Promptly at six Linder drew his automobile up in front of the Transley
summer home with Grant and Murdoch on board. Wilson had been watching,
and rushed down upon them, but before he could clamber up on Grant
a great teddy-bear was thrust into his arms and sent him, wild with
delight, to his mother.
“Look, mother! Look what The-Man-on-the-Hill brought! See! He has fire
in his eyes!”
Transley and Y.D. met the guests at the gate. “How do, Grant? Glad to
see you, old man,” said Transley, shaking his hand cordially. “The wife
has had so many good words for you I am almost jealous. What ho, Linder!
By all that’s wonderful! You old prairie dog, why did you never look me
up? I was beginning to think the Boche had got you.”
Grant introduced Murdoch, and Y.D. received them as cordially as had
Transley. “Glad to see you fellows back,” he exclaimed. “I al’us said
the Western men ‘ud put a crimp in the Kaiser, spite o’ hell an’ high
water!”
“One thing the war has taught us,” said Grant, modestly, “is that men
are pretty much alike, whether they come from west or east or north or
south. No race has a monopoly of heroism.”
“Well, come on in,” Transley beckoned, leading the way. “Dinner will be
ready sharp on time twenty minutes late. Not being a married man, Grant,
you will not understand that reckoning. You’ll have to excuse Mrs.
Transley a few minutes; she’s holding down the accelerator in the
kitchen. Come in; I want you to meet Squiggs.”
Squiggs proved to be a round man with huge round tortoise-shell glasses
and round red face to match. He shook hands with a manner that suggested
that in doing so he was making rather a good fellow of himself.
“We must have a little lubrication, for Y.D.’s sake,” said Transley,
producing a bottle and glasses. “I suppose it was the dust on the plains
that gave these old cow punchers a thirst which never can be slaked.
These be evil days for the old-timers. Grant?”
“Not any, thanks.”
“No? Well, there’s no accounting for tastes. Squiggs?”
“I’m a lawyer,” said Squiggs, “and as booze is now ultra vires I do
my best to keep it down,” and Mr. Squiggs beamed genially upon his
pleasantry and the full glass in his hand.
“I take a snort when I want it and I don’t care who knows it,” said Y.D.
“I al’us did, and I reckon I’ll keep on to the finish. It didn’t snuff
me out in my youth and innocence, anyway. Just the same, I’m admittin’
it’s bad medicine in onskilful hands. Here’s ho!”
The glasses had just been drained when Mrs. Transley entered the room,
flushed but radiant from a strenuous half hour in the kitchen.
“Well, here you are!” she exclaimed. “So glad you could come, Mr. Grant.
Why, Mr. Linder! Of all people--This IS a pleasure. And Mr.--?”
“Mr. Murdoch,” Transley supplied.
“My chief of staff; the man who persists in keeping me rich,” Grant
elaborated.
“I mustn’t keep you waiting longer. Dinner is ready. Dad, you are to
carve.”
“Hanged if I will! I’m a guest here, and I stand on my rights,” Y.D.
exploded.
“Then you must do it, Frank.”
“I suppose so,” said Transley, “although all I get out of a meal when
I have to carve is splashing and profanity. You know, Squiggs, I’ve
figured it out that this practice of requiring the nominal head of the
house to carve has come down from the days when there wasn’t usually
enough to go ‘round, and the carver had to make some fine decisions
and, perhaps, maintain them by force. It has no place under modern
civilization.”
“Except that someone must do it, and it’s about the only household
responsibility man has not been able to evade,” said Mrs. Transley.
As they entered the dining-room Zen’s mother, whiter and it seemed
even more distinguished by the years, joined them, accompanied by Mrs.
Squiggs, a thin woman much concerned about social status, and the party
was complete.
Transley managed the carving more skilfully than his protest might have
suggested, and there was a lull in the conversation while the first
demands of appetite were being satisfied.
“Tell us about your settlement scheme, Mr. Grant,” Mrs. Transley
urged when it seemed necessary to find a topic. “Mr. Grant has quite a
wonderful plan.”
“Yes, wise us up, old man,” said Transley. “I’ve heard something of it,
but never could see through it.”
“It’s all very simple,” Grant explained. “I am providing the capital to
start a few families on farms. Instead of lending the money directly to
them I am financing a company in which each farmer must subscribe for
stock to the value of the land he is to occupy. His stock he will pay
for with a part of the proceeds of each year’s crop, until it is paid in
full, when he becomes a paid-up shareholder, subject to no further call
except a levy which may be made for running expenses.”
“And then your advances are returned to you with interest,” Squiggs
suggested. “A very creditable plan of benefaction; very creditable,
indeed.”
“No, that is not the idea. In the first place, I am accepting no
interest on my advances, and in the second place the money, when repaid
by the shareholders, will not be returned to me, but will be used to
establish another colony on the same basis, and so on--the movement will
be extended from group to group.”
Mr. Squiggs readjusted his large round tortoise-shell glasses.
“Do I understand that you are charging no interest?”
“Not a cent.”
“Then where do YOU come in?”
“I had hoped to make it clear that I am not seeking to ‘come in.’ You
see, the money I am doing this with is not really mine at all.”
“Not yours?” cried a chorus of voices.
“No. Mr. Squiggs, you are a lawyer, and therefore a man of perspicuity
and accurate definitions. What is money?”
“You flatter me. I should say that money is a medium for the exchange of
value.”
“Very well. Therefore, if a man accepts money without giving value for
it in exchange he is violating the fundamental principle underlying the
use of money. He is, in short, an economic outlaw.”
“I am afraid I don’t follow you.”
“Let me illustrate by my own experience, and that of my family. My
father was possessed of a piece of land which at one time had little or
no value. Eventually it became of great value, not through anything he
had done, but as a result of the natural law that births exceed deaths.
Yet he, although he had done nothing to create this value, was able,
through a faulty economic system, to pocket the proceeds. Then, as
a result of the advantages which his wealth gave him, he was able to
extract from society throughout all the remainder of his life value out
of all proportion to any return he made for it. Finally it came down to
me. Holding my peculiar belief, which my right and left bower consider
sinful and silly respectively, I found money forced upon me, regardless
of the fact that I had given absolutely no value in exchange. Now if
money is a medium for the exchange of value and I receive money without
giving value for it, it is plain that someone else must have parted
with money without receiving value in return. The thing is basically
immoral.”
“Your father couldn’t take it with him.”
“But why should _I_ have it? I never contributed a finger-weight of
service for it. From society the money came and to society it should
return.”
“You should worry,” said Transley. “Society isn’t worrying over you.
Some more of the roast beef?”
“No, thank you. But to come down to date. It seems that I cannot get
away from this wealth which dogs me at every turn. Before enlisting I
had been margining certain steel stocks, purely in the ordinary course
of affairs. With the demands made by the war on the steel industry my
stocks went up in price and my good friend Murdoch was able to report
that it had made a fortune for me while I was overseas.... And we call
ourselves an intelligent people!”
“And so we are,” said Mr. Squiggs. “We stick to a system we know to
be sound. It has weathered all the gales of the past, and promises to
weather those of the future. I tell you, Grant, communism won’t
work. You can’t get away from the principle of individual reward for
individual effort.”
“My dear fellow, that’s exactly what I’m pleading for. I have no
patience with any claim that all men are equal, or capable of rendering
equal service to society, and I want payment to be made according to
service rendered, not according to the freaks of a haphazard system such
as I have been trying to describe.”
“But how are you going to bring that golden age about?” Murdoch
inquired.
“By education. The first thing is to accept the principle that wealth
cannot be accepted except in exchange for full-measure service. You,
Mrs. Transley--you teach your little boy that he must not steal. As he
grows older simply widen your definition of theft to include receiving
value without giving value in exchange. When all the mothers begin
teaching that principle the golden age which Mr. Murdoch inquires about
will be in sight.”
“How would you drive it home?” said Y.D. “We have too many laws
already.”
“Let us agree on that. The acceptance of this principle will make half
the laws now cluttering our statute books unnecessary. I merely urge
that we should treat the CAUSE of our economic malady rather than the
symptoms.”
“Theoretically your idea has much to commend it, but it is quite
impracticable,” Mr. Squiggs announced with some finality. “It could
never be brought into effect.”
“If a corporation can determine the value of the service rendered by
each of its hundred thousand employees, why cannot a nation determine
the value of the service rendered by each of its hundred million
citizens?”
“THERE’S something for you to chew on, Squiggs,” said Transley. “You
argue your case well, Grant; I believe you have our legal light rather
feazed--that’s the word, isn’t it, Mr. Murdoch?--for once. I confess a
good deal of sympathy with your point of view, but I’m afraid you can’t
change human nature.”
“I am not trying to do that. All that needs changing is the popular idea
of what is right and what is wrong. And that idea is changing with a
rapidity which is startling. Before the war the man who made money, by
almost any means, was set up on a pedestal called Success. Moralists
pointed to him as one to be emulated; Sunday school papers printed
articles to show that any boy might follow in his footsteps and become
great and respected. To-day, for following precisely the same practices,
the nation demands that he be thrown into prison; the Press heaps
contumely upon him; he has become an object of suspicion in the popular
eye. This change, world wide and quite unforeseen, has come about in
five years.”
“Is that due to a new sense of right and wrong, or to just old-fashioned
envy of the rich which now feels strong enough to threaten where it used
to fawn?” Y.D.’s wife asked, and Grant was spared a hard answer by the
rancher’s interruption, “Hit the profiteer as hard as you like. He’s got
no friends.”
“That depends upon who is the profiteer--a point which no one seems
to have settled. In the cities you may even hear prosperous ranchers
included in that class--absurd as that must seem to you,” Grant added,
with a smile to Y.D. “Require every man to give service according to
his returns and you automatically eliminate all profiteers, large and
small.”
“But you will admit,” said Mrs. Squiggs, “that we must have some
well-off people to foster culture and give tone to society generally?”
“I agree that the boy who is brought up in a home with a bath tub, and
all that that stands for, is likely to be a better citizen than the boy
who doesn’t have that advantage. That’s why I want every home to have a
bath tub.”
Mrs. Squiggs subsided rather heavily. In youth her Saturday night
ablutions had been taken in the middle of the kitchen floor.
“I have a good deal of sympathy,” said Transley, “with any movement
which has for its purpose the betterment of human conditions. Any
successful man of to-day will admit, if he is frank about it, that he
owes his success as much to good luck as to good judgment. If you could
find a way, Grant, to take the element of luck out of life, perhaps
you would be doing a service which would justify you in keeping
those millions which worry you so. But I can’t see that it makes any
difference to the prosperity of a country who owns the wealth in it, so
long as the wealth is there and is usefully employed. Money doesn’t
grow unless it works, and if it works it serves Society just the same as
muscle does. You could put all your wealth in a strong-box and bury it
under your house up there on the hill, and it wouldn’t increase a nickel
in a thousand years, but if you put it to work it makes money for
you and money for other people as well. I’m a little nervous about
new-fangled notions. It’s easier to wreck the ship than to build a new
one, which may not sail any better. What the world needs to-day is the
gospel of hard work, and everybody, rich and poor, on the job for all
that’s in him. That’s the only way out.”
“We seem to have much in common,” Grant returned. “Hard work is the only
way out, and the best way to encourage hard work is to find a system by
which every man will be rewarded according to the service rendered.”
At this point Mrs. Transley arose, and the men moved out into the
living-room to chat on less contentious subjects. After a time the women
joined them, and Grant presently found himself absorbed in conversation
with the old rancher’s wife. Zen seemed to pay but little attention
to him, and for the first time he began to realize what consummate
actresses women are. Had Transley been the most suspicious of
husbands--and in reality his domestic vision was as guileless as that of
a boy--he could have caught no glint of any smoldering spark of the long
ago. Grant found himself thinking of this dissembling quality as one of
nature’s provisions designed for the protection of women, much as the
sombre plumage of the prairie chicken protects her from the eye of the
sportsman. For after all the hunting instinct runs through all men, be
the game what it may.
Before they realized how the time had flown Linder was protesting
that he must be on his way. At the gate Transley put a hand on Grant’s
shoulder.
“I’m prepared to admit,” he said, “that there’s a whole lot in this old
world that needs correcting, but I’m not sure that it can be corrected.
You have a right to try out your experiments, but take a tip and keep
a comfortable cache against the day when you’ll want to settle down and
take things as they are. It is true and always has been true that a man
who is worth his salt, when he wants a thing, takes it--or goes down
in the attempt. The loser may squeal, but that seems to be the path of
progress. You can’t beat it.”
“Well, we’ll see,” said Grant, laughing. “Sometimes two men, each worth
his salt, collide.”
“As in the meadow of the South Y.D.,” said Transley, with a smile. “You
remember that, Y.D.--when our friend here upset the haying operations?”
“Sure, I remember, but I’m not holdin’ it agin him now. A dead horse is
a dead horse, an’ I don’t go sniffin’ it.”
“Perhaps I ought to say, though,” Grant returned, “that I really do not
know how the iron pegs got into that meadow.”
“And I don’t know how your haystacks got afire, but I can guess.
Remember Drazk? A little locoed, an’ just the crittur to pull off a fool
stunt like that. When the fire swept up the valley, instead of down, he
made his get-away and has never been seen since. I reckon likely there
was someone in Landson’s gang capable o’ drivin’ pegs without consultin’
the boss.”
The little group were standing in the shadow and Grant had no
opportunity to notice the sudden blanching of Zen’s face at the mention
of Drazk.
“You’re wrong about his not having been seen again, Y.D.,” said Grant.
“He managed to locate me somewhere in France. That reminds me, he had a
message for you, Mrs. Transley. I’m afraid Drazk is as irresponsible as
ever, provided he hasn’t passed out, which is more than likely.”
Grant shook hands cordially with Y.D. and his wife, with Squiggs and
Mrs. Squiggs, with Transley and Mrs. Transley. Any inclination he may
have felt to linger over Zen’s hand was checked by her quick withdrawal
of it, and there was something in her manner quite beyond his
understanding. He could have sworn that the self-possessed Zen Transley
was actually trembling.