How fortunate I was in my judges or my jury of two--a fond woman
and a plain man of common-sense! As our lives have been so bound
with theirs, I must reveal the man more fully here.
Mr. MacDonald was widely known among that class of corporations
that sought knowledge of the law and not opinions as to how it
might be corrupted. They came to him to carry their cases through
the courts, and not through the legislatures via the lobby.
Therefore, he was not what is commonly called a corporation lawyer.
He never drew bills designed to conceal franchise grabs or tax
evasions, or crooked contracts with dummies in subsidiary
corporations organized to bleed a mother concern of its profits.
Some laws not on the books governed him in such matters, so that he
never became an accomplice in these forms of thievery. He did more
than pray "lead us not into temptation"; he kept both of his keen
eyes open to make sure that he did not fall into it, and when he
found that he had fallen, he quickly made every effort to extricate
himself. This meant that he turned away volumes of business which
would have brought large returns, but he would not have his office
fouled by this stream of corruption any more than he would seek
health in a sewer. When these degenerate concerns were admitted to
his office, they came as penitents seeking reformation. His regular
clients were the corporations who had come to take his view, that a
big business must be laid on broad and deep foundations of
integrity all-around; that all compromises with blackmailing
legislatures are but makeshifts; that the thing to seek is justice,
not only for themselves, but with a greater zeal for the people
whose resources they use. The whole solution of our economic
problems, in the mind of this simple student of the law--including
its ninety per cent. of human nature--lay in the corporations
training their lawyers upon themselves as their most unmerciful
critics--as conscience, the censor, lays down the laws which every
strong individual must follow or meet his doom in ruin. The
underlying principles of the thing involving millions were as
simple in his mind as the obligation to pay his washerwoman, if he
were to maintain his self-respect. The officers and directors of a
corporation, he believed, could no more successfully cheat the
State of its just taxes, or rob the stockholders by paying them a
small profit on their holdings while draining the earnings of the
concern with their subsidiary National Packing & Transportation
Companies, United States Terminal Companies and American Warehouse
& Bonding Corporations, without in the end reaping the reward of
their crimes. Mr. MacDonald would no more give his consent to the
swindling of innocent stockholders by their trustees, than he would
rob an apple-stand. He had that rare discernment so seldom found
now among big business men and their lawyer followers--he could see
the wrong involved in the stealing of a million dollars and would
gladly have aided in a movement to amend the penal code so as to
prevent it, for he believed it possible for law to bring within the
scope of its crushing penalties the audacity of these modern
Captain Kidds. When he read the formal advertisement of a great
industrial monopoly declaring a dividend of a few per cent, per
annum basis on a lake of water owned by "outsiders," he thought of
the beautifully worded contracts made between the officers of the
concern, the "insiders," and their dummies, in the dozen or so
parasitic companies whose stock was nearly all in their own hands,
and paid from twenty to forty and even a hundred per cent, on the
investment in unadvertised dividends. He thought of this and
hundreds of other forms of legalized theft practiced by these men
of church standing, who made it a point never to engage in petit
larceny. They preferred to steal millions and keep on the safe
side. They divided up the "swag" in the office of the American
Transportation and Terminal Company, organized solely for that
respectable purpose. It had a fine name, but the Bowery thieves
would recognize it as a "fence." John MacDonald used to say: "A
corporation is not known by the companies it keeps."
For five years Gabrielle Tescheron had advanced under the guidance
of this simple, wise and good man, so that at the time of our story
she had been well grounded in her profession, in its philosophy, in
the routine of its office practice, and to some extent in the
knowledge of human nature its successful followers must command.
The long rows of sheepskin-bound books in the office library were
less formidable; the grind of detail was no longer an obstacle to
her ambition, which nerved her onward to the higher slopes of
professional occupation, for she now had reliable subordinates
trained according to the MacDonald system of thoroughness to
complete for her the irksome tasks. Mixed up as the business was in
corporation matters, it had much to look after that had fallen to
it through legal processes, but which, of itself was pure business
management and far away from the law. There were receiverships, and
fortunate was the weak-kneed concern that fell into John
MacDonald's hands; it generally meant new life and success for a
dying venture. He worked no magic, but he applied a lot of
common-sense where it had been scarce before, so that the results
seemed much as if a fairy in finance had touched the difficult
problems with a mystic wand. It was, however, the effect of truth
entering where promotors had held sway before, or where addle-pated
sons of constructive fathers, now departed, had been trying to make
the business go on what they knew of actresses and automobiles.
These concerns did so well under the receivership that when they
began business anew, John MacDonald was generally engaged to remain
in control of the management. If he found the right man in the
shop--the fellow who might have saved it--or could put his finger
on such a man elsewhere, he would assume the task with that man in
charge under him. Concerns that were tottering to a fall through
bad management naturally drifted into his office before the worst
happened, and engaged him to save their corporate lives by his
superior executive ability. This he would do also if he could find
his man. As a lawyer, he had less regard for the law's power to
effect transformations than a layman, and a higher conception of
the value of good men. While the ignoramuses at the head of the
capital and labor trusts were for leveling all the men in our big
business concerns, MacDonald continued to have faith in strong
individuals.
The effect of close relationship with this man was to gain
strength. Gabrielle had studied his methods until they became her
own. As I stood there before them, I did not know them as I do now.
MacDonald's fame I knew, and that tended to frighten me. It should
have given me confidence, for John MacDonald was what I call an
"elemental man." He kept close to the earth--the simples of the
world, he dealt in. It may appear from what I have said that he was
loaded down with responsibilities and care; then I have not made it
clear that the exercise of these executive gifts was chiefly to
secure leisure and the opportunity for relaxation--a most important
thing in the MacDonald philosophy. He and his staff worked hard
that they might have time to play, and with short hours and good
pay they came near to having the right proportions of labor and
leisure to keep men and women sound in health and contented with
the world. Therefore, there were not many employed in his office.
Why, down in one of the city departments so familiar to Jim and me,
the same volume of business would have required ten times as many
employes, and at least thirty different systems.
During his leisure, which John MacDonald planned to maintain
against all comers, and the on-rush of business, he practiced the
art of relaxation; he had formed a habit of returning to the simple
from confusing contact with the complex, and he practiced it
largely in his home, with his wife and children. Lincoln is the
best-known master of this art, necessary to maintain the
equilibrium of a busy man, and keep him fresh, sane, sociable and
interestingly boyish.
MacDonald had gone into the thick of the world's strife, and
through the ordeal had shielded himself from its poisoned arrows of
ambition. At a board meeting, it was said of John MacDonald, that
when the three minutes of real business were over and his
associates then began to discuss matters in the domain of
irrelevancies, he resolved into smiles and found somebody to crack
a joke with. He figured that about a third of his available time
was given to actual work, and the rest to play, because his
colleagues had so much ground to cover without reaching anywhere.
There were days when he worked a full sixteen hours, but they were
few, and he was always alone. On the days he had to associate with
talking business men, he made up for these busy days by relaxing at
a more rapid pace in a revel of bracing fun. I never knew a man who
understood so thoroughly how to live and succeed, because it seemed
to me he knew how to discount everything unnecessary, so that he
might take the time others gave to straining their nerves to save
his.
I suppose the character of Gabrielle Tescheron might have yielded
to the unstable influences of her home, where her impulsive and
irascible father sought to be an influential factor, were it not
for the counteracting effect of the day's associations in that calm
realm of business activity, where so much of the brain-work of vast
industrial enterprises was conducted as noiselessly as the
movements of one of those powerful machines that run in an oil
bath. I do not say that she would not have been superior to her
home environment without her fortunate associations down-town. I
give the business small credit, for our superior jewels are
intrinsically precious before the artisan gives the polish by which
we more often make our comparisons. But there can be no question
that she worked among associations which strengthened and
emphasized all her admirable qualities and placed her above the
petty things that annoyed her fretful father and seemed like
mountains to his magnifying eyes.
These, then, were Hosley's judges.
"Miss Tescheron, I come to right a great wrong, for which I am
wholly responsible; will you hear me?" I asked as softly and
politely as the meekest penitent ever tutored for the book agent's
business.
"I have no desire to hear you," she answered firmly, but with a
slight nervousness betraying the deep interest she denied.
"I trust you will be persuaded to at least hear me, and then--"
"But there is nothing you can say, as the subject I know you wish
to allude to is closed. Please do not refer to it." It was a
woman's "No."
Mr. MacDonald tilted back his chair and eyed me closely, but not
discouragingly.
"You are supposed to deal in justice here, are you not, Miss
Tescheron?" I continued, not heeding her frigid, uninviting air. I
had planned to deal tenderly with her wound, but soon realized that
my sympathetic beginning had proved more irritating than bluntness;
accordingly I introduced the spice of severity in tone in
equivalent degree as an experiment, and as I proceeded I noted the
interest of John MacDonald increasingly reflected in the features
of his pupil.
"Justice demands that I be heard. Unfortunately, I deserve nothing
here, for I have done about all a fool could reasonably be expected
to do to upset my own and others' plans. And now I demand but a few
minutes of your time to square the account. My point is that every
dog has his day. I shall have had mine as a meddler in the affairs
of my friend when I am through here. James Hosley, for whom I
appear, is charged with something by somebody, he doesn't know what
or by whom, and he was convicted by your father, and the conviction
has finally been sustained on appeal to you. As you alone exercise
the pardoning power, I come before you to-day to have the case
reopened for the presentation of new evidence. Would it not seem
ridiculous to blast your lives or even to upset the plans of the
caterer now forming for the great event next Wednesday, if on the
morning following that date we should read in the papers the true
story of this affair in place of the usual formal wedding notice?
Would it not seem cruel to have it published that jealousy, founded
on love-letters the man never wrote, turned the woman from him at
the very altar? Yes, he never wrote a line of that gush--that silly
drivel--it was a joke; but it was as nothing to the culmination of
the villainy of those detectives who have swindled your father, for
it now threatens to ruin two lives."
Briefly I ran over the account of our trip to farther Mount Vernon,
and of the effect of the third degree's pressure on Jim.
Mr. MacDonald relaxed control of his dignity, and burst into a
hearty laugh. Gabrielle blushed deeply and faltered until I
proceeded a few sentences farther.
"Yes, Jim's old love-letters that I wrote for literary exercise
years ago, failed to impress the girls, who returned them. At the
fire they proved to be fireproof, and fell through the floor. The
sneaking detectives found them and brought them to me. Jim is now
at my room, completely ignorant of the charges against him, poor
abandoned wretch!"
I then subsided and reviewed carefully all the particulars,
concluding with the statement:
"I submit to your honors that there is no getting around my
proposition that every dog has his day."
As I closed, Gabrielle hastily withdrew. Her face told the story.
She passed out, my card tightly held in her hand. I knew I had won
the verdict.
Mr. MacDonald chatted with me for a few minutes, and thanked me for
my promptness in sending that telegram the night before, for
without it the postponement of the wedding would have revealed an
absurd situation and held us all up to public ridicule.
"I liked the way you put this thing," said he, as we parted. "Let
me see you again."
I now figure that the cash I paid Obreeon I would have won back at
that interview a good hundredfold, in view of what MacDonald has
done for me since, had there been no other developments.