Modern business, by reason of the mingling of the sexes it involves, for
the playwright and the novelist and the sociologist is full of
interesting and dramatic situations, and in it may be studied,
undoubtedly, one phase of the evolution tending to transform if not
disintegrate certain institutions hitherto the corner-stones of society.
Our stage is set. A young woman, conscious of ability, owes her promotion
primarily to certain dynamic feminine qualities with which she is
endowed. And though she may make an elaborate pretense of ignoring the
fact, in her heart she knows and resents it, while at the same time,
paradoxically, she gets a thrill from it,--a sustaining and inspiring
thrill of power! On its face it is a business arrangement;
secretly,--attempt to repudiate this as one may,--it is tinged with the
colours of high adventure. When Janet entered into the intimate
relationship with Mr. Claude Ditmar necessitated by her new duties as his
private stenographer her attitude, slightly defiant, was the
irreproachable one of a strict attention to duty. All unconsciously she
was a true daughter of the twentieth century, and probably a feminist at
heart, which is to say that her conduct was determined by no preconceived
or handed-down notions of what was proper and lady-like. For feminism, in
a sense, is a return to atavism, and sex antagonism and sex attraction
are functions of the same thing. There were moments when she believed
herself to hate Mr. Ditmar, when she treated him with an aloofness, an
impersonality unsurpassed; moments when he paused in his dictation to
stare at her in astonishment. He, who flattered himself that he
understood women!
She would show him!--such was her dominating determination. Her promotion
assumed the guise of a challenge, of a gauntlet flung down at the feet of
her sex. In a certain way, an insult, though incredibly stimulating. If
he flattered himself that he had done her a favour, if he entertained the
notion that he could presently take advantage of the contact with her now
achieved to make unbusinesslike advances--well, he would find out. He had
proclaimed his desire for an able assistant in Miss Ottway's place--he
would get one, and nothing more. She watched narrowly, a l'affut, as the
French say, for any signs of sentiment, and indeed this awareness of her
being on guard may have had some influence on Mr. Ditmar's own attitude,
likewise irreproachable.... A rather anaemic young woman, a Miss Annie
James, was hired for Janet's old place.
In spite of this aloofness and alertness, for the first time in her life
Janet felt the exuberance of being in touch with affairs of import.
Hitherto the mill had been merely a greedy monster claiming her freedom
and draining her energies in tasks routine, such as the copying of
meaningless documents and rows of figures; now, supplied with stimulus
and a motive, the Corporation began to take on significance, and she
flung herself into the work with an ardour hitherto unknown, determined
to make herself so valuable to Ditmar that the time would come when he
could not do without her. She strove to memorize certain names and
addresses, lest time be lost in looking them up, to familiarize herself
with the ordinary run of his correspondence, to recall what letters were
to be marked "personal," to anticipate matters of routine, in order that
he might not have the tedium of repeating instructions; she acquired the
faculty of keeping his engagements in her head; she came early to the
office, remaining after hours, going through the files, becoming familiar
with his system; and she learned to sort out his correspondence, sifting
the important from the unimportant, to protect him, more and more, from
numerous visitors who called only to waste his time. Her instinct for the
detection of book-agents, no matter how brisk and businesslike they might
appear, was unerring--she remembered faces and the names belonging to
them: an individual once observed to be persona non grata never succeeded
in passing her twice. On one occasion Ditmar came out of his office to
see the back of one of these visitors disappearing into the corridor.
"Who was that?" he asked.
"His name is McCalla," she said. "I thought you didn't want to be
bothered."
"But how in thunder did you get rid of him?" he demanded.
"Oh, I just wouldn't let him in," she replied demurely.
And Ditmar went away, wondering.... Thus she studied him, without
permitting him to suspect it, learning his idiosyncrasies, his attitude
toward all those with whom daily he came in contact, only to find herself
approving. She was forced to admit that he was a judge of men, compelled
to admire his adroitness in dealing with them. He could be democratic or
autocratic as occasion demanded; he knew when to yield, and when to
remain inflexible. One morning, for instance, there arrived from New York
a dapper salesman whose jauntily tied bow, whose thin hair--carefully
parted to conceal an incipient baldness--whose wary and slightly weary
eyes all impressively suggested the metropolitan atmosphere of high
pressure and sophistication from which he had emerged. He had a machine
to sell; an amazing machine, endowed with human intelligence and more
than human infallibility; for when it made a mistake it stopped. It was
designed for the express purpose of eliminating from the payroll the
skilled and sharp-eyed women who are known as "drawers-in," who sit all
day long under a north light patiently threading the ends of the warp
through the heddles of the loom harness. Janet's imagination was
gradually fired as she listened to the visitor's eloquence; and the
textile industry, which hitherto had seemed to her uninteresting and
sordid, took on the colours of romance.
"Now I've made up my mind we'll place one with you, Mr. Ditmar," the
salesman concluded. "I don't object to telling you we'd rather have one
in the Chippering than in any mill in New England."
Janet was surprised, almost shocked to see Ditmar shake his head, yet she
felt a certain reluctant admiration because he had not been swayed by
blandishments. At such moments, when he was bent on refusing a request,
he seemed physically to acquire massiveness,--and he had a dogged way of
chewing his cigar.
"I don't want it, yet," he replied, "not until you improve it." And she
was impressed by the fact that he seemed to know as much about the
machine as the salesman himself. In spite of protests, denials, appeals,
he remained firm. "When you get rid of the defects I've mentioned come
back, Mr. Hicks--but don't come back until then."
And Mr. Hicks departed, discomfited....
Ditmar knew what he wanted. Of the mill he was the absolute master,
familiar with every process, carrying constantly in his mind how many
spindles, how many looms were at work; and if anything untoward happened,
becoming aware of it by what seemed to Janet a subconscious process,
sending for the superintendent of the department: for Mr. Orcutt,
perhaps, whose office was across the hall--a tall, lean, spectacled man
of fifty who looked like a schoolmaster.
"Orcutt, what's the matter with the opener in Cooney's room?"
"Why, the blower's out of order."
"Well, whose fault is it?"....
He knew every watchman and foreman in the mill, and many of the second
hands. The old workers, men and women who had been in the Chippering
employ through good and bad times for years, had a place in his
affections, but toward the labour force in general his attitude was
impersonal. The mill had to be run, and people to be got to run it. With
him, first and last and always it was the mill, and little by little what
had been for Janet a heterogeneous mass of machinery and human beings
became unified and personified in Claude Ditmar. It was odd how the
essence and quality of that great building had changed for her; how the
very roaring of the looms, as she drew near the canal in the mornings,
had ceased to be sinister and depressing, but bore now a burden like a
great battle song to excite and inspire, to remind her that she had been
snatched as by a miracle from the commonplace. And all this was a
function of Ditmar.
Life had become portentous. And she was troubled by no qualms of logic,
but gloried, womanlike, in her lack of it. She did not ask herself why
she had deliberately enlarged upon Miss Ottway's duties, invaded
debatable ground in part inevitably personal, flung herself with such
abandon into the enterprise of his life's passion, at the same time
maintaining a deceptive attitude of detachment, half deceiving herself
that it was zeal for the work by which she was actuated. In her soul she
knew better. She was really pouring fuel on the flames. She read him, up
to a certain point--as far as was necessary; and beneath his attempts at
self-control she was conscious of a dynamic desire that betrayed itself
in many acts and signs,--as when he brushed against her; and occasionally
when he gave evidence with his subordinates of a certain shortness of
temper unusual with him she experienced a vaguely alarming but delicious
thrill of power. And this, of all men, was the great Mr. Ditmar! Was she
in love with him? That question did not trouble her either. She continued
to experience in his presence waves of antagonism and attraction,
revealing to her depths and possibilities of her nature that frightened
while they fascinated. It never occurred to her to desist. That craving
in her for high adventure was not to be denied.
On summer evenings it had been Ditmar's habit when in Hampton to stroll
about his lawn, from time to time changing the position of the sprinkler,
smoking a cigar, and reflecting pleasantly upon his existence. His house,
as he gazed at it against the whitening sky, was an eminently
satisfactory abode, his wife was dead, his children gave him no trouble;
he felt a glow of paternal pride in his son as the boy raced up and down
the sidewalk on a bicycle; George was manly, large and strong for his
age, and had a domineering way with other boys that gave Ditmar secret
pleasure. Of Amy, who was showing a tendency to stoutness, and who had
inherited her mother's liking for candy and romances, Ditmar thought
scarcely at all: he would glance at her as she lounged, reading, in a
chair on the porch, but she did not come within his range of problems. He
had, in short, everything to make a reasonable man content, a life nicely
compounded of sustenance, pleasure, and business,--business naturally
being the greatest of these. He was--though he did not know it--ethically
and philosophically right in squaring his morals with his occupation, and
his had been the good fortune to live in a world whose codes and
conventions had been carefully adjusted to the pursuit of that particular
brand of happiness he had made his own. Why, then, in the name of that
happiness, of the peace and sanity and pleasurable effort it had brought
him, had he allowed and even encouraged the advent of a new element that
threatened to destroy the equilibrium achieved? an element refusing to be
classified under the head of property, since it involved something he
desired and could not buy? A woman who was not property, who resisted the
attempt to be turned into property, was an anomaly in Ditmar's universe.
He had not, of course, existed for more than forty years without having
heard and read of and even encountered in an acquaintance or two the
species of sex attraction sentimentally called love that sometimes made
fools of men and played havoc with more important affairs, but in his
experience it had never interfered with his sanity or his appetite or the
Chippering Mill: it had never made his cigars taste bitter; it had never
caused a deterioration in the appreciation of what he had achieved and
held. But now he was experiencing strange symptoms of an intensity out of
all proportion to that of former relations with the other sex. What was
most unusual for him, he was alarmed and depressed, at moments irritable.
He regretted the capricious and apparently accidental impulse that had
made him pretend to tinker with his automobile that day by the canal,
that had led him to the incomparable idiocy of getting rid of Miss Ottway
and installing the disturber of his peace as his private stenographer.
What the devil was it in her that made him so uncomfortable? When in his
office he had difficulty in keeping his mind on matters of import; he
would watch her furtively as she went about the room with the lithe and
noiseless movements that excited him the more because he suspected
beneath her outward and restrained demeanour a fierceness he craved yet
feared. He thought of her continually as a panther, a panther he had
caught and could not tame; he hadn't even caught her, since she might
escape at any time. He took precautions not to alarm her. When she
brushed against him he trembled. Continually she baffled and puzzled him,
and he never could tell of what she was thinking. She represented a whole
set of new and undetermined values for which he had no precedents, and
unlike every woman he had known--including his wife--she had an integrity
of her own, seemingly beyond the reach of all influences economic and
social. All the more exasperating, therefore, was a propinquity creating
an intimacy without substance, or without the substance he craved for she
had magically become for him a sort of enveloping, protecting atmosphere.
In an astonishingly brief time he had fallen into the habit of talking
things over with her; naturally not affairs of the first importance, but
matters such as the economy of his time: when, for instance, it was most
convenient for him to go to Boston; and he would find that she had
telephoned, without being told, to the office there when to expect him,
to his chauffeur to be on hand. He never had to tell her a thing twice,
nor did she interrupt--as Miss Ottway sometimes had done--the processes
of his thought. Without realizing it he fell into the habit of listening
for the inflections of her voice, and though he had never lacked the
power of making decisions, she somehow made these easier for him
especially if, a human equation were involved.
He had, at least, the consolation--if it were one--of reflecting that his
reputation was safe, that there would be no scandal, since two are
necessary to make the kind of scandal he had always feared, and Miss
Bumpus, apparently, had no intention of being the second party. Yet she
was not virtuous, as he had hitherto defined the word. Of this he was
sure. No woman who moved about as she did, who had such an effect on him,
who had on occasions, though inadvertently, returned the lightning of his
glances, whose rare laughter resembled grace notes, and in whose hair was
that almost imperceptible kink, could be virtuous. This instinctive
conviction inflamed him. For the first time in his life he began to doubt
the universal conquering quality of his own charms,--and when such a
thing happens to a man like Ditmar he is in danger of hell-fire. He
indulged less and less in the convivial meetings and excursions that
hitherto had given him relaxation and enjoyment, and if his cronies
inquired as to the reasons for his neglect of them he failed to answer
with his usual geniality.
"Everything going all right up at the mills, Colonel?" he was asked one
day by Mr. Madden, the treasurer of a large shoe company, when they met
on the marble tiles of the hall in their Boston club.
"All right. Why?"
"Well," replied Madden, conciliatingly, "you seem kind of preoccupied,
that's all. I didn't know but what the fifty-four hour bill the
legislature's just put through might be worrying you."
"We'll handle that situation when the time comes," said Ditmar. He
accepted a gin rickey, but declined rather curtly the suggestion of a
little spree over Sunday to a resort on the Cape which formerly he would
have found enticing. On another occasion he encountered in the lobby of
the Parker House a more intimate friend, Chester Sprole, sallow,
self-made, somewhat corpulent, one of those lawyers hail fellows well met
in business circles and looked upon askance by the Brahmins of their
profession; more than half politician, he had been in Congress, and from
time to time was retained by large business interests because of his
persuasive gifts with committees of the legislature--though these had
been powerless to avert the recent calamity of the women and children's
fifty-four hour bill. Mr. Sprole's hair was prematurely white, and the
crow's-feet at the corners of his eyes were not the result of legal
worries.
"Hullo, Dit," he said jovially.
"Hullo, Ches," said Ditmar.
"Now you're the very chap I wanted to see. Where have you been keeping
yourself lately? Come out to the farm to-night,--same of the boys'll be
there." Mr. Sprole, like many a self-made man, was proud of his farm,
though he did not lead a wholly bucolic existence.
"I can't, Ches," answered Ditmar. "I've got to go back to Hampton."
This statement Mr. Sprole unwisely accepted as a fiction. He took hold of
Ditmar's arm.
"A lady--eh--what?"
"I've got to go back to Hampton," repeated Ditmar, with a suggestion of
truculence that took his friend aback. Not for worlds would Mr. Sprole
have offended the agent of the Chippering Mill.
"I was only joking, Claude," he hastened to explain. Ditmar, somewhat
mollified but still dejected, sought the dining-room when the lawyer had
gone.
"All alone to-night, Colonel?" asked the coloured head waiter,
obsequiously.
Ditmar demanded a table in the corner, and consumed a solitary meal.
Very naturally Janet was aware of the change in Ditmar, and knew the
cause of it. Her feelings were complicated. He, the most important man in
Hampton, the self-sufficient, the powerful, the hitherto distant and
unattainable head of the vast organization known as the Chippering Mill,
of which she was an insignificant unit, at times became for her just a
man--a man for whom she had achieved a delicious contempt. And the
knowledge that she, if she chose, could sway and dominate him by the mere
exercise of that strange feminine force within her was intoxicating and
terrifying. She read this in a thousand signs; in his glances; in his
movements revealing a desire to touch her; in little things he said,
apparently insignificant, yet fraught with meaning; in a constant
recurrence of the apologetic attitude--so alien to the Ditmar formerly
conceived--of which he had given evidence that day by the canal: and from
this attitude emanated, paradoxically, a virile and galvanic current
profoundly disturbing. Sometimes when he bent over her she experienced a
commingled ecstasy and fear that he would seize her in his arms. Yet the
tension was not constant, rising and falling with his moods and
struggles, all of which she read--unguessed by him--as easily as a
printed page by the gift that dispenses with laborious processes of the
intellect. On the other hand, a resentment boiled within her his
masculine mind failed to fathom. Stevenson said of John Knox that many
women had come to learn from him, but he had never condescended to become
a learner in return--a remark more or less applicable to Ditmar. She was,
perforce, thrilled that he was virile and wanted her, but because he
wanted her clandestinely her pride revolted, divining his fear of scandal
and hating him for it like a thoroughbred. To do her justice, marriage
never occurred to her. She was not so commonplace.
There were times, however, when the tension between them would relax,
when some incident occurred to focus Ditmar's interest on the enterprise
that had absorbed and unified his life, the Chippering Mill. One day in
September, for instance, after an absence in New York, he returned to the
office late in the afternoon, and she was quick to sense his elation, to
recognize in him the restored presence of the quality of elan, of
command, of singleness of purpose that had characterized him before she
had become his stenographer. At first, as he read his mail, he seemed
scarcely conscious of her presence. She stood by the window, awaiting his
pleasure, watching the white mist as it rolled over the floor of the
river, catching glimpses in vivid, saffron blurs of the lights of the
Arundel Mill on the farther shore. Autumn was at hand. Suddenly she heard
Ditmar speaking.
"Would you mind staying a little while longer this evening, Miss Bumpus?"
"Not at all," she replied, turning.
On his face was a smile, almost boyish.
"The fact is, I think I've got hold of the biggest single order that ever
came into any mill in New England," he declared.
"Oh, I'm glad," she said quickly.
"The cotton cards--?" he demanded.
She knew he referred to the schedules, based on the current prices of
cotton, made out in the agent's office and sent in duplicate to the
selling house, in Boston. She got them from the shelf; and as he went
over them she heard him repeating the names of various goods now become
familiar, pongees, poplins, percales and voiles, garbardines and
galateas, lawns, organdies, crepes, and Madras shirtings, while he wrote
down figures on a sheet of paper. So complete was his absorption in this
task that Janet, although she had resented the insinuating pressure of
his former attitude toward her, felt a paradoxical sensation of jealousy.
Presently, without looking up, he told her to call up the Boston office
and ask for Mr. Fraile, the cotton buyer; and she learned from the talk
over the telephone though it was mostly about "futures"--that Ditmar had
lingered for a conference in Boston on his way back from New York.
Afterwards, having dictated two telegrams which she wrote out on her
machine, he leaned back in his chair; and though the business for the day
was ended, showed a desire to detain her. His mood became communicative.
"I've been on the trail of that order for a month," he declared. "Of
course it isn't my business to get orders, but to manage this mill, and
that's enough for one man, God knows. But I heard the Bradlaughs were in
the market for these goods, and I told the selling house to lie low, that
I'd go after it. I knew I could get away with it, if anybody could. I
went to the Bradlaughs and sat down on 'em, I lived with 'em, ate with
'em, brought 'em home at night. I didn't let 'em alone a minute until
they handed it over. I wasn't going to give any other mill in New England
or any of those southern concerns a chance to walk off with it--not on
your life! Why, we have the facilities. There isn't another mill in the
country can turn it out in the time they ask, and even we will have to go
some to do it. But we'll do it, by George, unless I'm struck by
lightning."
He leaned forward, hitting the desk with his fist, and Janet, standing
beside him, smiled. She had the tempting gift of silence. Forgetting her
twinge of jealousy, she was drawn toward him now, and in this mood of
boyish exuberance, of self-confidence and pride in his powers and success
she liked him better than ever before. She had, for the first time, the
curious feeling of being years older than he, yet this did not detract
from a new-born admiration.
"I made this mill, and I'm proud of it," he went on. "When old Stephen
Chippering put me in charge he was losing money, he'd had three agents in
four years. The old man knew I had it in me, and I knew it, if I do say
it myself. All this union labour talk about shorter hours makes me
sick--why, there was a time when I worked ten and twelve hours a day, and
I'm man enough to do it yet, if I have to. When the last agent--that was
Cort--was sacked I went to Boston on my own hook and tackled the old
gentleman--that's the only way to get anywhere. I couldn't bear to see
the mill going to scrap, and I told him a thing or two,--I had the facts
and the figures. Stephen Chippering was a big man, but he had a streak of
obstinacy in him, he was conservative, you bet. I had to get it across to
him there was a lot of dead wood in this plant, I had to wake him up to
the fact that the twentieth century was here. He had to be shown--he was
from Boston, you know--" Ditmar laughed--"but he was all wool and a yard
wide, and he liked me and trusted me.
"That was in nineteen hundred. I can remember the interview as well as if
it had happened last night--we sat up until two o'clock in the morning in
that library of his with the marble busts and the leather-bound books and
the double windows looking out over the Charles, where the wind was
blowing a gale. And at last he said, `All right, Claude, go ahead. I'll
put you in as agent, and stand behind you.' And by thunder, he did stand
behind me. He was quiet, the finest looking old man I ever saw in my
life, straight as a ramrod, with a little white goatee and a red,
weathered face full of creases, and a skin that looked as if it had been
pricked all over with needles--the old Boston sort. They don't seem to
turn 'em out any more. Why, I have a picture of him here."
He opened a drawer in his desk and drew out a photograph. Janet gazed at
it sympathetically.
"It doesn't give you any notion of those eyes of his," Ditmar said,
reminiscently. "They looked right through a man's skull, no matter how
thick it was. If anything went wrong, I never wasted any time in telling
him about it, and I guess it was one reason he liked me. Some of the
people up here didn't understand him, kow-towed to him, they were scared
of him, and if he thought they had something up their sleeves he looked
as if he were going to eat 'em alive. Regular fighting eyes, the kind
that get inside of a man and turn the light on. And he sat so still--made
you ashamed of yourself. Well, he was a born fighter, went from Harvard
into the Rebellion and was left for dead at Seven Oaks, where one of the
company found him and saved him. He set that may up for life, and never
talked about it, either. See what he wrote on the bottom--'To my friend,
Claude Ditmar, Stephen Chippering.' And believe me, when he once called a
man a friend he never took it back. I know one thing, I'll never get
another friend like him."
With a gesture that gave her a new insight into Ditmar, reverently he
took the picture from her hand and placed it back in the drawer. She was
stirred, almost to tears, and moved away from him a little, as though to
lessen by distance the sudden attraction he had begun to exert: yet she
lingered, half leaning, half sitting on the corner of the big desk, her
head bent toward him, her eyes filled with light. She was wondering
whether he could ever love a woman as he loved this man of whom he had
spoken, whether he could be as true to a woman. His own attitude seemed
never to have been more impersonal, but she had ceased to resent it;
something within her whispered that she was the conductor, the inspirer..
"I wish Stephen Chippering could have lived to see this order," he
exclaimed, "to see the Chippering Mill to-day! I guess he'd be proud of
it, I guess he wouldn't regret having put me in as agent."
Janet did not reply. She could not. She sat regarding him intently, and
when he raised his eyes and caught her luminous glance, his expression
changed, she knew Stephen Chippering had passed from his mind.
"I hope you like it here," he said. His voice had become vibrant,
ingratiating, he had changed from the master to the suppliant--and yet
she was not displeased. Power had suddenly flowed back into her, and with
it an exhilarating self-command.
"I do like it," she answered.
"But you said, when I asked you to be my stenographer, that you didn't
care for your work."
"Oh, this is different."
"How?"
"I'm interested, the mill means something to me now you see, I'm not just
copying things I don't know anything about."
"I'm glad you're interested," he said, in the same odd, awkward tone.
"I've never had any one in the office who did my work as well. Now Miss
Ottway was a good stenographer, she was capable, and a fine woman, but
she never got the idea, the spirit of the mill in her as you've got it,
and she wasn't able to save me trouble, as you do. It's remarkable how
you've come to understand, and in such a short time."
Janet coloured. She did not look at him, but had risen and begun to
straighten out the papers beside her.
"There are lots of other things I'd like to understand," she said.
"What?" he demanded.
"Well--about the mill. I never thought much about it before, I always
hated it," she cried, dropping the papers and suddenly facing him. "It
was just drudgery. But now I want to learn everything, all I can, I'd
like to see the machinery."
"I'll take you through myself--to-morrow," he declared.
His evident agitation made her pause. They were alone, the outer office
deserted, and the Ditmar she saw now, whom she had summoned up with
ridiculous ease by virtue of that mysterious power within her, was no
longer the agent of the Chippering Mill, a boy filled with enthusiasm by
a business achievement, but a man, the incarnation and expression of
masculine desire desire for her. She knew she could compel him, if she
chose, to throw caution to the winds.
"Oh no!" she exclaimed. She was afraid of him, she shrank from such a
conspicuous sign of his favour.
"Why not?" he asked.
"Because I don't want you to," she said, and realized, as soon as she had
spoken, that her words might imply the existence of a something between
them never before hinted at by her. "I'll get Mr. Caldwell to take me
through." She moved toward the door, and turned; though still on fire
within, her manner had become demure, repressed. "Did you wish anything
more this evening?" she inquired.
"That's all," he said, and she saw that he was gripping the arms of his
chair....