not fit for print. He had been away for a couple of days, and now sat
tilted back in his office chair, a heavy, leather-covered thing not
meant for tilting, his face puffed with anger, his mouth snarling--a
wild beast balked of his prey. His eyes, ferociously insolent, dwelt on
Justin, who, fine and keen and smiling a little, sat opposite him. Brute
anger never had any effect on Justin but to give him a contemptuous,
chill self-possession.
"You're sure the agreement's made?"
"Cater's been sending new consignments as fast as they could go for the
past three days; he's loaded up with machines."
Leverich swore again. "Confounded fools, not to have made terms with
Hardanger first! If we'd only known! If there was only some way to put a
spoke in the wheel, even yet!"
"Oh, I've got the spoke, easily enough," said Justin indifferently. "The
only trouble is, I can't use it."
"Got a spoke! Why in heaven didn't you say that before?" Leverich came
down on the front legs of his chair with a force that sent it rolling
ahead on its casters. "What are you sitting here for? What do you mean
by telling me that you can't use it?"
"Just what I say. But it's not worth talking about."
"See here, Alexander, could you get our machine in now instead of his?"
"I suppose I might."
"And you're not going to do it?"
"I can't, I tell you, Leverich. The information came to me in such a way
that I can't touch it."
"'The information--' It's something damaging to do with the machine?"
Justin drummed with his fingers on the desk without answering.
"You have proof?"
"What's the sense of talking, Leverich? Proof or no, I tell you, I can't
use it. This isn't any funny business; you can see that. Don't you
suppose, if I could use it, that I would? But there are some things a
man can't do. At any rate, _I_ can't. And that settles it."
Heaven knows he had gone over the matter insistently enough in the last
few days, since the combination had been unwillingly given into his
hands, but always with the foregone conclusion. The devil, as a rule,
doesn't actively try to tempt us to evil: he simply confuses us, so that
we are kept from using our reason. But this time he had no field for
action. To use secret information against Cater, that could never have
been had but for Cater's kindness to him in helping him to those bars in
time of need, was first, last, and every time impossible to Justin
Alexander. It was vain for argument to suggest that this very deed of
kindness had worked his disaster--the fact remained the same. He might
do other things; he might do worse things: this thing he could not
do--not though the refusal worked his own ruin, not though Cater's ruin
with Hardanger was insured anyway, but too late for the typometer to
profit by it. Even if the typometer could by some means keep afloat
until that day arrived, it would take a couple of years for such a
timing-machine to regain its prestige in a foreign country.
Justin had no excess of sentiment; no quixotic impulse urged him to go
and tell Cater what he had learned. It was Cater's business to look
after his end of the game. If the price of material or labor was too
cheap, he must know that there was something wrong with it. The stream
of Justin's mind ran clear in spite of that feeling of sharp practice
toward himself--nay, because of it; it was impossible to use the weapon
that a former kindness had placed in his hand. He looked at Leverich now
with an expression which the latter quieted himself to meet. This was a
situation, not for bluster and rage, but to be competently grappled
with.
"How about your obligations? Do you call this fair dealing to us,
Alexander? There's Lewiston's note; once this deal was settled, we would
have paid that, as you know. But it's out of the question as things
stand. We'll have to get our money out the best way we can. If this is
your sense of honor--to sacrifice your friends! See here, Alexander,
let's talk this out. When it comes to talking of ruin, no man can afford
to stand on terms. We didn't put you into the typometer business on any
kindergarten principles--it isn't to form your character. What we did,
we did for profit; and if the profit isn't there, we get out. We've no
objection to doing a kindness for any one, if we can do it and make a
profit; but it stands to reason that we're not in the business for
philanthropy any more than for kindergartening. We liked you, and we
were willing to give you a place in the game if you could run it to suit
us. But we don't consider any scheme that doesn't make money. What
doesn't make money has to go. Profit, profit, profit--that's what every
sane man puts first, and there's no justice in losing a chance to make
it. What you lose, another man takes. If you make another man's wife and
children better off, you stint your own. You've got to consider a
question on all sides. No woman respects a man who can't make money;
it's his everlasting business to make money, and she knows it. Your wife
won't think much of your fine scruples if she's to go without for 'em.
And, by the Lord, she's right! When you go into business, you've got to
make up your mind to one of two things: you've either got to step hard
on the necks of those below you, or you've got to lie down and let them
wipe their feet on you."
[Illustration: "'I DON'T GIVE QUARTER, AND I DON'T EXPECT ANY. IF I'M
SQUEEZED, I PAY'"]
Leverich had stopped at intervals for comment from Justin. Since none
was offered, he went on, with the large and easy manner of one who feels
the justice of his convictions: "No man ever accused me of being close.
I'm free-handed, if I say it that shouldn't. I like to give, and I _do_
give. If there's money wanted for charity, the committees know very well
where to come. And my wife likes to give, too; her name's on the books
of twenty charitable organizations. But we give out of money I've made
by _not_ being free-handed--by getting every last cent that belonged to
me. You see, I don't leave my wife out of my calculations--any man's a
fool that does. She's got the right to have as good as I can give her. I
wouldn't talk like this to most men, Alexander, but between you and me
it's different. It pays to keep your wife in a good humor, when you've
got to go home after a hard day's work; you take a dissatisfied woman,
and she'll make your home a hell. I know men--Great Scott! I don't know
how they live!" He paused again. Justin did not answer. He sat with his
head on his hand, looking, not at Leverich, but to one side of him.
[Illustration: "EVEN REDGE ... HAD BEEN ALLOWED TO HOLD HIM"]
"When I say I've made the money," continued Leverich, "I mean that I
actually _have_ made most of it--made it out of nothing! like the first
chapter of Genesis. If a man has money to start with, he can add to it
as easily as you can roll up a snowball. It's no credit to him. But I've
had only my brains. I've seen money where other men couldn't, and
nothing has stood in my way of getting to it. That's the whole secret of
success. And my attitude's fair--you couldn't find a fairer. When one of
your clerks falls sick, you pay him his full salary for three or four
months till he's around again. _I_ know! Well, I don't do any such
stunts. When I was a clerk myself, I was on the sick-list once for three
months, and nobody paid me. After the first month I was bounced, and I
didn't expect anything else. I didn't expect any philanthropical
business, and I don't give it. That's fair, isn't it? I don't give
quarter, and I don't expect any. If I'm squeezed, I pay. I don't stand
still in the middle of a deal and snivel about what I can do and what I
can't do. I don't snivel about what you call moral obligations. I only
recognize money obligations. Why, see here, Alexander," he broke off,
"if you use the influence you spoke of, you don't have to tell me what
it is--you don't have to tell anybody but Hardanger. Cater himself
needn't know that you had anything to do with it."
"But I'd know," said Justin quietly.
Leverich lost his easy manner; his jaw protruded.
"Very well, then; it comes down to this: If you fail us now, out of any
of your fool scruples toward that poor devil across the street,--who's
bound to get the blood sucked out of him anyway,--you ruin your own
prospects, and you try and cheat us out of the money we put up on you.
By ----, if you see any honor in that, I don't."
"Mr. Leverich," said Justin, raising his head simply, with a steely
gleam in his eyes that matched the other's, "when I try to cheat you or
Lewiston or any man out of what has been put up on me, I'll give you
leave to say what you please. At present I'll say good morning."
[Illustration: "AFTER THIS HE ONLY APPEARED IN THE VILLAGE STREET
GUARDED ON EITHER SIDE BY A FEMALE SNOW"]
Leverich shrugged his shoulders and turned his back as he bent over his
desk. Justin picked up his hat and went out, brushing, as he did so,
against a dark, pleasant-faced man who had been sitting in the next
room. Something in his face instantly conveyed to Justin the knowledge
that the conversation he had just been engaged in had grown louder than
the partition warranted. The next instant he recognized the man as a Mr.
Warren, of Rondell & Co. Both men turned to look back at each other, and
both bowed. The action had a certain definiteness in it, unwarranted by
the slightness of the meeting. The next moment Justin was in the
street.
[Illustration: "TO PUT HER YOUNG ARMS AROUND LOIS AND HOLD HER CLOSE
WITH ACHING PITY"]
The active clash of steel always roused the blood in him; he felt
actively stronger for combat. He was competently apportioning toward
Lewiston's note the different sums coming in this month. There were
large bills to be paid to the typometer's credit by several firms, one
of them Coneways'. Coneways represented the largest counted-in asset for
the entire year--it was the backbone of the establishment. If it went to
Lewiston, what would be left for the business? That could come next.
Lewiston was first. Leverich and Martin would exact every penny of their
principal after these intervening six months of the year were over.
Well, let them! Lewiston's note was what he had to think of now.
All business undertakings, no matter how wild, how precarious, to the
sense of the beholder, are started with confidence in their ultimate
success; it is the one trite, universal reason for starting--that faith
is the capital that all possess in common. Some of these doubtful
ventures, while never really succeeding, do not really fail at once.
They are always hard up, but they keep on, though gradually sinking
lower all the time. Others seem to exist by the continuance of that
first faith alone--a sheer optimism that keeps the courage alive and
keen enough to seize hold of the slightest driftwood of opportunity,
binding this flotsam into a raft that takes them triumphantly out on the
high tide. For all the long drag, the anxiety, the physical strain, the
harassment, failure in itself seemed as inherently impossible to Justin
as that he should be stricken blind or lose the use of his limbs. He
must think harder to find a way of accomplishment; that was all.
His step had its own peculiar ring in it as he left Leverich's, but it
lost somewhat of its alertness as he turned down the street that led to
the factory, unaltered, since his first coming to it, save for the
transformation of the neglected house he had noticed then, with its
gruesome interior, which had been turned into a freshly painted shop
long ago. The effect of association is inexorable. There was not a
corner, not a building, along that too familiar way, that was not hung
with some thought of care. There were moments of such strong repulsion
that he felt as if he couldn't turn down that street again--moments
lately when to enter the factory with its red-brick-arched yawning mouth
of a doorway occasioned a physical nausea--a foolish, womanish state
which irritated him.
The mail brought him the usual miscellaneous assortment of orders and
bills, and letters on minor points, and questions as to the typometer.
The mail was rather apt to be encouraging in its suggestions of a large
trade. Two letters this morning were full of enthusiastic encomium on
the use of the machine. In spite of an enormous and long-outstanding
bill for office stationery, insistently clamorous for payment--one of
those bills looked upon as trifles until they suddenly become
staggering--there was, after the mail, a general feeling of wielding the
destiny of a large part of the world, where the typometer was a power.
[Illustration: "'YOU'RE VERY GOOD TO BE SO SORRY FOR ME,' SHE
WHISPERED"]
A little woman whose husband, now dead, had been in his employ came in
to get help in collecting his insurance; she was timid before Justin,
deeply grateful for his kind and effective assistance. Two men came in,
at different times, for advice and introductions to important people. A
friend brought in a possible customer from the Sandwich Islands. There
was all that aura of prosperity that has nothing to do with the payment
of one's bills.
Justin took both the friend and the customer out to lunch, his agreeable
sense of hospitality only dimmed by the disagreeable fact of its taking
every cent of the five dollars he had expected to last for the week. He
was "strapped." The luncheon took longer, also, than he had counted on
its doing. The morning, begun well, seemed to lead up only to sordid and
anxious details--a sense of non-accomplishment, induced also by small
requisitions from different people, requiring cash from a cash-drawer
that was usually empty.
It was a welcome relief to figure, with Harker's assistance, on the
large sums coming in at the end of the month from Coneways. There were a
hundred ways for them to go, but they were to go to Lewiston. Perhaps,
after all, as Harker astutely suggested, Lewiston would be satisfied
with a partial payment and extend the rest of the note. While they were
still consulting, word was brought in that Mr. Lewiston was there.
Mr. Lewiston was a young man, small-featured, black-haired,
smooth-shaven, and with an air of nattiness and fashion, set at odds at
present by a very pale and anxious face and eager, dilated black eyes.
He cut short Justin's greeting with the words:
"I've just come over to speak about that note, Alexander."
"Well, I was just wanting to speak to you about it myself," said Justin
easily. "Have a cigar?"
"Thank you," said Lewiston mechanically, and as mechanically holding out
his hand for the cigar, evidently forgetting it the next moment. "The
fact is, I don't want to seem importunate, but if you could pay off that
note fifteen days before date,--a week from to-day, that is,--we'd
discount it to satisfy you, if you can collect now. I didn't want to
bother you about it, and I tried outside first, but nobody will take up
the paper just now, except at a ruinous rate. If you could make it
convenient, Alexander." Young Lewiston sat with his small, eager face
bent forward over his knees, his lips twitching slightly. "You know,
that money wasn't loaned on strictly business principles, Alexander, but
for friendship; I got father to consent to it. And if you could let us
have it now, it would save us a world of trouble. It's really not
much--only ten thousand."
Justin shook his head, his keen blue eyes fixed on the other. "I can't
let you have it, Lewiston; I wish I could! But I'm waiting payments
myself. Can't you pull out without it?"
Lewiston drew in his breath. "Oh, yes, of course we'll have to; but it
means-- Well, I know you would if you could, Alexander; I told father
so--father in a way holds me responsible. He was in London when I
renewed the note the last time. There isn't anything to interfere with
the payment when it's due?"
"On my honor, no," said Justin. "You shall have it then without fail."
"For if that should slip up--" continued young Lewiston, wrapped in
somber contemplation of his own affairs alone; he threw his arms outward
with a gesture suddenly tragic in its intensity, paused an instant, then
wrung Justin's hand silently and departed.
"Are you busy, Alexander? They said I could come in."
"Why, Girard!"
Justin wheeled a chair around with an instantly brightened face. "Sit
down. I'm mighty glad to see you." He looked smilingly at his visitor,
whose presence, long-limbed, straight, clean, and clear-eyed, always
elicited a peculiar admiration from other men. "I heard that you had a
room at the Snows' now, while Billy is away, but I haven't laid eyes on
you for a month."
"I've been coming in on a later train every morning and going out again
on a very much later one at night. I'm back in town on the paper for a
while."
"Why don't you settle down to something worth while?" asked Justin, with
the reserved disapproval of the business man for any mode of life but
his own.
[Illustration: "MRS. SNOW WAS FUMBLING WITH A PAPER"]
"Settle down to this kind of thing?" said Girard thoughtfully. "Well, I
did think of it last year, when I undertook those commissions for you.
But what's the use--yet awhile, at any rate? You see, I can always make
enough money for what I want and to spare, and there's nobody else to
care. I like my liberty! The love of trade doesn't take hold of me,
somehow--and you have to have such a tremendous amount of capital to
keep your place. By the way, have you sold the island yet?" The island
was a small one up near Nova Scotia, taken once for a debt.
"Not yet."
Girard gave him a quick glance. "How are things going with you?"
"Fine," said Justin in a conventionally prosperous tone, with a sudden
sight of a bottomless pit yawning below him. "I've a few things on my
mind lately--but they're all right now. By the way, how do you like it
at the Snows'?"
"Oh, all right." Girard's gray eyes smiled in an irrepressible smile. "I
score high at present. They all approve of me, and I am told that I am
the only man who has never run into the Boston fern or got tangled in
the Wandering Jew. Miss Bertha and I have long talks together--she's
great. As for Mrs. Snow--she heard Sutton speak of her the other night
to Ada as 'the old lady,' I assure you that since--" He shook his head,
and both men laughed.
"Come to see us. Miss Linden is back with us again," said Justin
hospitably.
"Thank you," said Girard, an indefinable stiffening change instantly
coming over him. "By the way, I mustn't forget what I came for, before I
hurry off."
He took some bills out of his long, flat leather wallet as he rose. "Do
you remember lending that sixty dollars to my friend Keston last year?
He turned up yesterday, and asked me to see that you got this."
"I'd forgotten all about it," averred Justin. He had not realized until
he took the bills that he had been keeping up all day by main strength,
with that caved-in sensation of there being nothing back of it--nothing
back of it. There are times when the touch of money is as the elixir of
life. Justin, holding on by the skin of his teeth for ten thousand
dollars, and needing imperatively at least as much more, felt that with
this paltry sixty dollars it was suddenly possible to draw a free
breath, felt a sheer lightness of spirit that showed how terrible was
the persistent weight under which he was living. The very feeling of
those separate bills in his pocket made him calmly sanguine.
He got ready to go home a little earlier than usual, saying lightly to
Harker, who had come in for his signature to some papers:
"Those payments will begin to straggle in next week. Coneways' isn't due
until the 31st--the very last minute! But he's always prompt, thank
Heaven--what are you doing?"
"Knocking on wood," said Harker, with a grim smile.
"Oh, knock on wood all you want to," returned Justin.
He even thought of Lois on his way, and stopped to buy her some flowers.
It was the first time he had thought of her unconsciously for a week.
While he was waiting for a car to pass before he crossed the street, his
eye caught the headline on a paper a newsboy was holding out to him:
GREAT CRASH
CONEWAYS & CO. FAIL
IN BOSTON
XX
"I don't think Justin looks very well," said Dosia that afternoon. She
was sitting on the edge of the bed, with her arms spread out
half-protectingly over Lois. The latter was only resting; she had been
up and around the house now for three or four weeks, and, although she
looked unusually fragile, seemed well, if not very strong.
The baby, wrapped in a blue embroidered blanket, with only a round
forehead and a small pink nose visible, was of that satisfactory variety
entirely given to sleep. Zaidee and even Redge, adoring little sister
and brother, had been allowed to hold him in their arms, so securely
unstirring was their little burden. Lois, who had passionately rebelled
against the prospect of additional motherhood, exhibited a not unusual
phase of it now in as passionately adoring this second boy. He seemed
peculiarly, intensely her own, not only a baby, but a spiritual
possession that communicated a new strength to her. Lois was changed.
She had always been beautiful, as a matter of fact, but there was
something withheld, mysterious, in her expression, as if she were taking
counsel of some half-slumberous force within, as of one listening at a
shell for the murmur of the ocean.
Not only Lois, but everything else, seemed changed to Dosia, at the same
time being also flatly, unchangeably natural. She had longed--oh, how
she had longed!--to be back here. Even while loving and working in her
so-called home, she had felt that this was her real home, although here
her cruelest blows had fallen on her; even while bleeding with the
wrench of parting from her own flesh and blood, she had felt that this
was the real home, for here she had really lived; and it was the home of
the nicer, more delicate instincts. After the crude housekeeping, the
lack of comforts that made the simplest nursing a grinding struggle with
circumstance, it was a blessed relief to get back to a sphere where
minor details were all in order as a matter of course. The Alexanders,
with their three children, kept only one maid now; but even that
restriction did not prevent the unlimited flow of hot and cold water!
Yet she had also dreaded this returning,--how she had dreaded it!--with
that old sickening shame which came over her inevitably as she thought
of certain people and places and days. The mere thought of seeing Mrs.
Leverich or George Sutton and that chorus of onlookers was like passing
through fire. One braces one's self to withstand the pain of scenes of
joy or sorrow revisited, to find that, after all, when the moment comes,
there is little of that dreaded pain. It has been lived through and the
climax passed in that previsioning which imagination made more intense,
more harrowingly real, than the reality.
Mrs. Leverich stopped her carriage one day to greet Dosia, and to ask
her, with a tentative semblance of her old effusion, to come and make
her a visit--an effusion which immediately died down into complete
non-interest, on Dosia's polite refusal; and the incident was not
especially heart-racking at the time, though afterward it set her
unaccountably trembling. Mrs. Leverich had in the carriage with her a
small, thin, long-nosed man with a pale-reddish mustache and hair, who,
gossip said, passed most of his time at the Leverichs'--he was seen out
driving alone with Myra nearly every day. He was "an old friend from
home." It had been gossip at first, but it was growing to be scandal
now, with audible wonder as to how much Mr. Leverich knew about it.
Her avoidance of George Sutton was as nothing to his desire of avoiding
her. He dived with surreptitious haste down side streets when he saw her
coming, or disappeared within shop doorways. Once, when Dosia confronted
him inadvertently on the platform of a car, and he had perforce to take
off his hat and murmur, "Good morning," he turned pale and was evidently
scared to death. After this he only appeared in the village street
guarded on either side by a female Snow--usually Ada and her mother,
though occasionally Bertha served as escort instead of the latter. The
elder Snows, in spite of this apparent security, were in a state of
constant nervous tension over Mr. Sutton's attention to Ada. He had not
"spoken" yet, but it had begun to be felt severely of late that he
ought to speak. Whenever Ada came into the house, her face was eagerly
scanned by both mother and sister to see from its look if it bore any
trace of the fateful words having been uttered. Every one knew, though
how no one could tell, that that bold thing, Dosia Linden, had tried to
get him once, and failed.