A word about Max Ingolby.
He was the second son of four sons, with a father who had been a
failure; but with a mother of imagination and great natural strength
of brain, yet whose life had been so harried in bringing up a family on
nothing at all, that there only emerged from her possibilities a great
will to do the impossible things. From her had come the spirit which
would not be denied.
In his boyhood Max could not have those things which lads
prize--fishing-rods, cricket-bats and sleds, and all such things; but
he could take most prizes at school open to competition; he could win in
the running-jump, the high-jump, and the five hundred yards’ race; and
he could organize a picnic, or the sports of the school or town--at
no cost to himself. His finance in even this limited field had been
brilliant. Other people paid, and he did the work; and he did it with
such ease that the others intriguing to crowd him out, suffered failure
and came to him in the end to put things right.
He became the village doctor’s assistant and dispenser at seventeen
and induced his master to start a drug-store. He made the drug-store a
success within two years, and meanwhile he studied Latin and Greek
and mathematics in every spare hour he had--getting up at five in the
morning, and doing as much before breakfast as others did in a whole
day. His doctor loved him and helped him; a venerable Archdeacon, an
Oxford graduate, gave him many hours of coaching, and he went to the
University with three scholarships. These were sufficient to carry him
through in three years, and there was enough profit-sharing from the
drug-business he had founded on terms to shelter his mother and his
younger brothers, while he took honours at the University.
There he organized all that students organize, and was called in at last
by the Bursar of his college to reorganize the commissariat, which he
did with such success that the college saved five thousand dollars a
year. He had genius, the college people said, and after he had taken
his degree with honours in classics and mathematics they offered him a
professorship at two thousand dollars a year.
He laughed ironically, but yet with satisfaction, when the professorship
was offered. It was all so different from what was in his mind for
the future. As he looked out of the oriel window in the sweet gothic
building, to the green grass and the maples and elms which made the
college grounds like an old-world park, he had a vision of himself
permanently in these surroundings of refinement growing venerable with
years, seeing pass under his influence thousands of young men directed,
developed and inspired by him.
He had, however, shaken himself free of this modest vision. He knew
that such a life would act like a narcotic to his real individuality.
He thirsted for contest, for the control of brain and will; he wanted
to construct; he was filled with the idea of simplifying things, of
economizing strength; he saw how futile was much competition, and how
the big brain could command and control with ease, wasting no force,
saving labour, making the things controlled bigger and better.
So it came that his face was seen no more in the oriel window. With
a mere handful of dollars, and some debts, he left the world of
scholarship and superior pedagogy, and went where the head offices of
railways were. Railways were the symbol of progress in his mind. The
railhead was the advance post of civilization. It was like Cortez and
his Conquistadores overhauling and appropriating the treasures of long
generations. So where should he go if not to the Railway?
His first act, when he got to his feet inside the offices of the
President of a big railway, was to show the great man how two “outside”
proposed lines could be made one, and then further merged into the
company controlled by the millionaire in whose office he sat. He got his
chance by his very audacity--the President liked audacity. In attempting
this merger, however, he had his first failure, but he showed that he
could think for himself, and he was made increasingly responsible. After
a few years of notable service, he was offered the task of building a
branch line of railway from Lebanon and Manitou north, and northwest,
and on to the Coast; and he had accepted it, at the same time planning
to merge certain outside lines competing with that which he had in hand.
For over four years he worked night and day, steadily advancing towards
his goal, breaking down opposition, manoeuvring, conciliating, fighting.
Most men loved his whimsical turn of mind, even those who were the
agents of the financial clique which had fought him in their efforts
to get control of the commercial, industrial, transport and banking
resources of the junction city of Lebanon. In the days when vast markets
would be established for Canadian wheat in Shanghai and Tokio, then
these two towns of Manitou and Lebanon on the Sagalac would be like the
swivel to the organization of trade of a continent.
Ingolby had worked with this end in view. In doing so he had tried to
get what he wanted without trickery; to reach his goal by playing the
game according to the rules, and this policy nonplussed his rivals and
associates. They expected secret moves, and he laid his cards on the
table. Sharp, quick, resolute and ruthless he was, however, if he knew
that he was being tricked. Then he struck, and struck hard. The war of
business was war and not “gollyfoxing,” as he said. Selfish, stubborn
and self-centred he was in much, but he had great joy in the natural and
sincere, and he had a passionate love of Nature. To him the flat
prairie was never ugly. Its very monotony had its own individuality.
The Sagalac, even when muddy, had its own deep interest, and when it was
full of logs drifting down to the sawmills, for which he had found the
money by interesting capitalists in the East, he sniffed the stinging
smell of the pines with elation. As the great saws in the mills, for
which he had secured the capital, throwing off the spray of mangled
wood, hummed and buzzed and sang, his mouth twisted in the droll smile
it always wore when he talked with such as Jowett and Osterhaut, whose
idiosyncrasies were like a meal to him; as he described it once to some
of the big men from the East who had been behind his schemes, yet who
cavilled at his ways. He was never diverted from his course by such men,
and while he was loyal to those who had backed him, he vowed that he
would be independent of these wooden souls in the end. They and the
great bankers behind them were for monopoly; he was for organization and
for economic prudence. So far they were necessary to all he did; but it
was his intention to shake himself free of all monopoly in good time.
One or two of his colleagues saw the drift of his policy and would have
thrown him over if they could have replaced him by a man as capable, who
would, at the time, consent to grow rich on their terms.
They could not understand a man who would stand for a half-hour watching
a sunset, or a morning sky dappled with all the colours that shake from
a prism; they were suspicious of a business-mind which could gloat over
the light falling on snow-peaked mountains, while it planned a great
bridge across a gorge in the same hour; of a man who would quote a verse
of poetry while a flock of wild pigeons went whirring down a pine-girt
valley in the shimmer of the sun.
On the occasion when he had quoted a verse of poetry to them, one of
them said to him with a sidelong glance: “You seem to be dead-struck on
Nature, Ingolby.”
To that, with a sly quirk of the mouth, and meaning to mystify his
wooden-headed questioner still more, he answered: “Dead-struck?
Dead-drunk, you mean. I’m a Nature’s dipsomaniac--as you can see,” he
added with a sly note of irony.
Then instantly he had drawn the little circle of experts into a
discussion upon technical questions of railway-building and finance,
which made demands upon all their resources and knowledge. In that
conference he gave especial attention to the snub-souled financier who
had sneered at his love of Nature. He tied his critic up in knots of
self-assertion and bad logic which presently he deftly, deliberately and
skilfully untied, to the delight of all the group.
“He’s got as much in his ten years in the business as we’ve got out
of half a life-time,” said the chief of his admirers. This was the
President who had first welcomed him into business, and introduced him
to his colleagues in enterprise.
“I shouldn’t be surprised if the belt flew off the wheel some day,”
savagely said Ingolby’s snub-souled critic, whose enmity was held in
check by the fact that on Ingolby, for the moment, depended the safety
of the hard cash he had invested.
But the qualities which alienated an expert here and there caught the
imagination of the pioneer spirits of Lebanon. Except those who,
for financial reasons, were opposed to him, and must therefore pit
themselves against him, as the representatives of bigger forces behind
them, he was a leader of whom Lebanon was combatively proud. At last he
came to the point where his merger was practically accomplished, and a
problem arising out of it had to be solved. It was a problem which taxed
every quality of an able mind. The situation had at last become acute,
and Time, the solvent of most complications, had not quite eased the
strain. Indeed, on the day that Fleda Druse had made her journey down
the Carillon Rapids, Time’s influence had not availed. So he had gone
fishing, with millions at stake--to the despair of those who were
risking all on his skill and judgment.
But that was Ingolby. Thinking was the essence of his business, not
Time. As fishing was the friend of thinking, therefore he fished in
Seely’s Eddy, saw Fleda Druse run the Carillon Rapids, saved her from
drowning, and would have brought her in pride and peace to her own home,
but that she decreed otherwise.