The winter wore away. Bob dragged himself out of bed every morning at
half-past six, hurried through a breakfast, caught a car--and hoped that
the bridge would be closed. Otherwise he would be late at the office,
which would earn him Harvey's marked disapproval. Bob could not see that
it mattered much whether he was late or not. Generally he had nothing
whatever to do for an hour or so. At noon he ate disconsolately at a
cheap saloon restaurant. At five he was free to go out among his own
kind--with always the thought before him of the alarm clock the
following morning.
One day he sat by the window, his clean, square chin in his hand, his
eyes lost in abstraction. As he looked, the winter murk parted
noiselessly, as though the effect were prearranged; a blue sky shone
through on a glint of bluer water; and, wonder of wonders, there through
the grimy dirty roar of Adams Street a single, joyful robin note flew up
to him.
At once a great homesickness overpowered him. He could see plainly the
half-sodden grass of the campus, the budding trees, the red "gym"
building, and the crowd knocking up flies. In a little while the shot
putters and jumpers would be out in their sweaters. Out at Regents'
Field the runners were getting into shape. Bob could almost hear the
creak of the rollers smoothing out the tennis courts; he could almost
recognize the voices of the fellows perching about, smell the fragrant
reek of their pipes, savour the sweet spring breeze. The library clock
boomed four times, then clanged the hour. A rush of feet from all the
recitation rooms followed as a sequence, the opening of doors, the
murmur of voices, occasionally a shout. Over it sounded the sharp,
half-petulant advice of the coaches and the little trainer to the
athletes. It was getting dusk. The campus was emptying. Through the
trees shone lights. And Bob looked up, as he had so often done before,
to see the wonder of the great dome against the afterglow of sunset.
Harvey was examining him with some curiosity.
"Copied those camp reports?" he inquired.
Bob glanced hastily at the clock. He had been dreaming over an hour.
A little later Fox came in; and a little after that Harvey returned
bringing in his hand the copies of the camp reports, but instead of
taking them directly to Bob for correction, as had been his habit, he
laid them before Fox. The latter picked them up and examined them. In a
moment he dropped them on his desk.
"Do you mean to tell me," he demanded of Harvey, "that _seventeen_ only
ran ten thousand? Why, it's preposterous! Saw it myself. It has a
half-million on it, if there's a stick. Let's see Parsons's letter."
While Harvey was gone, Fox read further in the copy.
"See here, Harvey," he cried, "something's dead wrong. We never cut all
this hemlock. Why, hemlock's 'way down."
Harvey laid the original on the desk. After a second Fox's face cleared.
"Why, this is all right. There were 480,000 on _seventeen_. And that
hemlock seems to have got in the wrong column. You want to be a little
more careful, Jim. Never knew that to happen before. Weren't out with
the boys last night, were you?"
But Harvey refused to respond to frivolity.
"It's never happened before because I never let it happen before," he
replied stiffly. "There have been mistakes like that, and worse, in
almost every report we've filed. I've cut them out. Now, Mr. Fox, I
don't have much to say, but I'd rather do a thing myself than do it over
after somebody else. We've got a good deal to keep track of in this
office, as you know, without having to go over everybody else's work
too."
"H'm," said Fox, thoughtfully. Then after a moment, "I'll see about it."
Harvey went back to the outer office, and Fox turned at once to Bob.
"Well, how is it?" he asked. "How did it happen?"
"I don't know," replied Bob. "I'm trying, Mr. Fox. Don't think it isn't
that. But it's new to me, and I can't seem to get the hang of it right
away."
"I see. How long you been here?"
"A little over four months."
Fox swung back in his chair leisurely.
"You must see you're not fair to Harvey," he announced. "That man
carries the details of four businesses in his head, he practically does
the clerical work for them all, and he never seems to hurry. Also, he
can put his hand without hesitation on any one of these documents," he
waved his hand about the room. "I can't."
He stopped to light the stub of a long-extinct cigar.
"I can't make it hard for that sort of man. So I guess we'll have to
take you out of the office. Still, I promised Welton to give you a good
try-out. Then, too, I'm not satisfied in my own mind. I can see you are
trying. Either you're a damn fool or this college education racket has
had the same effect on you as on most other young cubs. If you're the
son of your father, you can't be entirely a damn fool. If it's the
college education, that will probably wear off in time. Anyhow, I think
I'll take you up to the mill. You can try the office there. Collins is
easy to get on with, and of course there isn't the same responsibility
there."
In the buffeting of humiliation Bob could not avoid a fleeting inner
smile over this last remark. Responsibility! In this sleepy, quiet
backwater of a tenth-floor office, full of infinite little statistics
that led nowhere, that came to no conclusion except to be engulfed in
dark files with hundreds of their own kind, aimless, useless, annoying
as so many gadflies! Then he set his face for the further remarks.
"Navigation will open this week," Fox's incisive tones went on, "and our
hold-overs will be moved now. It will be busy there. We shall take the
eight o'clock train to-night." He glanced sharply at Bob's lean, set
face. "I assume you'll go?"
Bob was remembering certain trying afternoons on the field when as
captain, and later as coach, he had told some very high-spirited boys
what he considered some wholesome truths. He was remembering the various
ways in which they had taken his remarks.
"Yes, sir," he replied.
"Well, you can go home now and pack up," said Fox. "Jim!" he shot out in
his penetrating voice; then to Harvey, "Make out Orde's check."
Bob closed his desk, and went into the outer office to receive his
check. Harvey handed it to him without comment, and at once turned back
to his books. Bob stood irresolute a moment, then turned away without
farewell.
But Archie followed him into the hall.
"I'm mighty sorry, old man," he whispered, furtively. "Did you get the
G.B.?"
"I'm going up to the mill office," replied Bob.
"Oh!" the other commiserated him. Then with an effort to see the best
side, "Still you could hardly expect to jump right into the head office
at first. I didn't much think you could hold down a job here. You see
there's too much doing here. Well, good-bye. Good luck to you, old man."
There it was again, the insistence on the responsibility, the activity,
the importance of that sleepy, stuffy little office with its two men at
work, its leisure, its aimlessness. On his way to the car-line Bob
stopped to look in at an open door. A dozen men were jumping truck loads
of boxes here and there. Another man in a peaked cap and a silesia coat,
with a pencil behind his ear and a manifold book sticking out of his
pocket shouted orders, consulted a long list, marked boxes and scribbled
in a shipping book. Dim in the background huge freight elevators rose
and fell, burdened with the mass of indeterminate things. Truck horses,
great as elephants, magnificently harnessed with brass ornaments, drew
drays, big enough to carry a small house, to the loading platform where
they were quickly laden and sent away. From an opened upper window came
the busy click of many typewriters. Order in apparent confusion, immense
activity at a white heat, great movement, the clanging of the wheels of
commerce, the apparition and embodiment of restless industry--these
appeared and vanished, darted in and out, were plain to be seen and were
vague through the murk and gloom. Bob glanced up at the emblazoned sign.
He read the firm's name of well-known wholesale grocers. As he crossed
the bridge and proceeded out Lincoln Park Boulevard two figures rose to
him and stood side by side. One was the shipping clerk in his peaked cap
and silesia coat, hurried, busy, commanding, full of responsibility; the
other was Harvey, with his round, black skull cap, his great, gold-bowed
spectacles, entering minutely, painstakingly, deliberately, his neat
little figures in a neat, large book.