what become of Susie Gilders. I calc’late some girl’s dad or brother’ll be splittin’ Mike Moran with an ax one of these days. But I’m talkin’ too much, Mr. Ashe. Didn’t figger to git off on this rig. How about that job?”
“Report to the superintendent. Tell him I sent you. What’s your name?”
“Tim Bennett.”
“Well, Tim, I don’t know you and you don’t know me, but I’d hate to have you think about me as you do about Moran. I’ll try to see you don’t. These are my mills, and the crew are working for me—but that doesn’t mean any man or girl is to be afraid of me. If anything goes wrong, tell me. Once I wanted to do something besides run a clothespin-mill. I wanted to see if I couldn’t turn in and do something for these Polacks and Hunkies and Italians—something that would change them from being foreigners into Americans. But I couldn’t have my way. But this much I can do—I can see that the folks who work for me get a square deal. You’ll find the superintendent back by the log-slide.”
Tim hesitated a moment, seemed to have something more to say, but to find difficulty saying it. Finally he blurted out: “Say, Mr. Ashe, I b’lieve you and me is goin’ to get on.”
Jim recognized the compliment; it was no small one.
“I hope so, Tim,” he said.
Jim sat down in his chair before his desk and scowled at the wall. Michael Moran—everywhere that name obtruded itself—Michael Moran and Zaanan Frame. The pair of them seemed to impend over the Ashe Clothespin Company like twin thunderclouds, threatening, possessed of destructive potentialities. They had met, conferred with Morton Welliver after that gentlemen had delivered his ultimatum. Had that conference concerned him? Jim believed it had. Just what harm Zaanan Frame was potent to cause, Jim did not know; but Moran—Moran owned the little railroad, the sole outlet for Jim’s wares; he controlled the lumber company from which came Jim’s logs; his voice was preponderating in the bank to which Jim owed thirty thousand dollars.
A thought came to Jim: If he could buy Moran’s logs and pay Moran a profit on them—and then himself manufacture them into clothespins and realize another profit—how great would be Moran’s profit if in his own mills he manufactured clothespins from his own logs! Jim believed that in Moran’s place he would covet the Ashe Clothespin Company. And Moran’s various activities showed him to be an acquisitive individual. But nowhere had Moran manifested an unfriendly spirit; indeed, he had been distinctly friendly in the matter of the loan. What then? In any event, Jim told himself, it would not be time wasted to keep a clear eye on the man and, if possible, to rear in advance defenses against his possible attack.
Presently he got up and went into the outer office, where Grierson and his assistant were making occult entries in black and red ink on the pages of huge books. These tomes, in which were recorded the daily history of business transactions, always affected Jim with a feeling of awe, and secretly he had for Grierson and his young man a profound admiration. Anybody who could make all those entries and add all those figures, and then, a month afterward, have the slightest idea what all the agglomeration was about, was possessed of some divine spark akin to genius!
“Grierson,” said Jim, “have you ever made the acquaintance of the creature known as a demand note?”
“Not personally, I thank Heaven,” Grierson said, piously.
“But you know its habits?”
“You’re joking, Mr. Ashe.” Anything akin to humor was not to be tolerated when it touched a thing so sacred as one of the bits of business impedimenta.
“I’m exceedingly serious. What can you tell me of the habits and personal peculiarities of the thing?”
“A demand note,” said Grierson, with musty gravity, “is a negotiable instrument running for an indefinite period. It differs from a time note in that it may be presented and payment demanded”—he accented the word “demanded” in a manner that Jim thought vindictive—“at any time the holder chooses. Am I clear?”
“Perfectly—and disquietingly. I am to understand that if you give a man a demand note he may drop in on you casually whenever the notion seizes him and make you—er—in the undignified language of the soap salesman, come across? Is that it?”
Mr. Grierson nodded, frowned, peered anxiously at his ledger as if he feared a figure or two might sneak away from him while his attention was distracted.
“Can you say anything cheerful about one of them?” Jim persisted.
“The only cheerful thing about a demand note, Mr. Ashe, is to know you are able to pay it whenever it turns up—which most people are not.”
“That,” said Jim, “is an observation made from great depths of wisdom.”
“I hope, Mr. Ashe, you have not been making any demand paper.”
“Your hope is vain, Grierson. The thing is done. The sword is suspended over my head. I am now speculating on the possibility of certain gentlemen cutting the hair that holds it.”
He went back to his desk again with the intention of boring into the inwardness of the situation, but, strangely, his mind showed a disposition to wander. It skipped offishly away from demand notes and speculations regarding Michael Moran; was drawn again and again where Jim did not want it to go—and where it would not be welcome. Of the latter he was sure. For it was Marie Ducharme who obtruded and elbowed aside more serious matters.
Jim moved to the Widow Stickney’s that night. He wondered how Miss Ducharme would regard his coming. Doubtless it would not decrease the ill will she felt toward him. Doubtless she would regard it as an impertinent intrusion. What did it matter how she regarded it? He said that to himself, but somehow he could not quite convince himself that he said it with all sincerity.
The rural individual, riding for the first time on a descending elevator, experiences a sensation that leads to a fixed preference for stairs. It is a peculiar sensation. It may be reproduced in less degree psychologically. For instance, the boy on his way to the woodshed with his father and a razor-strop knows it; the young man about to announce to her father his ambition to become a son-in-law is acquainted with it. It comes to many people as they approach the unknown, the dreaded, the long-sought-after. It is a mingling of excitement, apprehension, anticipation, and the three of them do not mingle in peace. They seem, indeed, to have a most lively and troublesome time of it in the region known as the pit of the stomach.
As Jim left his room to go down to his first breakfast at the Widow Stickney’s table he experienced an unmistakable attack of it. Marie Ducharme was the cause. Doubtless they would breakfast together. He was a bit apprehensive as to how it would go off. There was a certain amount of curiosity-incited anticipation of a second meeting with her, a second opportunity to glimpse her queer, disturbed, turbulent personality. Let there be no error here—Jim Ashe was not drawn toward Marie Ducharme. Quite the contrary. She was not at all the sort of person who would attract him; and her present frame of mind was not such as to magnetize any healthy young man. But she was a girl; she was a step beyond the ordinary; she had a personality that one could not encounter and escape unaffected. That was all.
He hesitated for a moment in the hall, and then entered the dining-room, where the widow and Marie Ducharme were already at the table.
“Right here, Mr. Ashe,” said the widow; “take this here chair with the arms and the cushion into it. It’ll seem sort of queer to see a man settin’ into it agin. My first used it and my second used it.”
“And you keep it in case it might be needed again,” said Jim, gravely.
The widow shook her head. “’Tain’t nothin’ but a memento no more. Husbands is all right, but enough’s enough. What a body can want of more ’n two is more ’n I can see. Let me make you acquainted with Miss Ducharme, Mr. Ashe.”
Miss Ducharme nodded coldly.
“Cream ’n’ sugar?” asked the widow.
“Some cream, a good deal of sugar, and a little coffee,” said Jim, stealing a look at the young woman. She was stirring her coffee, a process which appeared to require concentration. Jim didn’t blame her for stirring it or for doing anything else which would bring to public attention a hand as graceful and shapely as hers. Her face, beneath a stack of blackest hair, was expressionless.
“Mr. Ashe hain’t goin’ to bite you, Marie,” said the widow, with a note of exasperation in her voice. Jim was glad he had not taken a swallow of coffee, for he could not have been responsible for consequences.
Miss Ducharme raised her eyes slowly, looked for an instant into Jim’s eyes. “Nobody’s going to bite me if I can help it,” she said.
“Mrs. Stickney is right,” said Jim, “I’m not vicious. I almost never bite strangers. Still, I might wear a muzzle if it would help matters.”
Miss Ducharme made no reply save a faint movement of her shoulders—inherited from an ancestor who had served Frontenac. She finished her coffee and toast and egg slowly, arose silently, and left the room. The widow looked after her a moment with compressed lips.
“Sometimes,” she said, “she’s that cantankerous my hand fairly itches to come against her ear. Seems she might ’a’ acted a leetle prettier, bein’s you’re a stranger and this is your first meal.”
“Don’t let it worry you, Mrs. Stickney.”
“Worry me! Huh! ’Tain’t worry that ails me, it’s bein’ that provoked with her. She’s lived with me since her folks died. She was fifteen then. I couldn’t make her out as a child and a Philadelphy lawyer couldn’t make her out as a woman. She’s been gittin’ worse. Marie’s a good girl, Mr. Ashe—better ’n a lot of these mealy-mouthed, bowin’-and-scrapin’ ones—and Lord knows she’s smarter. Too dum smart, I call her, for her own good. But she’s queer. Kind of knurly. She don’t appear to like folks, somehow.”
“Possibly, Mrs. Stickney, the trouble is that she doesn’t like herself.”
“She gits on my mind. Sometimes I’m afeard she’s goin’ to mess up what chances of happiness she’s got. She sets and thinks too much, and some of the things she says would fair shock you out of your shoes. If I thought she meant ’em, old as she is I’d take her acrost my knee and see if a slipper wouldn’t change her point of view some.”
“Anyhow, I’ll promise not to quarrel with her, Mrs. Stickney,” said Jim, rising. He felt it was not altogether ethical to discuss Miss Ducharme thus freely. The widow seemed to have no such scruples. Indeed, she was willing at all times and seasons to discuss anybody, absent or present, and to put into frank and expressive terms her thoughts concerning them. The widow was no gossip, no backbiter, but a woman of opinions and a nimble tongue undeterred by fear or favor.
“A husband’s what she needs,” said she. “One with enough disposition to go so far’s to lay his hand on her if she went past his patience. I mind my first husband shakin’ me once. I was young, then, with notions. Dun’no’s anythin’ ever done me so much good. ’Tain’t considered proper no more—but if there was more shakin’s there’d be fewer divorcin’s.”
“Perhaps our men are deteriorating under the influences of modern life,” Jim suggested, with a twinkle in his eye. “The headship of the family is passing to the other sex.”
“Then men ought to be up and doin’ somethin’ about it,” said the widow. “I wouldn’t give shucks for a man that let a woman run him. All this here talk about emancipatin’ wimmin makes me sick to my stummick. Wimmin don’t need emancipatin’. What they need is bossin’. I’ve been a woman consid’able of a spell and I calc’late I ought to know.”
“I think my grandmother would agree with you if she were living.”
“Of course. I’m grandmother to six. My idee is that wimmin don’t git settled and sensible till they turn sixty.”
“I’m in favor of giving the vote to all grandmothers.”
“It would fetch consid’able sense into elections,” said the widow. “Don’t hurry off. I like to talk—maybe you’ve noticed it.”
“And enjoyed it,” said Jim, passing through the door.
Miss Ducharme was putting on her hat in the hall. Jim’s first thought was to pass on without pause; his second and better thought was to parley.
“I’m waving a flag of truce, Miss Ducharme,” he said. “Can’t we declare an armistice for ten minutes to bury our dead?”
“I have no war with you,” she replied, with no interest. “I simply don’t like you. Why should we talk about it?”
“There’ll be no trouble on that score,” said Jim, smiling. He rather enjoyed her acerbity. “You see, I’m not exactly fond of you. But we’re living under the same roof and eating at the same table. If we could agree on a truce or a pretense that we are not distasteful to each other—merely while we’re in the house—it might make Mrs. Stickney’s life a bit more joyous. I assure you that if I had known you lived here I shouldn’t have intruded.”
“Mrs. Stickney has a right to take whatever boarders she chooses.”
“I’m not asking you to be friends—” Jim stopped. He was conscious of that feeling of sudden determination, of that urge to quick action which had come upon him several times since his arrival in Diversity, of that spirit which had earned for him among his workmen the name of Sudden Jim. So he cut off his sentence and started another.
“I’m going to be your friend, whether you like it or not. Possibly I shall even like you. You seem to need friends, if what you said to me the other day is an indication of what is really going on inside you. The matter is out of your hands. You said absurd things; things dangerous for any young woman to say, even if she knows in her heart they’re ridiculous.”
“They were not absurd. I meant them. You had no business to be there to hear—to know. You let me talk when I was unstrung. You spied—it amounted to that.”
“Let it stand that way. I do know and I’m going to meddle. You hate Diversity because it isn’t New York City. You talk recklessly to a stranger. The sum of the matter is that you are steering for a big unpleasantness. If you don’t like things as they are, what is the sense of putting in your time making them worse? Pretty soon you’ll talk and think and gloom yourself into doing something that’ll smash the china. So I’m going to meddle. Of course I don’t know you, and I haven’t any personal interest in you. But I’m interested in you as a sociological specimen. As such I’m going to be polite to you, and as entertaining as possible while we’re at Mrs. Stickney’s table. I shall expect you to be humanly polite to me. Do you understand?”
She looked at him queerly, almost apprehensively. When she replied her voice was low, not cold, not friendly. Jim’s will had encountered her will and been the stronger.
“Yes,” she said.
“You’ll be reasonably decent—so Mrs. Stickney won’t lose her appetite?”
“Yes. In the house. But nowhere else. And I shall hate you—hate you.”
“That’s enough for a beginning.”
“And don’t you dare to watch me. Don’t dare to pry into my affairs. Don’t dare to interfere with me in any way.”
“Miss Ducharme, if you fell into the river it would be only human for me to fish you out. Drowning isn’t the worst thing there is. Folks who would jump into the water after you would stand by and let trouble come to you which would make you wish you could drown. A man has the right to interfere. Humanity gives it to him. It’s silly to think I have the right to save your life from a physical danger, but haven’t the right to save you from the other kind. You say it’s none of my business. It is my business. What threatens any human being is the business of every other human being, if he weren’t too lazy or too hidebound or too conventional to admit it. You have brains—or you wouldn’t be in the state of mind you are. You know logic when you meet it face to face—and that was logic. The trouble with you is ambition that has fermented in the can.”
“You are a bumptious young man,” she said, hotly. “You’re full of school-book theories. What do you know about a woman? About her problems? What do you know about anything? You haven’t lived yet. I’m a dozen years older than you—in knowing what the world is. You talked idealistic nonsense the other day about the good there is in the world; you’re talking idealistic nonsense to-day. You’re a cub altruist. What you think is humanitarianism is merely impertinence. Altruism is just a word in the dictionary.”
“I knew you had brains,” said Jim, “and I’ll bet you disagree with Mrs. Stickney about woman’s sphere. She says every woman ought to be bossed by a man—and shouldn’t be allowed the vote till she’s a grandmother.”
“I don’t agree. A woman is an individual, complete—she needs no man for a complement. Her abilities are as great, her potentialities as strong, She has the right to own herself, to guard herself, to reach out for the life she wants as a man does. Because her risk in life is greater she has the right to more than equality; she has the right to special privilege and special protection. She has the right to demand that she be put in a condition where she can protect her treasures, material, physical, spiritual. And how can she do it as things are? Less than half the world—in trousers—holds the majority in captivity, exercising the rights of conquerors. You make laws to bind us. Men make laws respecting the peculiar problems of women—when men know less of women and their problems than they do of the mound-builders. We don’t ask to make your laws—only men can make laws for men; but we do demand to make our own laws. We demand that weapons be placed in our hands for our own defense. With some of the theories I do not agree, but I do insist that women should not be left—in the condition they are now—as the women of a sacked city, at the mercy of the conquerors.”
“You have thought, haven’t you? Perhaps not altogether healthily, but keenly. Dinner-table conversations won’t be trite.”
“Thought! What has there been to do in Diversity but think? And the more I think, the more I comprehend, the worse the handcuffs cut into my wrists. Some day it will become unendurable.”
“And then,” Jim said, “I shall jump into the water after you. We’ll take altruism out of the dictionary for that one time, anyhow.”
She said nothing, moved toward the door.
“Our agreement is sealed?” he asked. “We are to act toward each other like ordinarily polite human beings while we are in the house?”
“Yes,” she said over her shoulder.
“Are we to shake hands on it?”
“No,” she said, sharply, and went out, carrying herself lightly, with splendid poise, eye-delighting grace.
Jim felt a tinge of regret that her face was not lovely. With the intellect that was hers, he thought gravely, with her beauty of line and motion, beauty of face would have made her a miracle. But she was no miracle. She was a small, over-burdened, vainly protesting girl who had fought her way alone to such ideals as she possessed. With her will she thought she had molded her own soul. She did not know that souls are never subject to finite processes; she did not know that each soul is a single drop from the great ocean of Divinity, coming to us in such purity as the great ocean possesses, to be made more pure or to be defiled by our acts—but never to be altered by our wills. One day would come when she would call up her soul before her and know it as she did not know it now.
Jim’s final thought on the matter was that Marie was not a modern woman, not an advanced woman, but a primitive woman, an atavism, fighting as her remotest mother must have fought for the very right to be.