The Brimming Cup Part 22

Mr. Bayweather took advantage of her absence to tell them a lot about how much the Crittendens had done for the whole region and what a golden thing Mrs. Crittenden's music had been for everybody, and about an original conception of business which Mr. Crittenden seemed to have. Mr.

Welles was not interested in music, but he was in business and he would have liked to hear a great deal more about this, but just at this point, as if to cut the clergyman off, in came Mr. Crttenden, very brisk and prompt, ready to take them around the mill.

Vincent stood up. They all stood up. Mr. Welles noted that Vincent had quite come out of his brown study and was now all there. He was as he usually was, a wire charged with a very high-voltage current.

They went out now, all of them together, but soon broke up into two groups. He stayed behind with Mr. Crittenden and pretended to look at the machinery of the saw-mill, which he found very boring indeed, as he hadn't the slightest comprehension of a single cog in it. But there was something there at which he really looked. It was the expression of Mr.

Crittenden's face as he walked about, and it was the expression on the faces of the men as they looked at the boss.

Mr. Welles, not being a talker, had had a great deal of opportunity to study the faces of others, and he had become rather a specialist in expressions. Part of his usefulness in the office had come from that.

He had catalogued in his mind the different looks on human faces, and most of them connected with any form of business organization were infinitely familiar to him, from the way the casual itinerant temporary laborer looked at the boss of his gang, to the way the star salesman looked at the head of the house.

But here was a new variety to him, these frank and familiar glances thrown in answer to the nodded greeting or short sentence of the boss as he walked about. They were not so much friendly (although they were that too), as they were familiar and open, as though nothing lay hidden behind the apparent expression. It was not often that Mr. Welles had encountered that, a look that seemed to hide nothing.

He wondered if he could find out anything about this from Mr. Crittenden and put a question to him about his relations with his men. He tried to make it tactful and sensible-sounding, but as he said the words, he knew just how flat and parlor-reformerish they sounded; and it didn't surprise him a bit to have the business-man bristle up and snap his head off. It had sounded as though he didn't know a thing about business--he, the very marrow of whose bones was soaked in a bitter knowledge that the only thing that could keep it going was the fear of death in every man's heart, lest the others get ahead of him and trample him down.

He decided that he wouldn't say another thing, just endure the temporary boredom of being trotted about to have things explained to him, which he hadn't any intention of trying to understand.

But Mr. Crittenden did not try to explain. Perhaps he was bored himself, perhaps he guessed the visitor's ignorance. He just walked around from one part of the big, suns.h.i.+ny shops to another, taking advantage of this opportunity to look things over for his own purposes. And everywhere he went, he gave and received back that curious, new look of openness.

It was not noisy here as in the saw-mill, but very quiet and peaceful, the bee-like whirring of the belts on the pulleys the loudest continuous sound. It was clean, too. The hardwood floor was being swept clean of sawdust and shavings all the time, by a lame old man, who pottered tranquilly about, sweeping and cleaning and putting the trash in a big box on a truck. When he had it full, he beckoned to a burly lad, shoving a truck across the room, and called in a clear, natural, friendly voice, "Hey, Nat, come on over." The big lad came, whistling, pushed the box off full, and brought it back empty, still whistling airily.

There were a good many work-people in sight. Mr. Welles made a guessing estimate that the business must keep about two hundred busy. And there was not one who looked harried by his work. The big, cluttered place heaped high with piles of curiously shaped pieces of wood, filled with oddly contrived saws and lathes and knives and buffers for sawing and turning and polis.h.i.+ng and fitting those bits of wood, was brooded over as by something palpable by an emanation of order. Mr. Welles did not understand a detail of what he was looking at, but from the whole, his mind, experienced in business, took in a singularly fresh impression that everybody there knew what he was up to, in every sense of the word.

He and Mr. Crittenden stood for a time looking at and chatting to a gray-haired man who was polis.h.i.+ng smoothly planed oval bits of board. He stopped as they talked, ran his fingers over the satin-smoothed surface with evident pleasure, and remarked to his employer, "Mighty fine maple we're getting from the Warner lot. See the grain in that!"

He held it up admiringly, turning it so that the light would show it at its best, and looked at it respectfully. "There's no wood like maple,"

he said. Mr. Crittenden answered, "Yep. The Warner land is just right for slow-growing trees." He took it out of the workman's hand, looked it over more closely with an evident intelligent certainty of what to look for, and handed it back with a nod that signified his appreciation of the wood and of the workmans.h.i.+p which had brought it to that state.

There had been about that tiny, casual human contact a quality which Mr.

Welles did not recognize. His curiosity rose again. He wondered if he might not succeed in getting some explanation out of the manufacturer, if he went about it very tactfully. He would wait for his chance. He began to perceive with some surprise that he was on the point of quite liking Mrs. Crittenden's husband.

So he tried another question, after a while, very cautiously, and was surprised to find Mr. Crittenden no longer snappish, but quite friendly.

It occurred to him as the pleasantest possibility that he might find his liking for the other man returned. That _would_ be a new present hung on the Christmas tree of his life in Vermont.

On the strength of this possibility, and banking on the friendliness in the other man's eyes, he drove straight at it, the phrase which the minister had used when he said that Mr. Crittenden thought of business as an ideal service to humanity as much as doctoring. That had sounded so ignorant and ministerial he hadn't even thought of it seriously, till after this contact with the man of whom it had been said. The best way with Crittenden was evidently the direct one. He had seen that in the first five minutes of observation of him. So he would simply tell him how bookish and impossible it had sounded, and see what he had to say.

He'd probably laugh and say the minister had it all wrong, of course, regular minister's idea.

And so presently they were off, on a real talk, beyond what he had hoped for, and Crittenden was telling him really what he had meant. He was saying in his firm, natural, easy voice, as though he saw nothing specially to be self-conscious about in it, "Why, of course I don't rank lumbering and wood-working with medicine. Wood isn't as vital to human life as quinine, or a knowledge of what to do in typhoid fever. But after all, wood is something that people have to have, isn't it?

Somebody has to get it out and work it up into usable shape. If he can do this, get it out of the woods without spoiling the future of the forests, drying up the rivers and all that, and have it transformed into some finished product that people need in their lives, it's a sort of plain, everyday service, isn't it? And to do this work as economically as it can be managed, taking as low a price as you can get along with instead of s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g as high a price as possible out of the people who have to have it, what's the matter with that, as an interesting problem in ingenuity? I tell you, Mr. Welles, you ought to talk to my wife about this. It's as much her idea as mine. We worked it out together, little by little. It was when Elly was a baby. She was the second child, you know, and we began to feel grown-up. By that time I was pretty sure I could make a go of the business. And we first began to figure out what we were up to. Tried to see what sort of a go we wanted the business to have. We first began to make some sense out of what we were doing in life."

Mr. Welles found himself overwhelmed by a reminiscent ache at this phrase and burst out, his words tinged with the bitterness he tried to keep out of his mind, "Isn't that an awful moment when you first try to make some sense out of what you are doing in life! But suppose you had gone on doing it, always, always, till you were an old man, and never succeeded! Suppose all you seemed to be accomplis.h.i.+ng was to be able to hand over to the sons of the directors more money than was good for them? I tell you, Mr. Crittenden, I've often wished that once, just once, before I died I could be _sure_ that I had done anything that was of any use to anybody." He went on, nodding his head, "What struck me so about what Mr. Bayweather said is that I've often thought about doctors myself, and envied them. They take money for what they do, of course, but they miss lots of chances to make more, just so's to be of some use.

I've often thought when they were running the prices up and up in our office just because they could, that a doctor would be put out of his profession in no time by public opinion, if he ever tried to screw the last cent out of everybody, the way business men do as a matter of course."

Mr. Crittenden protested meditatively against this. "Oh, don't you think maybe there's a drift the other way among decent business people now?

Why, when Marise and I were first trying to get it clear in our own heads, we kept it pretty dark, I tell you, that we weren't in it only for what money we could make, because we knew how loony we'd seem to anybody else. But don't you see any signs that lately maybe the same idea is striking lots of people in America?"

"No, I do _not_!" said Mr. Welles emphatically. "With a profiteer on every corner!

"But look-y-here, the howl about profiteers, isn't that something new?

Isn't that a dumb sort of application to business of the doctor's standard of service? Twenty years ago, would anybody have thought of doing anything but uneasily admiring a grocer who made all the money he could out of his business? 'Why shouldn't he?' people would have thought then. Everybody else did. Twenty years ago, would anybody have dreamed of legally preventing a rich man from buying all the coal he wanted, whether there was enough for everybody, or not?"

Mr. Welles considered this in unconvinced silence. Mr. Crittenden went on, "Why, sometimes it looks to me like the difference between what's legitimate in baseball and in tennis. Every ball-player will try to bluff the umpire that he's safe when he knows the baseman tagged him three feet from the bag; and public opinion upholds him in his bluff if he can get away with it. But like as not, the very same man who lies like a trooper on the diamond, if he went off that very afternoon to play tennis would never dream of announcing 'out' if his opponent's ball really had landed in the court,--not if it cost him the sett and match,--whether anybody was looking at him or not. It's 'the thing' to try to get anything you can put over in baseball, anything the umpire can't catch you at. And it's not 'the thing' in tennis. Most of the time you don't even have any umpire. That's it: that's not such a bad way to put it. My wife and I wanted to run our business on the tennis standard and not on the baseball one. Because I believe, ultimately you know, in fixing things,--everything,--national life as well, so that we'll need as few umpires as possible. Once get the tennis standard adopted ..."

Mr. Welles said mournfully, "Don't get started on politics. I'm too old to have any hopes of that!"

"Right you are there," said Mr. Crittenden. "Economic organization is the word. That's one thing that keeps me so interested in my little economic laboratory here. Political parties are as prehistoric as the mastodon, if they only knew it."

Mr. Welles said, "But the queer thing is that you make it work."

"Oh, anybody with a head for business could make it work. You've got to know how to manage your machine before you can make it go, of course.

But that's not saying you have to drive it somewhere you don't want to get to. I don't say that that workman back there who was making such a beautiful job of polis.h.i.+ng that maple could make it go. He couldn't."

Mr. Welles persisted. "But I've always thought, I've always _seen_ it, or thought I had ... that life-and-death compet.i.tion is the only stimulus that's strong enough to stir men up to the prodigious effort they have to put out to _make_ a go of their business, start the machine running. That, and the certainty of all they could get out of the consumer as a reward. You know it's held that there's a sort of mystic ident.i.ty between all you can get out of the consumer and the exact amount of profit that'll just make the business go."

Mr. Crittenden said comfortably, as though he were talking of something that did not alarm him, "Oh well, the best of the feudal seigneurs mournfully believed that a sharp sword and a long lance in their own hands were the strongholds of society. The wolf-pack idea of business will go the same way." He explained in answer to Mr. Welles' vagueness as to this term, "You know, the conception that if you're going to get hair brushes or rubber coats or mattresses or what-not enough for humanity manufactured, the only way is to have the group engaged in it form a wolf-pack, hunting down the public to extract from it as much money as possible. The salesmen and advertisers take care of this extracting. Then this money's to be fought for, by the people engaged in the process, as wolves fight over the carca.s.s of the deer they have brought down together. This is the fight between the directors of labor and the working-men. It's ridiculous to hold that such a wasteful and incoherent system is the only one that will arouse men's energies enough to get them into action. It's absurd to think that business men ...

they're the flower of the nation, they're America's specialty, you know ... can only find their opportunity for service to their fellow-men by such haphazard contracts with public service as helping raise money for a library or heading a movement for better housing of the poor, when they don't know anything about the housing of the poor, nor what it ought to be. Their opportunity for public service is right in their own legitimate businesses, and don't you forget it. Everybody's business is his best way to public service, and doing it that way, you'd put out of operation the professional uplifters who uplift as a business, and can't help being priggish and self-conscious about it. It makes me tired the way professional idealists don't see their big chance. They'll take all the money they can get from business for hospitals, and laboratories, and to investigate the sleeping sickness or the boll-weevil, but that business itself could rank with public libraries and hospitals as an ideal element in the life on the globe ... they can't open their minds wide enough to take in that."

Mr. Welles had been following this with an almost painful interest and surprise. He found it very agitating, very upsetting. Suppose there had been something there, all the time. He must try to think it out more.

Perhaps it was not true. But here sat a man who had made it work. Why hadn't he thought of it in time? Now it was too late. Too late for him to do anything. Anything? The voice of the man beside him grew dim to him, as, uneasy and uncertain, his spirits sank lower and lower. Suppose all the time there had been a way out besides beating the retreat to the women, the children, and the gardens? Only now it was too late! What was the use of thinking of it all?

For a moment he forgot where he was. It seemed to him that there was something waiting for him to think of it ...

But oddly enough, all that presented itself to him, when he tried to look, was the story that had nothing to do with anything, which his cousin had told him in a recent letter, of the fiery sensitive young Negro doctor, who had worked his way through medical school, and hospital-training, gone South to practise, and how he had been treated by the white people in the town where he had settled. He wondered if she hadn't exaggerated all that. But she gave such definite details. Perhaps Mr. Crittenden knew something about that problem. Perhaps he had an idea about that, too, that might be of help. He would ask him.

PART II

CHAPTER XI

IN AUNT HETTY'S GARDEN

I

June 10.

Marise bent to kiss the soft withered cheek. "Elly is a _real_ Vermonter, but I'm not. She can get along with just 'h.e.l.lo, Aunt Hetty,'

but that's not enough for me," she said tenderly to the old woman; "I have to kiss you."

"Oh, you can do as you like, for all of me," answered the other with an unsparing indifference.

Marise laughed at the quality of this, taking the shaky old hand in hers with a certainty of affection returned. She went on, "This is a regular descent on you, Cousin Hetty. I've come to show you off, you and the house and the garden. This is Mr. Welles who has settled next door to us, you know, and this is Mr. Marsh who is visiting him for a time. And here are the children, and Eugenia Mills came up from the city last night and will be here perhaps, if she gets up energy after her afternoon nap, and Neale is coming over from the mill after closing hours, and we've brought along a basket supper and, if you'll let us, we're going to eat it out in your garden, under Great-great-grandmother's willow-tree."

Cousin Hetty nodded dry, though not uncordial greetings to the strangers and said crisply, "You're welcome enough to sit around anywhere you can find, and eat your lunch here, but where you're going to find anything to show off, beats me."