Rough-Hewn Part 31

"I'll be there."

"Of course you won't draw much of a salary at first; I think I'd better keep your allowance going for a few months at least."

"Nothing doing, Dad! It's white of you to suggest it, but I'm on my own now. If you get me a job, that's more than plenty. If I can't live on my wages, I'll black boots after office hours."

CHAPTER x.x.xI

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 pa.s.sion. "How dear, how sweet, how incredibly pure and good she was!"

The moment pa.s.sed; 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 pa.s.sing 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 cla.s.sifying 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 cla.s.sify 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 n.o.body'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! n.o.body 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.

CHAPTER x.x.xII

Father had written from Caracas that Mother was taking the next boat back to New York because she needed a lot of dental work done and hadn't any confidence in Venezuelan dentists, but when Neale met Mother at the dock she told him at once, laughingly, that the dental work was only an excuse, and that she had come to have a visit with her son. She had added with a whimsical defiance that, such being the fact, she had no intention of putting up the usual Crittenden bluff of something different.

"I'm not a Crittenden," she told Neale gaily in the cab on the way to the hotel, "though I married into the family so young! And now that I've worn a mantilla, with a rose in my hair, I'm not going to try any longer to pretend that I am."

Neale looked at her, admiring her now quite distinguished appearance, but feeling a little alarm at her tone. She sounded almost disturbingly electric.

"I've come up to have a real New York spree with my big son and his nice girl, now that he has condescended to let us know he has a nice girl,"

she told him, her smiling eyes at once tender and a little mocking. "You can afford it, can't you, since your last raise?"

"Oh, I can afford anything in reason."

"Your father says they tell him you're getting on splendidly."

"They never let on as much to me," said Neale drily, "though they are treating me very white as to pay."

They were at the hotel door now, where Mother made arrangements for a stay of a month.

"Dental work takes so long," she told Neale gravely in the elevator, making him laugh outright. She looked very well pleased at this, and after they were inside her room, stood up on tip-toes and gave him another kiss.

He had never entirely recovered from his father's chance remark that Mother had been only twenty when she married. She must have been about as old as he was now when he first began to remember her. Just a girl,--and she had seemed older to him then than now.

He told her this as he unstrapped her valise. "You seem younger to me every time I see you--lots younger now than when I was six or seven years old."

She laughed out. "I was a child myself when you were six or seven." She turned grave for a moment. "If I had you to bring up, now that I am a really grown person with a personality of my own and some experience of the world, I'd do it very differently. I'd make a better job of it."