May, 1905.
Neale had never, so to speak, received any letters in his life until his
parents had gone off to Rio; but since then letters had filled what
personal life he had found time for. It was surprising how much more
freely people spoke out in the written word than in talk. The weekly
bulletins from Mother, and Father's occasional letters gave him more of
a feeling of intercourse with his parents than he had ever known when
they lived under the same roof. And he was sure that in no other way
could he ever have come to look into the clear integrity of Martha's
heart as he had in the letters which had come to him from all over
Europe, where she had been wandering with her father during his
sabbatical year of freedom.
In the April after his graduation, Martha had written from England that
she was hurrying the end of her travel-year so that she could be home to
take a Palisading walk with him on May sixteenth. May sixteenth was the
date of their last walk together on the Palisades, the walk which had
ended in the sweet, wordless understanding between them. Her frank
recognition of it as an anniversary to be remembered showed how far
along the year of separation and frequent letter-writing had brought
them.
He was thinking of Martha, the wonderful Martha her letters had
revealed, as he waited for her on May sixteenth in the parlor of her
father's apartment. He found it almost impossible to listen to what
Professor Wentworth was saying, and tried in vain to answer the
traveler's questions about Columbia news. The Wentworths had been in
Norway and Spain and England and Greece, while Neale had not been out of
New York; but he knew no more of Columbia than they. With the bestowal
of the impersonally broadcasted degree, Columbia had dropped him as
unceremoniously as it had failed to welcome him when he arrived--"and
quite right, too," thought Neale. He detested the florid sentimentality
of some other universities, the maudlin old grads singing of bright
college years!
So he knew nothing whatever about Columbia to report. Besides, Professor
Wentworth naturally enough was inquiring about what had been happening
to the faculty during his absence, and Neale had never had the faintest
guess that any of his professors led a three-dimensional life. But most
of all, his year in business, in an office surrounded by men who had
never been near a university had set him immeasurably far from the
academic world. In an attempt to satisfy Martha's father he now made a
great effort to look back at college life, but he was looking back at it
from the wrong end of a telescope. It was inconceivably small and far
away. He had not realized till now how much the year in business had
changed him, how rapidly he had left behind him the horizon of his
college years. Well, that was as it should be--to live hard in the
present without brooding over the past or dreaming of the future....
Then Martha came in, and he forgot college altogether, forgot Professor
Wentworth, he even forgot the business world as he looked half-shyly,
half-confidently into her blue eyes--the same, but, oh, how startlingly
more real and alive than the dream-like memory picture he had been
treasuring all those months.
* * * * *
They crossed the ferry, they stepped off briskly up the zig-zag path,
then when the last house was hidden behind the rocks, they stopped.
Martha lifted her smiling face to his. As their lips touched, Neale was
thrilled by a wave of emotion,--exaltation rather than passion. "How
dear, how sweet, how incredibly pure and good she was!"
The moment passed; as they walked on from time to time their eyes met
frankly. "Oh, but I'm glad to be walking with you again, Neale," said
Martha at last. "It's as if we hadn't been separated at all--yes, you
do look older--ever so much older--and yet about the same."
"Oh, I'm just the same, Martha," he told her briefly with a weighty,
significant accent.
It was the only reference made by either of them to what was in their
hearts. But it was enough for both of them. What a _fine_ girl, Neale
thought, not to want, any more than he did, a lot of goings-on to
express feelings! As they tramped along energetically, Martha was
talking of what the year had been to her. She spoke of picture-galleries
and Gothic cathedrals, and palaces and ruins; but what she said, and
what Neale heard was that nowhere had she met any one whom she liked
better than Neale. Neale felt himself relax in an ineffable content, and
knew by contrast how anxious he had been.
Then they made their fire and cooked their bacon, ate their lunch, and
Neale lighted his pipe peaceably and happily. They sat in a sunny,
sheltered corner of the rocks, overlooking the river, their hearts
sheltered and sunny, and in the intervals of their talk they looked at
each other in quiet satisfaction. How good it was to be together again!
Neale's report of his year took longer than Martha's because they both
felt that hers had the irrelevant passing interest of a vacation-time,
while his was to have enduring importance for them both. It was, he told
her, the same phase in the business world as a freshman year in college,
and although he had not made a brilliant outer success as yet, he felt,
on the whole, satisfied with the way he had got his feet under him and
had begun to know his way about. He gave a droll little color to the
account of his job in the office, the one they had evidently given him
as an experiment, to be tried out in cheap materials first--he
representing the cheap materials! The business had grown and grown; at
first, a generation ago, the product of Mr. Gates' business ability;
later on, too large even for what the "old man" could keep under his
remarkably capacious hat. Then twenty years ago, other people--Mr.
Gates' son, Neale's father, the clever and forceful manager of the
Chicago office, a branch-manager in Ottawa,--had begun to keep it under
their respective hats. Important matters were decided orally in a
personal talk between the different department heads, who, having the
required information at their finger-tips, needed no figuring or
statistics to help their decisions. This had lasted all the while Neale
was growing up, but by the time he graduated, some of the younger
members of the organization had begun to feel that perhaps the stock of
information vital to the conduct of the business ought to be copied off
from the several brains which possessed it, and set down in some more
accessible form. Mr. Belden, the Ottawa manager, knew all about the
lumber market in eastern Canada, the average quality of mill-run spruce
in each section and what the chances were of getting it on time for a
given order; Mr. Gilman, at the Chicago office, could snap back over the
long-distance wire any question you cared to put about Wisconsin or
Northern Michigan lumber regions. But they were neither of them so young
as they had been nor was Mr. Crittenden, whose specialty was the
selling-end of Eastern and foreign lumber markets. Even the "young Mr.
Gates" was now over fifty. They were all mortal, the health of the
"young Mr. Gates" was far from good; and furthermore the business kept
steadily growing so that it was very inconvenient to have to wait to
consult men widely separated.
"Do you get it?" asked Neale, lying in the sun on the Palisades,
smoking, looking up at a sweet, well-beloved face and delighting in her
eager, intelligent interest in his story. "Do you get it? Half the bunch
thought a card-catalogue the foolishest, new-fangled waste of time; half
of them didn't know whether it was or not; all of them wanted some sort
of tabulation of inside information, and none of them knew how to go
about it any more than if they'd been asked to bake a batch of bread or
write a theme on the Crusades. The half that wanted to stick to the old
ways and keep it all safe under different people's hats were dead set
against spending any money on any fool system of collecting and
classifying information. And the other half weren't by any means so sure
of their ground that they wanted to spend a lot of cash to get an
expert. And, anyhow, where could you find an expert? If you let one of
those 'business-system' people inside the office he'd be trying to run
the whole works. Maybe the idea was all right, but you couldn't get it
executed. Well, while the whole proposition was up in the air, and
everybody chewing the rag about it, somebody knocks at the door, and who
is it? Why, Crittenden's son, just out of college, wanting a job. All
nonsense, college, and yet what _would_ it have taught a boy if not how
to straighten out and classify information? Anyhow you could get him for
next to nothing: boys out of college never expect to be paid anything to
speak of, and a good reason why; because they aren't worth anything.
Give him a year's try at it! Crittenden's son ought to have a _little_
natural sense. It won't cost much; he can't do any harm; maybe he might
work out a system that would be useful.
"So they offered the job at slightly more than office-boy wages to the
college graduate. And what did _he_ think about it? How had he been
trained for such work? _You_ know, Martha, how he'd been trained. What
he knew about orderly arrangement of information was about what would go
on the head of a pin! He'd been learning a _few_ scattered items about
English Literature and Greek Philosophy, and the latest inaccuracy about
atoms; and a whole lot about how to get a football over a given line
under given conditions. But incidentally and on the side, he'd had a
pretty thorough course in poker, and a poker-face was the necessary
equipment for _that_ situation!"
He and Martha laughed, a light-hearted young laugh, that did them good
and made them feel closer than ever to each other in the conspiracy of
two against the world.
The rest of the year had been, Neale told her, a slow, dogged struggle
to find out what after all it was nobody's business to tell him; to
invent a system of recording what he found out that would not only be
fool-proof but stenographer-proof; to collect exact statistics as to the
cost of production and transportation; and to bring together items of
account-keeping that had never before had even a speaking acquaintance
with each other.
"I've traced a plank from the tree to tide-water, inch by inch, my
note-book in my hand, setting down every sixteenth of a cent per board
foot that it cost till we sold it to the retail dealer, watching it as
if it were the prince-royal of a reigning house and I the secret-service
man set to keep track of him! I've covered reams of paper figuring out
the cost of the office-work of getting that plank sold--extra
office-work, you know, not ordinary overhead;--and, by heck, I don't see
how they've ever managed to run their old business a minute, the
haphazard way they've been going at it! Nobody knew anything, not _all_
of anything! I seem to have been marking time, but just you wait till I
get out of the office and into the real game. I know more about some
things than any of the buyers, even the old-timers."
"Well, there must be a big profit in business or they wouldn't be able
to conduct it that loose way," said Martha.
"Oh, the profits are big, all right," Neale concurred. "Old man Gates
has more cash than he knows what to do with. And not one of his
grandchildren amounts to a whoop. When his son, the one who's our
General Manager now, retires, there won't be a Gates left in the Gates
Lumber Company."
"They won't mind," said Martha.
"You bet your life they won't _mind_," said Neale. "Far from it! Most
likely they've hardly heard the name of it. They're all living in Europe
now, buying villas and things out of the money the Company makes. Our
Mr. Gates never sees any of his family except when he takes a vacation
and goes to Florence or England. All _they_ want out of the lumber
business is a fat wad of easy money."
"That's not right," said Martha suddenly. "That's not right."
"It's not right if getting something for nothing is wrong," Neale agreed
casually. "But what are you going to do about it? There you are. That's
the way things go."
Martha made no answer. There was a little silence. Then she said: "All
that account-keeping, that detail work--it doesn't seem so terribly
interesting to me, Neale. Haven't you found it awfully dull sometimes?"
Neale rolled over and sat up with an effect of entering again into
active and energetic life. "Well, I might have," he said finally. "But
you know, Martha, that I have a special reason for wanting to get on
quick in business, and I've been mighty glad enough to grab hold of any
end that was handy." He smiled at her confidently. "All a fellow needs
in the business world is a crack in the wall to get his toes into for a
start. I've got my crack. Now you just watch me climb!"
It was perfectly understood between them what he was climbing to reach.