THE AWAKENING
Frank Barton had gone to the Front. He would be where there was battle,
murder, and sudden death! War had become a horrid, living reality to
Ethel Clayton.
She heard that Morrison Copley had been in town to bid his mother
good-bye and had gone away, too, bound for the transport. Likewise that
Charlie Bradley, that hulking fellow who had been so notorious about
town, supposedly had sailed at the same time Barton had gone to France.
Ethel had occasion to pass the Fuller house within the week. It was
shuttered and empty looking. The _Clarion_ had told, in a column and a
half, of the last reception tendered Helen Fuller and her mother before
their departure. Grandon Fuller was living at the Bellevue and seemed
rather relieved than otherwise, so people said, that his wife and
daughter had gone abroad.
But Ethel did not scoff now--she had never done so openly--at the idea
of flighty Helen Fuller settling down to Red Cross work. Secretly she
wished that she, too, were on the way to France. Suppose Frank Barton
should be wounded! Some woman would attend him in the hospital. It
might even fall to Helen’s lot. Had Ethel gone to France it might be
her fate to nurse Barton.
She felt a sudden and bitter distaste for her work in the offices
of the Hapwood-Diller Company. The drab business affairs of every
day disgusted her. Although she neglected nothing, Ethel had no
satisfaction in what she did.
The war filled more and more space in the daily papers. But there was
no news of the Rainbow Division, with which it was believed Barton and
the other young officers from Mailsburg had sailed. Everything was so
secretly done!
There was the story that sifted back from France to the families of
some of the soldiers of the unit from the West, who thought they were
bound for New York by train, but who found themselves alighting in New
Orleans and going aboard the troop ships there, to sail for southern
France by the way of Gibraltar.
The fact that the country was honeycombed by German and Austrian spies,
and by those whom the enemy’s money could buy, was becoming slowly a
settled conviction, even in Mailsburg. Those of German birth and name
would in time be ostracised. It could not be helped. It was in the
nature of things.
The man who in war time calls himself too broad-minded to hate the
enemy is often one who has not yet awakened to the seriousness of war.
The enemy-alien in our midst should tremble for his personal safety.
Otherwise he becomes a menace.
Just off Burnaby Street was a little shop where, ever since Ethel was
a child, had sat a little old German cobbling shoes. He was a marked
character in this part of the town where the residents were mostly of
the old, native American stock.
Somebody has said that the trade of tailor breeds socialists and
pessimists. So being a cobbler used to breed philosophers of a kindly
sort. Gessler had been wont to hand out bits of homely and comfortable
philosophy with his mended shoes.
The war had changed his attitude toward life, it seemed. Until the
United States had got into it he had talked eagerly with everybody who
would listen.
The Kaiser he hated, for he was a “Prussian, arrogant and brutal.”
“My father used always to say that there would be war if that
bloodhound came to the throne!” he frequently said. But he likewise was
proud of his race. “The whole world is fighting them and can’t beat
them already!” he cried.
Now that his adopted country was arraigned against the fatherland,
Gessler was very glum and silent. He did not have so much work as
before; but he sat all day on his cobbler’s bench, his hammer in his
hand, often staring out of the window with empty eyes.
On her way to work one morning Ethel carried a pair of shoes to be
mended. But when she reached the corner in sight of which the little
German’s shop stood, she hesitated. How could she approach Gessler and
speak to him with that pleasant familiarity that had been her custom.
She could think of him only now as an enemy. Every German was an
enemy! His countrymen in their terrible undersea craft might sink the
transport upon which Frank Barton had sailed. The war had come home
to Ethel Clayton! It was real to her at last, as it becomes real to
everybody who has a personal stake in it.
She took the shoes to another cobbler and went on her way to the office.
These days Ethel was almost vexed with Benway Chase because he
continued to be so enthusiastic about his work and interested in it. He
never seemed to flag in his tasks; and he might really be, as he had
laughingly said, fitting himself for Jim Mayberry’s position.
He spent most of his noon hour talking with the foremen of the
different shops. He learned much about the practical working of the
factory system; yet he never neglected his own particular tasks.
Mabel Skinner still considered Benway the most wonderful young man who
had ever crossed her path; but she worshiped from afar. She did not
dream of preening her poor plumage to attract his notice; yet when
he smiled at her in good comradeship Little Skinner was secretly in
ecstasies.
“Gee!” she confided to Boots, her errant brother, on one occasion,
“when Mr. Chase asked me did I like flowers, an’ give me some of them
late asters from his mother’s garden, I almost swallowed my gum!”
“Cracky!” scoffed Boots. “That poor fish? Why, he ain’t got but one
good wing!”
“An’ he can put over a spitter with that that _you_ can’t hit,
Smartie,” retorted his sister vigorously. “And he’s a gentleman, Mr.
Chase is!”
“Cracky!” repeated Boots. “Seems to me, if I was a girl I’d fall for a
feller that could gimme something besides a flower an’ a sweet smile.
Like that Jim Mayberry. He’s got a flivver and could take you ridin’.”
“He only took me once,” said Mabel complacently. “And I guess he must
have give you a ride in his buzz-cart, too, that time, or you wouldn’t
have give me that dream about Jim and Sam Blaisdell of Norville workin’
in cahoots against Mr. Barton.”
“Huh! That warn’t no dream,” grumbled Boots. “You think you’re allus
so smart, Mab Skinner. I heard ’em talkin’ all right ’bout how to do
Mr. Barton. And it had something to do with the Bogata works down to
Norville, just as I told you.”
“Well, that egg never hatched, then,” declared his dubious sister.
They might have suspected the incubation of another egg had she known
how often Jim Mayberry was in consultation with Mr. Grandon Fuller
these days at the Bellevue, although Mabel Skinner of course knew
little about the inside affairs of the Hapwood-Diller Company. It might
have aroused any person’s suspicions to mark the superintendent’s
intimacy with the largest stockholder of the concern.
Mr. Fuller had not again suggested the removal of Barton and the
appointment of Mayberry as manager. Indeed, with the former already out
of the country and in the Service, that change did not seem necessary
to the carrying to conclusion of any schemes Mr. Fuller might have.
Not that there was anything wrong showing on the surface of affairs.
The factory seemed to be running quite as usual. But as the end of the
business year approached Ethel could not fail to note that the reports
on output were not so favorable as they had been earlier in the year.
As, of course, it was not really within the compass of her work she
could not discover why this should be.
From the very day Mayberry had been balked in his endeavor to put
the Bogata order through, the tide of fortune for the Hapwood-Diller
Manufacturing Company seemed to have turned. The superintendent never
spoke again about the Bogata Company to Ethel. The latter knew,
however, that Hammerly’s prophecy regarding a receivership for that
concern had come true--and that before the new year.
In the matter of the shop reports the girl was puzzled and alarmed. It
did not seem to be anybody’s fault; certainly Mayberry did not neglect
his supervision of the factory, and most of the foremen were old and
faithful employees.
The report of the corporation compared unfavorably with the last
report. A good deal of money was tied up in raw material. Contracts
unfilled and bills not yet collectible were items that bulked big on
the wrong side of the ledger.
The board voted the usual dividend; but the surplus was much reduced
thereby. And then, suddenly and like the bursting of a bomb, trouble
came.
The Hapwood-Diller Company stock was listed in the market; that is, it
was traded in by the curb brokers both in State and Broad Streets. One
morning Hammerly came raging into the offices, his _Financial Gazette_
in his hand, his spectacles pushed up to the line of his grizzled hair,
and his eyes fairly snapping.
“What’s the meaning of this, I want to know?” he cried, shaking the
financial sheet under Jim Mayberry’s nose as that young man appeared
from the manager’s office. “Do you know anything about this?”
“About what, Mr. Hammerly?”
“This trading in Hapwood-Diller shares? It’s been going on for a
week, I understand. Yesterday three hundred shares was sold for
eighty-nine--eleven points off. Never heard of such a thing! Who’s
selling?”
“Why, bless your heart, Mr. Hammerly,” said the superintendent, “I
don’t know. I own only fifty shares and I haven’t sold them, I can
assure you.”
“Some tarnal fool is dumping his shares on the market, and at a bad
time. Right after such a poor showing as was made by our last report.
If Frank Barton was on the job such a report would never have been
made.”
Mayberry flushed. “No man can make bricks without straw, Mr. Hammerly,”
he said.
“Huh?” snorted the grain dealer. “Who ever told you they made bricks of
straw? That’s about all you know, Jim Mayberry. They make bricks with
clay around these parts. You ain’t in Egypt. But that ain’t neither
here nor there. This here selling of shares--and maybe these were only
wash sales?” added the suspicious old man. “Here! let me see the stock
book, Mayberry.”
“Ask Ethel for that,” returned the superintendent sharply, and, turning
on his heel, walked away.
Mr. Hammerly looked after him with lowering brow. “Ha!” he muttered,
“mighty independent of a sudden. Now, I wonder what that means?”
But he was as pleasant as usual with Ethel. Macon Hammerly approved of
her. He retired to a corner seat to study the list of names to whom
stock, at the reorganization after Israel’s Diller’s death, had been
issued. Most of the local owners of the shares had clung to all their
original allotment, even through the depression at the beginning of
the war before Frank Barton had been elevated to the management of the
concern’s affairs.
The Hapwood-Diller Manufacturing Company had always been a very close
corporation. There were some Diller and Hapwood heirs in the West and
South who had traded off their shares in the corporation; but nobody
knew better than Mr. Macon Hammerly just where those shares lay. At
least, up to this date he thought he knew where the bulk of them were.
The next shock to the working force of the Company, as well as to the
board, was the turning back of the entire order billed to the Kimberly
Binding Company. The order amounted to twelve thousand dollars. The
goods were not according to specifications.
Jim Mayberry denied all responsibility for this error. The Kimberly
order had been received and the contract signed by Barton. Mayberry
showed that the shop sheets covering the contract had been followed
exactly by the workmen. The duplicates of these papers in the office
were the same as the working plans in every particular.
But the Kimberly Company produced its copy of the specifications with
two differences in it, one of dimension and the other of quality,
changes which made the finished product absolutely useless to the
Kimberly people. Or for anybody else, for that matter! The product
could merely go into the scrap heap.
There was a live tilt in the board meeting that day between Mr. Grandon
Fuller and his followers, and Mr. Macon Hammerly. Ethel was in and out
of the room to take dictation, and to furnish books and figures when
required, so she heard much of the wrangle.
Jim Mayberry sat sullenly in his place at the table and had only one
declaration to repeat: It was not up to him! Mr. Fuller did most of the
talking.
Barton’s name was signed to the Kimberly schedule. He had O. K.’d it.
Two bad errors had crept into the specifications and the now absent
manager had overlooked them.
“And he was _absent_, all right, before ever he left here,” Fuller
scoffed. “Absent in his mind if not in body. And his absent-mindedness
has cost us a pretty penny. I can see right now that this board will
have to pass the next dividend.”
The very next day a block of five thousand shares sold in Boston for
eighty-seven and a half and two hundred in the New York market for
eight-seven flat.
One evening Ethel came home from work to be greeted by her mother in a
flurried state of mind.
“Good land, Ethel! What’s the matter with the Hapwood-Diller Company
now? I feared how it would be if Frank Barton went away.”
Ethel keenly remembered her mother’s expressed doubt of Mr. Barton’s
having much to do with the prosperity of the concern. Now she asked
Mrs. Clayton:
“What do you think is the matter at the factory? I don’t know what you
mean.”
“Well, I want to know! And you working right there, too. Here this
little lawyer comes around and offers me a ridiculous price for our
shares----”
“What lawyer?”
“I don’t know him. He says he’s from New York. Here’s his card,” and
she handed to Ethel a card on which was engraved “A. Schuster, Atty.”
and an address in a Wall Street building.
“Anyway, he seems to think he can buy our stock for sixty-five dollars.
That’s all he’ll offer and he just laughed and laughed when I told him
the shares of the Hapwood-Diller Company had never been worth less than
a hundred dollars apiece since they were printed.”
“What did he say to that?” asked her more than curious daughter.
“He declared sixty-five was better than it would sell in the market
in a month, unless the company was reorganized and put on a paying
basis. I wonder what Grandon Fuller or Hammerly would say to that? And
you ought to know the truth, Ethel,” added the worried woman. “Aren’t
things going right in the office now that Frank Barton’s gone away?”
“There is nothing to worry over,” her daughter said stoutly.
“Well, that’s what I told that little lawyer,” Mrs. Clayton declared.
“I said we’d just got our dividend check same’s usual, and he
said--What do you suppose he said?”
“I have no idea,” confessed Ethel.
“That it would be the last one we’d get for many a long day. Can that
be so, Ethel? I don’t know what we should do if our income from those
shares your great-uncle Diller left us should be cut off.”
“I shouldn’t worry, Mother,” Ethel said composedly.
Yet this was only one of the many things she began to hear which
suggested a coming catastrophe to the Hapwood-Diller Company.