I Walked in Arden Part 31

I hesitated for a second, puzzled. Either he was a very clever man, or--I did not know what to think.

"You once told me to take no one for granted," I fumbled slowly, "if it was a question of business. There were to be no exceptions, you said." I saw the twinkle gathering in the corners of his eyes. "I've known you, Knowlton, nine months, but I don't know very much about you."

He laughed long and loud. "That's having a man's teaching come home and howl on his own doorstep!" he laughed. "Sometimes, Ted, I think you are the biggest d.a.m.n fool I ever knew, and then you'll do something else, and I say, 'No, cuss it all, the boy has brains after all.'"

"Meaning that now I am in the d.a.m.n fool stage?" I snorted, rather irritated. He had a way of making one feel as if he held one in his hand.

"It penetrates," he shouted. "The boy is getting intelligent again," and he laughed some more. "Ted," he said, growing instantly serious, "since I earned my first dollar, you are the only man who has ever to my face doubted my honesty." He went off into a laugh again. "And to think," he roared, "that I promised myself that I'd bust the first one who did on the nose."

I pulled at my pipe, waiting for him to finish. I was conscious of an unpleasant glow at the back of my neck.

"Ted, you raised this issue. Let's have it out." I waved my pipe deprecatingly. "No, sir," he went on, "you asked for a dog fight. We'll have one. Have you ever studied the books of the company?"

"No," I muttered. "It wouldn't do me any good if I did. I don't know bookkeeping."

A trace of a grin returned to his face. "Well, you can hire chartered accountants to do it for you," he said. "If ever you do look at them, you will discover that I am a salaried man and haven't one penny interest in this company except the professional one of making good on a job."

I was out of my depth and lacked the technical vocabulary to make a suitable reply.

"Now, Ted, if we do put over this new proposition, all it will mean to me will be a letter of thanks from your father. I mean, legally speaking, I'll have no special claims for anything I do. I have no financial interest at stake except the purely human one of making a good job a better one."

I got up and held out my hand. "I'm sorry, Knowlton."

His old grin returned, as he took my hand. "It's all right, kid," he said. "I'm glad you're learning."

Deep Harbor I suspected to be a difficult spot in which to do new financing. Probably our absentee owners.h.i.+p would be a handicap. I went first to Mr. Claybourne to ask his advice. He received me in his little office, which was upstairs in his own factory. His face grew serious as he listened to me, and I saw him watching a switch-engine through the window.

"I don't know, Ted," he said at length, after my story was done. "I'll be frank with you. This isn't the time to think of you as a future son-in-law. We are talking now about Deep Harbor and business. We don't know much about you. The company is directed from London. We don't like that. On the grounds we have you and Knowlton. Now I dare say you are all right as a chemist, Ted--out in your laboratory. But you don't know any more about American business than a babe unborn."

"That leaves Knowlton," I suggested.

"Yes, that leaves Knowlton," he echoed. "Knowlton is a salaried man. He has no financial interest in your concern. Supposing some one offers him a bigger salary and he ups and leaves you. Where would you be?"

"Knowlton?" I gasped incredulously. "Leave us?"

"It has happened," said Mr. Claybourne drily. "And after all, why not?

Why should Knowlton stick with you, if he can make more somewhere else?"

"But--but loyalty," I protested, "good faith--a dozen things make it out of the question!"

Mr. Claybourne shook his head slowly. "Ted, you are going to get some hard knocks some day. The world isn't run the way you think it is. And I don't mean any discredit to Knowlton, either. It would only be sound sense for him to jump at a better offer."

My faith in Knowlton was unshaken, but I turned Mr. Claybourne's words over in my mind. "If that is an objection," I said at last, "I'll cable my father to give Knowlton an interest in the business."

"You ought to have done that long ago," replied Mr. Claybourne. "Well, Ted, I'm sorry I can't encourage you. Coming to dinner tonight?"

From Mr. Claybourne's factory I walked straight to the telegraph-and-cable office. "Do it now, as Knowlton would say," I smiled to myself as I walked along the street. It was quite a different thing for me to walk along Deep Harbor's streets now from what it had been the first few months. It almost seemed as if half the persons I met knew me.

"h.e.l.lo, Ted!" pa.s.sing men would call with cheery friendliness--from the barber at the Otooska House to the president of the country club, I was "Ted." Young ladies waved friendly hands at me from front porches, or would ask after Helen as I went by. It was a curiously intimate town, where men often fought each other bitterly in business and played golf together afterwards at the country club. We had no secrets from each other, and the young people wandered in and out of each other's homes as into clubs. It was a frightfully public way to live, and yet not unpleasant.

There was a special free masonry among the men. They knew each other's financial standing and bank account down to the last cent. They also knew each other's business capacity and reliability with astounding accuracy. One heard at the club startlingly frank revelations about all that was going on, and nothing that happened remained long unknown or undiscussed. There were some things talked about which did not reach the ears of the women--whom So-and-so visited on his last trip to New York, for example. The men knew and laughed at much that their code kept from their wives. On the whole, Deep Harbor was a reasonably moral place, in spite of much c.o.c.ktail drinking and free and easy manners. But there were a few notorious exceptions. And others, less notorious, indulged in occasional flings in distant towns. I never heard of any "prominent citizen" who kept a double establishment in Deep Harbor. A double life there meant a train journey. An actual local scandal was a six months'

wonder and carried with it almost complete ostracism to boot. We had had a few famous divorces, but none during my time.

I was thinking of all this as I walked to the telegraph office on State Street. The greetings along the way had started me on my train of thought. I was a long time wording my cable to my father and still longer reducing it to a business code. A cable or telegram in plain language was not advisable. Deep Harbor knew everything, even the secrets you sent or received by wire. I had been casually questioned more than once about sending messages in code. One advantage of so thoroughly transparent a gla.s.s house was that no one cared particularly about casting stones. The infinite gossip of the men, while frank and outspoken in its opinions, was rarely malicious. It was simply that a naked truth, deprived of the last fig leaf, circulated concerning every one.

"All right, Mr. Jevons," said the telegraph girl, as she took my coded message. "Charge it to the company?"

"No--personal," I answered. Knowlton had a way of making me account for every cable. A company cable had to have a copy filed at the office.

"Shall I 'phone an answer out to the Claybournes'?" she asked, as if it were a perfectly ordinary matter for her to have an intimate knowledge of my evening movements.

"Yes," I said, for one got accustomed to Deep Harbor's ways, "but make certain you give the reply to me in person. Do not leave a message or 'phone it to any one else in the house."

I took the electric car out to the factory to report to Knowlton.

"Claybourne is rather pessimistic," I began.

"He would be," said Knowlton. "He doesn't want to make himself personally responsible for your campaign. If he were first in, it would commit him to us as a venture which he was backing. Almost too bad you are to be his son-in-law. It ties his hands."

I said nothing about Mr. Claybourne's real objections.

Mr. Claybourne left early after dinner, as was his custom, to play bridge at the club. Mrs. Claybourne knitted in the front room, and Helen and I had thus our evening to ourselves. Leonidas curled up on a goatskin rug and snored while we alternately talked and read. Spring was coming on, although April, with its cold winds off the lake, was not very spring-like. But the approach of spring made us look forward more definitely to a possible date for our marriage. So far I had not been able to gain my father's permission either to return to England or to set an actual date for the wedding. He hoped that it could be arranged by mid-summer. Beyond that, he refused to commit himself. Helen thought June, as the most conventional time, would probably please her mother best. Already Mrs. Claybourne was threatening to go to the coast of Maine at the end of June and carry Helen with her. We knew that nothing but a definite date could forestall this plan. We figured that we could almost live upon my salary, but there were practical difficulties in the way of taking temporary quarters, if we were going to England soon afterwards. We were therefore a little reluctant to defy matters and get married at once. At least, so Helen's commonsense concluded. We could not afford to quarrel with either family, and a matter of a few extra weeks seemed hardly worth general displeasure. I agreed with Helen, chiefly because it never occurred to me to disagree with her. We were each so sure of the other's love that we did not pa.s.s through those agonies of suspense, petty jealousies, and quarrels that seem to be, according to novels, the stock-in-trade of lovers' conduct. We were simply, insanely, and also calmly happy. We lived in our own world, allowed no one across its threshold, and never dreamed of stepping outside it ourselves. Leonidas alone was privileged to share our bliss.

As we sat and talked in whispers of the days to come, the telephone bell rang. It was a cable from my father, and, like mine, in code. The girl at the other end spelled it out to me while Helen wrote it down. At last we had it all, and it was a fairly long one. I walked into the hall to get my copy of the code book, and discovered that I had left it at the telegraph office. Helen scolded me soundly, for our evening was spoiled.

It meant that I had to go back down town after the book, and it would then be too late to return. There was nothing for it but to go.

The girl at the office was quite sorry for me. She had found and kept my book.

"You might have sent it out by messenger," I said reproachfully.

"I thought of it, Mr. Jevons," she said, "but I didn't know if you would want it that bad. A messenger costs thirty cents."

"Yes," I agreed, "but some evenings are priceless."

With this rather flat remark, I left her. I went home to decode the message at my leisure. Another postponement awaited me there, for I found Knowlton ensconced in my study, reading one of my books, his feet upon my table. He came and went as he pleased at my rooms, an arrangement to which I had never objected. But I could not tell him about my father's cable until I knew what answer I had received. If my father refused my suggestion, obviously I could not let Knowlton know anything about it. He sat and talked until well past midnight, while the unread cable burned a hole in my pocket.

"By the way," said Knowlton suddenly, "a cable came through for you this evening. Anything in it?"

"From the family," I replied, mentally d.a.m.ning Deep Harbor's skill in publicity. "But how did you know?"

Knowlton grinned. "I happened to be sending a telegram, and the young lady with the auburn hair mentioned that she had just 'phoned one out to you at the Claybournes'. In code, she said. It was all by way of making conversation, Ted. She thought I'd be interested to know. I'll bet she knows the day I leave off my flannels and put on my summer underwear,"

Knowlton added, with his trenchant vulgarity. He got upon his feet, stretched himself, and said good-night. I saw him to the door and well on his way to the Otooska House, and then returned to my code book. It was a slow job. Each word in the code stood for either a phrase or a complete sentence. I had to look each one up in the book and then fit the meanings together, bit by bit, like a mosaic. At last the whole was clear. I could hardly believe my eyes. Here is what I saw:

"Good offer received for sale of business. Cancel any subscriptions of local capital. Give K. five per cent bonus net proceeds above salary.

Necessary papers follow first mail. T. sail England August first. Bring H."