Ned Cornet kept well within the speed laws on his way back to his
father’s beautiful home on Queen Anne Hill. He was none too well pleased
with himself, and his thoughts were busy. There would be some sort of a
scene with Godfrey Cornet, the gray man whose self-amassed wealth would
ultimately settle for the damages to the “jitney” and the affront to the
municipality,—perhaps only a frown, a moment’s coldness about the lips,
but a scene nevertheless. He looked forward to it with great
displeasure.
It was a curious thing that lately he had begun to feel vague
embarrassment and discomfiture in his father’s presence. He had been
finding it a comfort to avoid him, to go to his club on the evenings his
father spent at home, and especially to shun intimate conversation with
him. Ned didn’t know just why this was true; perhaps he had never paused
to think about it before. He simply felt more at ease away from his
father, more free to go his own way. Some way, the very look on the gray
face was a reproach.
No one could look at Godfrey Cornet and doubt that he was the veteran of
many wars. The battles he had fought had been those of economic stress,
but they had scarred him none the less. His face was written over, like
an ancient scroll, with deep, dark lines, and every one marked him as
the fighter he was.
Every one of his fine features told the same story. His mouth was hard
and grim, but it could smile with the kindest, most boyish pleasure on
occasion. His nose was like an eagle’s beak, his face was lean with
never a sagging muscle, his eyes, coal black, had each bright points as
of blades of steel. People always wondered at his trim, erect form,
giving little sign of his advanced years. He still looked hard as an
athlete; and so he was. He had never permitted “vile luxury’s contagion”
to corrupt his tissues. For all the luxury with which he had surrounded
his wife and son, he himself had always lived frugally: simple food,
sufficient exercise, the most personal and detailed contact with his
great business. He had fought upward from utter poverty to the
presidency and ownership of one of the greatest fur houses of his
country, partly through the exercise of the principle of absolute
business integrity, mostly through the sheer dynamic force of the man.
His competitors knew him as a fair but remorseless fighter; but his fame
carried far beyond the confines of his resident city. Bearded trappers,
running their lines through the desolate wastes of the North, were used
to seeing him come venturing up their gray rivers in the spring,
fur-clad and wind-tanned,—finding his relaxation and keeping fit by
personally attending to the buying of some of his furs. Thus it was hard
for a soft man to feel easy in his presence.
Ned Cornet wished that he didn’t have to face him to-night. The
interview, probably short, certainly courteous, would leave him a vague
discomfort and discontent that could only be alleviated by further
drinks, many of them and strong. But there was nothing to do but face
it. Dependence was a hard lot; unlike such men as Rodney Coburn and Rex
Nard, Ned had no great income-yielding capital in his own name. He was
somewhat downcast and sullen as he entered the cheerfully lighted
hallway of his father’s house.
In the soft light it was immediately evident that he was his father’s
son, yet there were certain marked differences between them. Warrior
blood had some way failed to come down to Ned. For all his stalwart
body, he gave no particular image of strength. There was noticeable
extra weight at his abdomen and in the flesh of his neck, and there was
also an undeniable flabbiness of his facial muscles.
Godfrey Cornet’s hands and face were peculiarly trim and hard and brown,
but in the bright light and under careful scrutiny, his son’s showed
somewhat sallow. To a casual observer he showed unmistakable signs of an
easy life and luxurious surroundings; but the mark of prolonged
dissipation was not immediately evident. Perhaps the little triangles on
either side of his irises were not the hard, bluish-white they should
be; possibly there was the faintest beginning of a network of fine, red
lines just below the swollen flesh sacks beneath his eyes. The eyes
themselves were black and vivid, not unlike his father’s; he had a
straight, good nose, a rather crooked, friendly mouth, and the curly
brown hair of a child. As yet there was no real viciousness in his face.
There was amiable weakness, truly, but plenty of friendly boyishness and
good will.
He took his place at the stately table so gravely and quietly that his
parent’s interest was at once wakened. His father smiled quietly at him
across the board.
“Well, Ned,” he asked at last. “What is it to-day?”
“Nothing very much. A very close call, though, to real tragedy. I might
as well tell you about it, as likely enough it’ll be in the papers
to-morrow. I went into a bad skid at Fourth and Madison, hit a jitney,
and before we got quite stopped managed to knock a girl over on the
pavement. Didn’t hurt her a particle. But there’s a hundred dollars’
damage to the jit—and a pretty severe scare for your young son.”
As he talked, his eyes met those of his father, almost as if he were
afraid to look away. The older man made little comment. He went on with
his dessert, and soon the talk veered to other matters.
There hadn’t been any kind of a scene, after all. It was true that his
father looked rather drawn and tired,—more so than usual. Perhaps
difficult problems had come up to-day at the store. His voice had a
peculiar, subdued, quiet note that wasn’t quite familiar. Ned felt a
somber heaviness in the air.
He did not excuse himself and hurry away as he had hoped to do. He
seemed to feel that to make such an offer would precipitate some
impending issue that he had no desire to meet. His father’s thoughts
were busy; both his wife and his son missed the usual absorbingly
interesting discourse that was a tradition at the Cornet table. The
older man finished his coffee, slowly lighted a long, sleek cigar, and
for a moment rested with elbows on the table.
“Well, Ned, I suppose I might as well get this off my chest,” he began
at last. “Now is as auspicious a time as any. You say you got a good
scare to-day. I’m hoping that it put you in a mood so that at least you
can give me a good hearing.”
The man spoke rather humbly. The air was electric when he paused. Ned
leaned forward.
“It wasn’t anything—that accident to-day,” he answered in a tone of
annoyance. “It could have happened to any one on slippery pavements. But
that’s ridiculous—about a good hearing. I hope I always have heard
everything you wanted to tell me, sir.”
“You’ve been a very attentive son.” Godfrey Cornet paused again. “The
trouble, I’m afraid, is that I haven’t been a very attentive father.
I’ve attended to my business—and little else—and now I’m paying the
piper.
“Please bear with me. It was only a little accident, as you say. The
trouble of it is that it points the way that things are going. It could
very easily have been a terrible accident—a dead girl under your
speeding wheels, a charge of manslaughter instead of the good joke of
being arrested for speeding, a term in the penitentiary instead of a
fine. Ned, if you had killed the girl it would have been fully right and
just for you to spend a good many of the best years of your life behind
prison walls. I ask myself whether or not I would bring my influence to
bear, in that case, to keep you from going there. I’m ashamed to say
that I would.
“You may wonder about that. I would know, in my heart, that you should
go there. I am not sure but that you should go there now, as it is. But
I would also know that I have been criminal too—criminally neglectful,
slothful, avoiding my obligations—just as much as you have been
neglectful and slothful and avoiding your obligations toward the other
residents of this city when, half-intoxicated, you drove your car at a
breakneck pace through the city streets. I can’t accuse you without also
accusing myself. Therefore I would try to keep you out of prison. In
doing that, I would see in myself further proof of my old weakness—a
weak desire to spare you when the prison might make a man of you.”
Ned recoiled at the words, but his father threw him a quick smile. “That
cuts a little, doesn’t it? I can’t help it. Ned, your mother and I have
always loved you too well. I suppose it is one of the curses of this
age—that ease and softness have made us a hysterical, sentimental
people, and we love our children not wisely, but too well. I’ve
sheltered you, instead of exposing you to the world. The war did not
stiffen you—doubtless because you were one of the millions that never
reached the front.”
Ned leaned forward. “That wasn’t my fault,” he said with fire. “You know
that wasn’t my fault.”
“I know it wasn’t. The fact remains that you lost out. Let me go on.
I’ve made it easy for you, always, instead of bitter hard as I should
have done. I’ve surrounded you with luxury instead of hardship. You’ve
never done an honest day’s toil on earth. You don’t know what it is to
sweat, to be so tired you can’t stand, to wonder where the next meal is
coming from, to know what a hard and bitter thing life is!
“A girl, thrown on the pavement. A working girl, you said—probably
homely, certainly not your idea of a girl. Perhaps, in your heart, you
think it wouldn’t have much mattered if you had killed her, except for
the awkwardness to you. She was just one of thousands. You, my son, are
Ned Cornet—one of our city’s most exalted social set, one of our
fashionable young clubmen.”
His tone had changed to one of unspeakable bitterness. Ned leaned
forward in appeal. “That isn’t true,” he said sharply. “I’m not a damned
snob!”
“Perhaps not. I’m not sure that I know what a snob is. I’ve never met
one—only men who have pretended to be snobs to hide their fear of me.
Let me say, though, Ned—whatever her lot, no matter how menial her
toil, your life could be spared much easier than hers. It would be
better that you should be snuffed out than that she should lose one of
her working hands. Likely you felt superior to her as you drove her
home; in reality you were infinitely inferior. She has gone much farther
than you have. She knows more of life; she is harder and better and
truer and worth more to this dark world in which we live. The world
could ill afford to lose her, a fighter, a worker. It would be better
off to lose you—a shirker, a slacker!
“I’m not accusing you. God knows the blame is on my own head. For my
part I sprang from the world of toil—never do I go out into that
society in which you move but that I thank God for the bitter toil I
knew in youth. The reason is that it has put me infinitely above them.
Such soft friends as you have wither before my eyes, knowing well that
they can not meet me on even grounds; or else they take refuge in an air
of conceit, a pretense of caste, that deceives themselves no more than
it deceives me. They talk behind my back of my humble origin—fearfully
clothing their own nakedness with the garments of worthy, fighting men
who have preceded them—and yet their most exalted gates open before my
knock. They dare not shut their doors to me. They treat me with the
respect that is born of fear.
“That toil, that hard schooling, has made me what I am and given me the
highest degree possible of human happiness. I find a satisfaction in
living; I am able to hold my head up among men. I have health, the
adoring love of a wonderful woman; I give service to the world. I can
see old age coming upon me without regret, without vain tears for what
might have been, without fear for whatever fate lies beyond. I am
schooled for that fate, Ned. I’ve got strength to meet it. My spirit
will not be buffeted willy-nilly in those winds that blow between the
worlds. I am a man, I’ve done man’s work, and I can hold my place with
other men in the great trials to come.
“What those tests are, I do not know. Personally I lean toward an older
theology, one mostly outworn now, one cast away by weak men because they
are afraid to believe in it. It is not for me to say that Dante foresaw
falsely. The only thing I can not believe is the legend over the
door—‘Abandon Hope, ye who enter here.’ There is no gateway here or
hereafter that can shut out Hope. I believe that no matter how terrible
the punishment that lies within those gates, however hard the school,
there is a way through and out at last.
“Hell is not the dream of a religious fanatic, Ned. I believe in it just
as surely as I believe in a heaven. There must be some school, some
bitter, dreadful training camp for those who leave this world unfitted
to go on to a higher, better world. Lately souls have been going there
in ever-increasing numbers. Let softness and self-indulgence and luxury
continue to degenerate this nation, and all travel will be in that
direction. My hope is yet, the urge behind all that I’m saying to you
to-night, is that you may take some other way.”
His black eyes gleamed over the board. For the moment, he might have
been some prophet of old, preaching the Word to the hosts of Israel. The
long dining room was deathly still as he paused. Realizing that the
intensity of his feeling was wakening the somber poetry within him,
revealing his inmost, secret nature, he steadied himself, watching the
upcurling smoke of his cigar. When he spoke again his voice and words
were wholly commonplace.
“There is no force in heaven or earth so strong as moral force,” he
said. “In the end, nothing can stand against it. If it dies in this
land, Lord help us—because we will be unable to help ourselves. We can
then no longer drive the heathen from our walls. With it, we are
great—without it we are a race of weaklings. And with luxury and ease
upon us, it seems to me I see it manifested ever less and less.
“Ned, there’s one thing to bring it back—and that is hardship. I mean
by hardship all that is opposite to ease: self-restraint instead of
license; service instead of self-love; devotion to a cause of right
rather than to pleasure; most of all, hard work instead of ease. I’ve
heard it said, as a thing to be deplored, that shirt sleeves go to shirt
sleeves every three generations. Thank God it is so. There is nothing
like shirt sleeves, Ned, to make a man—and hard-working, bunching
muscles under them. And through my own weakness I’ve let those fine
muscles of yours grow flabby and soft.
“Your mother and I have a lot to answer for. Both of us were busy, I
with my business, she with her household cares and social duties, and it
was easier to give you what you wanted than to refuse you things for
your own good. It was easier to let you go soft than to provide hardship
for you. It was pleasanter to give in than to hold out—and we loved you
too much to put you through what we should have put you through. We
excused you your early excesses. All young men did it, we told each
other—you were merely sowing your wild oats. Then I found, too late,
that I could not interest you in work—in business. You had always
played, and you didn’t want to stop playing. And your games weren’t
entirely harmless.
“This thing we’ve talked over before. I’ve never been firm. I’ve let you
grow to man’s years—twenty-nine, I believe—and still be a child in
experience. The work you do around my business could be done by a
seventeen-year-old boy. You don’t know what it means to keep a business
day. You come when you like and go when you like. In your folly you are
no longer careful of the rights of other, better people—or you wouldn’t
have driven as you did to-day. You can no longer be bright and
attractive at dinner except under the stimulation of cocktails—nothing
really vicious yet, but pointing to the way things are going. Ned, I
want to make a man of you.”
He paused again, and their eyes met over the table. All too plainly the
elder Cornet saw that his appeal had failed to go home. His son was
smiling grimly, his eyes sardonic, unmistakable contempt in the curl of
his lips. Whether he was angry or not the gray man opposite could not
tell. He hoped so in his heart—that Ned had not sunk so low that he
could no longer know the stirring urge of manly anger. A great
depression drew nigh and enfolded him.
“This isn’t a theater,” was the calloused reply at last. “You are not
delivering a lecture to America’s school children! Strangely, I feel
quite able to take care of myself.”
“I only wish that I could feel so too.”
“You must think I’m a child—to try to scare me with threats of hell
fire. Father, I didn’t realize that you had this streak of puritanism in
you.”
His father made no reply at first. Ned’s bitter smile had seemingly
passed to his own lips. “I suppose there’s no use of going on,” he said.
“By all means go on, since you are so warmed up to your subject,” Ned
answered coldly. “I wouldn’t like to deprive you of the pleasure. You
had something on your mind: what is it?”
“It was a real opportunity for you—a chance to show the stuff you’re
made of. It wasn’t much, truly—perhaps I have taken the whole thing too
seriously. Ned, I wonder if you like excitement.”
“Do I? You know how I love polo——”
“You love to watch! The point is, do you like excitement well enough to
take a slight risk of your life for it? Do you care enough about
success, on your own hook, to go through snow and ice to win it? A
chance came to-day to make from fifty to a hundred thousand dollars for
this firm; all it takes is a little nerve, a little endurance of
hardship, a little love of adventure. I hoped to interest you in it—by
so doing to get you started along the way that leads to manhood and
self-respect. You carry this off successfully, and it’s bound to give
you ambition to tackle even harder deals. It means contact with men, a
whole world of valuable experience, and a world of fun to boot. It
wouldn’t appeal to some of your cheap friends—but heaven knows, if you
don’t take it up, I’m going to do it myself.”
“Go ahead, shoot!” Ned urged. He smiled wanly, almost superciliously at
the enthusiasm that had overswept his father’s face. The old man’s eyes
were gleaming like black diamonds.
It was a curious thing, this love of adventure and trial and
achievement! The old man was half-mad, immersed in the Sunday-school
sentiments of a dead and moth-eaten generation, yet it was marvelous the
joy that he got out of living! He was one of an older generation, or he
would never anticipate pleasure in projects that incurred hardship,
work, responsibility, the silences of the waste places such as he knew
on his annual fur-buying expeditions. His sense of pleasure was weird;
yet he was consistent, to say the least. Now he was wildly elated from
merely _thinking_ about his great scheme,—doubtless some stupid plan to
add further prestige to the great fur house of Godfrey Cornet. Ned
himself could not find such happiness in twice the number of drinks that
were his usual wont.
“It’s simply this,” his father went on, barely able to curb his
enthusiasm. “To-day I met Leo Schaffner at lunch, and in our talk he
gave me what I consider a real business inspiration. He tells me, in his
various jobbing houses, he has several thousand silk and velvet gowns
and coats and wraps left on his hands in the financial depression that
immediately followed the war. He was cussing his luck because he didn’t
know what to do with them. Of course they were part of the surplus that
helped glut the markets when hard times made people stop buying—stock
that was manufactured during the booming days of the war. He told me
that this finery was made of the most beautiful silks and velvets, but
all of it was a good three seasons out of style. He offered me the lot
of two thousand for—I’m ashamed to tell you how much.”
“Almost nothing!” his son prompted him.
“Yes. Almost nothing. And I took him up.”
His son leaned back, keenly interested for the first time. “Good Lord,
why? You can’t go into business selling out-of-date women’s clothes!”
“Can’t, eh? Son, while he was talking to me, it occurred to me all at
once that the least of those gowns, the poorest one in the lot, was
worth at least a marten skin! Think of it! A marten skin, from Northern
Canada and Alaska, returned the trapper around sixty dollars in 1920.
Now let me get down to brass tacks.
“It’s true I don’t intend to sell any of those hairy old white trappers
any women’s silk gowns. But this was what I was going to have you do:
first you were to hire a good auxiliary schooner—a strong, sturdy,
seaworthy two-masted craft such as is used in northern trading. You’d
fit that craft out with a few weeks’ supplies and fill the hold with a
couple of thousand of those gowns. You’d need two or three men to run
the launch—I believe the usual crew is a pilot, a first and second
engineer, and a cook—and you’d have to have a seamstress to do fitting
and make minor alterations. Then you’d start up for Bering Sea.
“You may not know it, but along the coast of Alaska, and throughout the
islands of Bering Sea there are hundreds of little, scattered tribes of
Indians, all of them trappers of the finest, high-priced furs. Nor do
their women dress in furs and skins altogether, either, as popular
legend would have you believe. Through their hot, long summer days they
wear dresses like American women, and the gayer and prettier the
dresses, the better they like ’em. To my knowledge, no one has ever fed
them silk—simply because silk was too high—but being women, red or
white, they’d simply go crazy over it.
“The other factor in the combination is that the _Intrepid_, due to the
unsettled fur market, failed to do any extensive buying on her last
annual trading trip through the islands, and as a result practically all
the Indians have their full catch on hand. The _Intrepid_ is the only
trader through the particular chain of islands I have in mind—the
Skopin group, north and east of the Aleutian chain—and she’s not
counting on going up again till spring. Then she’ll reap a rich
harvest—unless you get there first.
“The Skopin Islands are charted—any that are inhabited at all—easy to
find, easy to get to with a seaworthy launch. Every one of those Indians
you’ll find there will buy a dress for his squaw or his daughter to show
off in, during the summer, and pay for it with a fine piece of fur. For
some of the brighter, richer gowns I haven’t any doubt but that you
could get blue and silver fox. As I say, the worst of ’em is worth at
least a single marten. Considering your lack of space, I’d limit you to
marten, blue and silver fox, fisher and mink, and perhaps such other
freak furs as would bring a high price—no white fox or muskrat or
beaver, perhaps not even ermine and land otter. Ply along from island to
island, starting north and working south and west clear out among the
Aleuts, to keep out of the way of the winter, showing your dresses at
the Indian villages and trading them for furs!
“This is August. I’m already arranging for a license. You’d have to get
going in a week. Hit as far north as you want—the farther you go the
better you will do—and then work south. Making a big chain that cuts
off the currents and the tides, the Skopin group is surrounded by an
unbroken ice sheet in midwinter, so you have to count on rounding the
Aleutian Peninsula into Pacific waters some time in November. If you
wait much longer you’re apt not to get out before spring.
“That’s the whole story. The cargo of furs you should bring out should
be worth close to a hundred thousand. Expenses won’t be fifteen thousand
in all. It would mean work; dealing with a bunch of crafty redskins
isn’t play for boys! Maybe there’d be cold and rough weather, for Bering
Sea deserves no man’s trust. But it would be the finest sport in the
world, an opportunity to take Alaskan bear and tundra caribou—plenty of
adventure and excitement and tremendous profits to boot. It would be a
man’s job, Ned—but you’d get a kick out of it you never got out of a
booze party in your life. And we split the profits
seventy-five—twenty-five—the lion’s share to you.”
He waited, to watch Ned’s face. The young man seemed to be musing. “I
could use fifty thousand, pretty neat,” he observed at last.
“Yes—and don’t forget the fun you’d have.”
“But good Lord, think of it. Three months away from Second Avenue.”
“The finest three months of your life—worth all the rest of your
stupid, silly past time put together.”
Almost trembling in his eagerness, the old man waited for his son’s
reply. The latter took out a cigarette, lighted it, and gazed
meditatively through the smoke. “Fifty thousand!” he whispered greedily.
“And I suppose I could stand the hardship.”
Then he looked up, faintly smiling. “I’ll go, if Lenore will let me,” he
pronounced at last.