The Brimming Cup

CHAPTER X
AT THE MILL

The stenographer, a pale, thin boy, with a scarred face, and very white hands, limped over to the manager's desk with a pile of letters to be signed. "There, Captain Crittenden," he said, pride in his accent.

Neale was surprised and pleased. "All done, Arthur?" He looked over the work hastily. "Good work, good work." He leaned back, looking up at the other. "How about it, anyhow, Arthur? Is it going to work out all right?"

The stenographer looked at him hard and swallowed visibly. "I never dreamed I'd be fit to do anything I like half so well. I thought when I was in the hospital that I was done for, for sure. Captain Crittenden, if you only knew what my mother and I think about what you've done for . . ."

Neale dodged hastily. "That's all right. That's all right. If you like it, that's all that's necessary. And I'm not Captain any more."

"I forget, sir," said the other apologetically.

"Can you sit down and take a second batch right now? I want to get through early. Mrs. Crittenden's going to bring some visitors to see the place this afternoon, and I'll have to be with them more or less."

He looked at the clock. It was half-past three. Marise had said she would be there about four. He gave a calculating glance at the stack of letters. He would never be able to get through those. "We'll have to get a move on," he remarked. "Things got pretty well piled up while I was away."

He began to dictate rapidly, steadily, the end of a sentence clearly in his mind before he pronounced the first word. He liked to dictate and enjoyed doing it well. The pale young stenographer bent over his note-book, his disfigured face intent and serious.

"Turned out all right, Arthur has," thought Neale to himself. "I wasn't so far off, when I thought of the business college for him." Then he applied himself single-mindedly to his dictation, taking up one letter after another, with hardly a pause in his voice. But for all his diligence, he had not come to the bottom of the pile when four o'clock struck; nor ten minutes later when, glancing out of the window, he saw Marise and the children with Mr. Bayweather and the two other men coming across the mill-yard. Evidently Mr. Bayweather had dropped in just as they were going to start and had come along. He stopped dictating and looked at the group with a certain interest. Marise and the children had had a good deal to say yesterday about the newcomers to Crittenden's.

It seemed to him that the impression he had received of them had been as inaccurate as such second-hand impressions were apt to be. The older man was just like any elderly business man, for all he could see, nothing so especially attractive about him, although Marise had said in her ardent way that he was "the sort of old American you love on sight, the kind that makes you home-sick when you meet him in Europe." And as for Mr. Marsh, he couldn't see any signs of his being such a record-breaking live-wire as they had all said. He walked along quietly enough, and was evidently as resigned as any of them to letting Mr. Bayweather do all the talking. On the other hand, none of them had told him what a striking-looking fellow he was, so tall, and with such a bold carriage of that round dark head.

"Here they come, Arthur," he remarked. "No more time. But I'll try to squeeze in a minute or two, while they are here, to finish up these last ones."

The young man followed the direction of his eyes and nodded. He continued looking at the advancing group for a moment, and as he stood up, "You could tell that Mr. Marsh is a millionaire by the way his clothes fit, couldn't you?" he remarked, turning to go back to his desk in the outer office.

They were coming down the hall now. Neale went forward to open the door, met and breasted the wave of children who after hugging casually at his knees and arms, swept by; and stepped forward to be presented to the newcomers. They had not crossed the threshold, before his first impression was reversed in one case. Marsh was a live-wire all right. Now that he had seen his eyes, he knew what Elly had meant when she said that when he looked at you it was like lightning.

Mr. Bayweather barely waited for the first greetings to be pronounced before he burst out, "Do they say, 'backwards and forwards' or 'back and forth'?"

Neale laughed. Old Bayweather was perennial. "Backwards and forwards, of course," he said. "English people always say everything the longest possible way." He explained to the others, "Mr. Bayweather is an impassioned philologist . . ."

"So I have gathered," commented Marsh.

". . . and whenever any friends of his go on travels, they are always asked to bring back some philological information about the region where they go."

He turned to Marise (how sweet she looked in that thin yellow dress). "Where do you want your personally conducted to begin, dear?" he asked her. (Lord! How good it seemed to get back to Marise!)

Mr. Bayweather cut in hastily, "If I may be permitted to suggest, I think a history of the mill would be advisable as a beginning. I will be glad to tell the newcomers about this. I've just been working the subject up for a chapter in history of Ashley."

Neale caught an anguished side-glance from Marise and sent back to her a shrugged message of helplessness in the face of Destiny. The man didn't live who could head old Bayweather off when he got started on local history. And besides, this would give him time to get those last three letters finished. Aloud he said, "I wouldn't dare say a word about history in Mr. Bayweather's presence. I have a few letters to finish. I'll just step into the outer office and be ready to start when you've heard the history lecture." He turned to the children, who were tapping on the typewriter. "Look here, kids, you'd be better off where you won't break anything. Get along with you out into the mill-yard and play on the lumber-piles, why don't you? Paul, you see if you can tell yellow birch from oak this time!"

He and the children beat a retreat together into the outer office, where he bent over Arthur's desk and began to dictate in a low voice, catching, as he did so, an occasional rotund phrase from the disquisition in the other room. ". . . the glorious spirit of manly independence of the Green Mountain Boys . . ."

To himself Neale thought, "He'd call it bolshevism if he met it today . . ."

". . . second building erected in the new settlement, 1766, as a fort. . . . No, no, Mr. Marsh, not against the Indians! Our early settlers here never had any trouble with the Indians."

Neale laughed to himself at the clergyman's resentment of any ignorance of any detail of Ashley's unimportant history.

". . . as a fort against the York State men in the land-grant quarrels with New Hampshire and New York, before the Revolution." Neale, smiling inwardly, bet himself a nickel that neither of the two strangers had ever heard of the Vermont land-grant quarrels, and found himself vastly tickled by the profound silence they kept on the subject. They were evidently scared to death of starting old Bayweather off on another line. They were safe enough, if they only knew it. It was inconceivable to Mr. Bayweather that any grown person should not know all about early Vermont history.

At this point Marise came out of the office, her face between laughter and exasperation. She clasped her hands together and said, "Can't you do anything?"

"In a minute," he told her. "I'll just finish these two letters and then I'll go and break him off short."

Marise went on to the accountant's desk, to ask about his wife, who sang in her winter chorus.

He dictated rapidly: "No more contracts will go out to you if this stripping of the mountain-land continues. Our original contract has in it the clause which I always insist on, that trees smaller than six inches through the butt shall not be cut. You will please give your choppers definite orders on this point, and understand that logs under the specified size will not be accepted at the mill." He held out to the stenographer the letter he was answering. "Here, Arthur, copy the name and address off this. It's one of those French-Canadian names, hard to spell if you don't see it."

He paused an instant to hear how far Mr. Bayweather had progressed, and heard him saying, "In the decade from 1850 on, there was a terrible and scandalous devastation of the mountain-land . . ." and said to himself, "Halfway through the century. I'll have time to go on a while. All ready, Arthur." He dictated: "On birch brush-backs of the model specified, we can furnish you any number up to . . ." He wound his way swiftly and surely through a maze of figures and specifications without consulting a paper or record, and drawing breath at the end, heard Mr. Bayweather pronouncing his own name. ". . . Mr. Crittenden has taught us all a great deal about the economic aspects of a situation with which we had had years of more familiarity than he. His idea is that this mountainous part of New England is really not fit for agriculture. Farming in the usual sense has been a losing venture ever since the Civil War high prices for wool ceased. Only the bottoms of the valleys are fit for crops. Most of our county is essentially forest-land. And his idea of the proper use to make of it, is to have a smallish industrial population engaged in wood-working, who would use the bits of arable land in the valleys as gardens to raise their own food. He has almost entirely reorganized the life of our valley, along these lines, and I daresay he cannot at all realize himself the prodigious change from hopelessness and slow death to energy and forward-looking activity which his intelligent grasp of the situation has brought to this corner of the earth."

The young stenographer had heard this too, and had caught the frown of annoyance which the personal reference brought to Neale's forehead. He leaned forward and said earnestly, "It's so, Captain . . . Mr. Crittenden. It's so!"

Mr. Bayweather went on, "There is enough wood in the forests within reach of the mill to keep a moderate-sized wood-working factory going indefinitely, cutting by rotation and taking care to leave enough trees for natural reforestration. But of course that has not been the American way of going at things. Instead of that steady, continuous use of the woods, which Mr. Crittenden has shown to be possible, furnishing good, well-paid work at home for the men who would be otherwise forced off into cities, our poor mountains have been lumbered every generation or so, on an immense, murderous, slashing scale, to make a big sum of money for somebody in one operation. When old Mr. Burton Crittenden's nephew came to town it was a different story. Mr. Neale Crittenden's ideal of the lumber business is, as I conceive it, as much a service to mankind as a doctor's is."

Neale winced, and shook his head impatiently. How ministers did put the Sunday-school rubber-stamp on everything they talked about—even legitimate business.

"And as Mrs. Crittenden's free-handed generosity with her musical talent has transformed the life of the region as much as Mr. Crittenden's high and disinterested . . ."

"Oh Gosh, Arthur, never mind about the rest!" murmured Neale, moving back quickly into the inner office to create a diversion. "All ready?" he asked in a loud, hearty voice, as he came up to them. "Up to 1920 by this time, Mr. Bayweather?" He turned to Marsh, "I'm afraid there is very little to interest you, with your experience of production on a giant scale, in a business so small that the owner and manager knows every man by name and everything about him."

"You couldn't show me anything more out of my own experience," answered Marsh, "than just that. And as for what I know about production on a giant scale, I can tell you it's not much. I did try to hook on, once or twice, years ago—to find out something about the business that my father spent his life in helping to build up, but it always ended in my being shooed out of the office by a rather irritable manager who knew I knew nothing about any of it, and who evidently hated above everything else, having amateur directors come horning in on what was no party of theirs. 'If they get their dividends all right, what more do they want?' was his motto. I never was able to make any sense out of it. It's all on such a preposterously big scale now. Once in a while, touring, I have come across one of our branch establishments and have stopped my car to see the men come out of the buildings at quitting-time. That's as close as I have ever come. Do you really know their names?"

"I can't pronounce all the French-Canadian names to suit them, but I know them all, yes. Most of them are just the overflow of the rural population around here."

He said to himself in congratulation, "Between us, we pried old Bayweather loose from his soft soap, pretty neatly," and gave the man before him a look of friendly understanding. He was a little startled, for an instant, by the expression in the other's bright eyes, which he found fixed on him with an intentness almost disconcerting. "Does he think I'm trying to put something over on him?" he asked himself with a passing astonishment, "or is he trying to put something over on me?" Then he remembered that everyone had spoken of Marsh's eyes as peculiar; it was probably just his habit. "He can look right through me and out at the other side, for all I care!" he thought indifferently, meeting the other's gaze with a faintly humorous sense of something absurd.

Marise had come back now, and was saying, "You really must get started, Neale, the men will be quitting work soon."

"Yes, yes, this minute," he told her, and led the way with Mr. Welles, leaving Marise and Mr. Bayweather to be showman for Mr. Marsh. He now remembered that he had not heard the older man say a single word as yet, and surmised that he probably never said much when the fluent Mr. Marsh was with him. He wondered a little, as they made their way to the saw-mill, what Marise saw in either of them to interest her so much. Oh well, they were a change, of course, from Ashley and Crittenden's people, and different from the Eugenia Mills bunch, in New York, too.

He stood now, beside Mr. Welles, in the saw-mill, the ringing high crescendo scream of the saws filling the air. Marise stood at the other end talking animatedly to the two she had with her. Marise was a wonder on conversation anyhow. What could she find to say, now, for instance? What in the world was there to say to an ex-office manager of a big electrical company about a wood-working business?

His eyes were caught by what one of the men was doing and he yelled at him sharply, "Look out there, Harry! Stop that! What do I have a guard rail there for, anyhow?"

"What was the matter?" asked Mr. Welles, startled.

"Oh, nothing much. One of the men dodging under a safety device to save him a couple of steps. They get so reckless about those saws. You have to look out for them like a bunch of bad children."

Mr. Welles looked at him earnestly. "Are you . . . have you . . . Mr. Bayweather has told us so much about all you do for the men . . . how they are all devoted to you."

Neale looked and felt annoyed. Bayweather and his palaver! "I don't do anything for them, except give them as good wages as the business will stand, and as much responsibility for running things as they'll take. Beyond that, I let them alone. I don't believe in what's known as 'welfare work.' I wouldn't want them messing around in my private life, and I don't believe they'd like me in theirs."

The necessity to raise his voice to a shout in order to make himself heard above the tearing scream of the saws made him sound very abrupt and peremptory, more so than he had meant. As he finished speaking his eyes met those of the older man, and were held by the clarity and candor of the other's gaze. They were like a child's eyes in that old face. It was as though he had been abrupt and impatient to Elly or Mark.

As he looked he saw more than candor and clarity. He saw a deep weariness.

Neale smoothed his forehead, a little ashamed of his petulance, and drew his companion further from the saws where the noise was less. He meant to say something apologetic, but the right phrase did not come to him. And as Mr. Welles said nothing further, they walked on in silence. They passed through the first and second floors of the mill, where the handling of the smaller pieces was done, and neither of them spoke a word. Neale looked about him at the familiar, familiar scene, and found it too dull to make any comment on. What was there to say? This was the way you manufactured brush-backs and wooden boxes and such-like things, and that was all. The older men bent over their lathes quietly, the occasional woman-worker smartly hammering small nails into the holes already bored for her, the big husky boys shoved the trucks around, the elevator droned up and down, the belts flicked as they sped around and around. Blest if he could think of any explanation to make to a grown man on so simple and everyday a scene. And yet he did not enjoy this silence because it seemed like a continuation of his grumpiness of a few minutes ago. Well, the next time the old fellow said anything, he'd fall over himself to be nice in his answer.

Presently as they came to the outside door, Mr. Welles remarked with a gentle dignity, in evident allusion to Neale's cutting him short, "I only meant that I was very much interested in what I see here, and that I would like very much to know more about it."

Neale felt he fairly owed him an apology. He began to understand what Marise meant when she had said the old fellow was one you loved on sight. It was her way, emotionally heightened as usual, of saying that he was really a very nice old codger. "I'll be glad to tell you anything you want to know, Mr. Welles," he said. "But I haven't any idea what it is that interests you. You fire ahead and ask questions and I'll agree to answer them."

"That's what I'd like, all right. And remember if I ask anything you don't want to talk about . . ." He referred evidently to Neale's impatience of a few minutes ago.

"There aren't any trade secrets in the wood-working business," said Neale, laughing. "Better come along and see our drying-room as we talk. We've had to make some concession to modern haste and use kiln-drying, although I season first in the old way as long as possible." They stepped out of the door and started across the mill-yard.

Mr. Welles said with a very faint smile in the corner of his pale old lips, "I don't believe you want to show me any of this, Mr. Crittenden. And honestly that isn't what interests me about it. I wouldn't know a drying-room from a steam-laundry."

Neale stopped short, and surveyed his companion with amusement and admiration. "Good for you!" he cried. "Tell the truth and shame the devil and set an example to all honest men. Mr. Welles, you have my esteem."

The old man had a shy smile at this. "I don't tell the truth that way to everybody," he said demurely.

Neale liked him more and more. "Sir, I am yours to command," he said, sitting down on the steps, "ask ahead!"

Mr. Welles turned serious, and hesitated. "Mr. Bayweather said . . ." He began and looked anxiously at Neale.

"I won't bite even if he did," Neale reassured him.

Mr. Welles looked at him with the pleasantest expression in his eyes. "It's a great relief to find that we can get on with one another," he said, "for I must admit to you that I have fallen a complete victim to Mrs. Crittenden. I . . . I love your wife." He brought it out with a quaint, humorous roundness.

"You can't get up any discussion with me about that," said Neale. "I do myself."

They both laughed, and Mr. Welles said, "But you see, caring such a lot about her, it was a matter of great importance to me what kind of husband she had. I find actually seeing you very exciting."

"You're the first who ever found it so, I'm sure," said Neale, amused at the idea.

"But it wasn't this I wanted to say," said Mr. Welles. He went back and said again, "Mr. Bayweather said your idea of business is service, like a doctor's?"

Neale winced at the Bayweather priggishness of this way of putting it, but remembering his remorse for his earlier brusqueness, he restrained himself to good humor and the admission, "Making allowance for ministerial jargon, that's something like a fair statement."

He was astonished at the seriousness with which Mr. Welles took this. What was it to him? The old man looked at him, deeply, unaccountably, evidently entirely at a loss. "Mr. Crittenden," he said abruptly, "to speak right out, that sounded to me like the notion of a nice idealistic woman, who has never been in business. You see I've been in a business office all my life!"

Neale found his liking for the gentle, troubled old man enough for him to say truthfully, "Mr. Welles, I don't mind talking to you about it. Sure, yes I can understand how having a minister put it that way. . . . Lord! How the old boy does spill over! And yet why should I care? I'm ashamed of letting harmless Mr. Bayweather get on my nerves so."

Mr. Welles started to speak, found no words, and waved an arm as if to imply that he understood perfectly. This made Neale laugh a little, and gave him a picture of the helplessness of a newcomer to Ashley, before the flood-tide of Mr. Bayweather's local learning.

He went on, "He sort of taints an honest idea, doesn't he, by his high-falutin' way of going on about it?"

He hesitated, trying to think of simple words to sum up what he had, after all, never exactly formulated because it had been so much an attitude he and Marise had silently grown into. It was hard, he found, to hit on any expression that said what he wanted to; but after all, it wasn't so very important whether he did or not. He was only trying to make a nice tired old man think himself enough respected to be seriously talked to. He'd just ramble on, till Marise brought the other visitors up to them.

And yet as he talked, he got rather interested in his statement of it. A comparison of baseball and tennis ethics came into his mind as apposite, and quite tickled him by its aptness. Mr. Welles threw in an occasional remark. He was no man's fool, it soon appeared, for all his mildness. And for a time he seemed to be interested.

But presently Neale noticed that the other was looking absent and no longer made any comments. That was what happened, Neale reflected with an inward smile, as he slowed down and prepared to stop, when anybody succeeded in getting you started on your hobby. They were bored. They didn't really want to know after all. It was like trying to tell folks about your travels.

But he was astonished to the limit of astonishment by what Mr. Welles brought out in the silence which finally dropped between them. The old man looked at him very hard and asked, "Mr. Crittenden, do you know anything about the treatment of the Negroes in the South?"

Neale sat up blinking. "Why no, nothing special, except that it's a fearful knot we don't seem to get untied," he said. "I contribute to the support of an agricultural school in Georgia, but I'm afraid I never take much time to read the reports they send me. Why do you ask?"

"Oh, no particular reason. I have a relative down there, that's all."

Marise and the others came out of a door at the far-end of the building now, and advanced towards them slowly. Neale and Mr. Welles watched them.

Neale was struck again by Marsh's appearance. As far away as you could see him, he held the eye. "An unusual man, your friend Mr. Marsh," he remarked. "Mrs. Crittenden tells me that he is one of the people who have been everywhere and done everything and seen everybody. He looks the part."

Mr. Welles made no comment on this for a moment, his eyes on the advancing group. Marise had raised her parasol of yellow silk. It made a shimmering halo for her dark, gleaming hair, as she turned her head towards Marsh, her eyes narrowed and shining as she laughed at something he said.

Then the old man remarked, "Yes, he's unusual, all right, Vincent is. He has his father's energy and push." He added in a final characterization, "I've known him ever since he was a little boy, and I never knew him not to get what he went after."

As they walked along towards the mill, Mr. Welles had a distinct impression that he was going to dislike the mill-owner, and as distinct a certainty as to where that impression came from. He had received too many by the same route not to recognize the shipping label. Not that Vincent had ever said a single slighting word about Mr. Crittenden. He couldn't have, very well, since they neither of them had ever laid eyes on him. But Vincent never needed words to convey impressions into other people's minds. He had a thousand other ways better than words. Vincent could be silent, knock off the ashes from his cigarette, recross his legs, and lean back in his chair in a manner that slammed an impression into your head as though he had yelled it at you.

But to be fair to Vincent, Mr. Welles thought probably he had been more than ready to soak up an impression like the one he felt. They'd had such an awfully good time with Mrs. Crittenden and the children, it stood to reason the head of the house would seem to them like a butter-in and an outsider in a happy-family group.

More than this, too. As they came within hearing of the industrial activity of the mill, and he felt his heart sink and turn sore and bitter, Mr. Welles realized that Vincent had very little to do with his dread of meeting the mill-owner. It was not Mr. Crittenden he shrank from, it was the mill-owner, the business man . . . business itself.

Mr. Welles hated and feared the sound of the word and knew that it had him cowed, because in his long life he had known it to be the only reality in the world of men. And in that world he had known the only reality to be that if you didn't cut the other fellow's throat first he would cut yours. There wasn't any other reality. He had heard impractical, womanish men say there was, and try to prove it, only to have their economic throats cut considerably more promptly than any others. He had done his little indirect share of the throat-cutting always. He was not denying the need to do it. Only he had never found it a very cheerful atmosphere in which to pass one's life. And now he had escaped, to the only other reality, the pleasant, gentle, slightly unreal world of women, nice women, and children and gardens. He was so old now that there was no shame in his sinking into that for what time he had left, as other old fellows sank into an easy-chair. Only he wished that he could have got along without being reminded so vividly, as he would be by this trip to the business-world, of what paid for the arm-chair, supported the nice women and children. He wished he hadn't had to come here, to be forced to remember again that the inevitable foundation for all that was pleasant and livable in private life was the grim determination on the part of a strong man to give his strength to "taking it out of the hide" of his competitors, his workmen, and the public. He'd had a vacation from that, and it made him appallingly depressed to take another dose of it now. He sincerely wished that sweet Mrs. Crittenden were a widow with a small income from some impersonal source with no uncomfortable human associations with it. He recalled with a sad cynicism the story Mrs. Crittenden had told them about the clever and forceful lawyer who had played the dirty trick on the farmer here in Ashley, and done him out of his wood-land. She had been very much wrought up about that, the poor lady, without having the least idea that probably her husband's business-life was full of such knifings-in-the-back, all with the purpose of making a quiet life for her and the children.

Well, there was nothing for it but to go on. It wouldn't last long, and Mr. Welles' back was practised in bowing to weather he didn't like but which passed if you waited a while.

They were going up the hall now, towards a door marked "Office," the children scampering ahead. The door was opening. The tall man who stood there, nodding a welcome to them, must be Mr. Crittenden.

So that was the kind of man he was. Nothing special about him. Just a nice-looking American business-man, with a quiet, calm manner and a friendly face.

To the conversation which followed and which, like all such conversations, amounted to nothing at all, Mr. Welles made no contribution. What was the use? Mr. Bayweather and Vincent were there. The conversation would not flag. So he had the usual good chance of the silent person to use his eyes. He looked mostly at Mr. Crittenden. Well, he wasn't so bad. They were usually nice enough men in personal relations, business men. This one had good eyes, very nice when he looked at the children or his wife. They were often good family men, too. There was something about him, however, that wasn't just like all others. What was it? Not clothes. His suit was cut off the same piece with forty million other American business-suits. Not looks, although there was an outdoor ruddiness of skin and clearness of eye that made him look a little like a sailor. Oh yes, Mr. Welles had it. It was his voice. Whenever he spoke, there was something . . . something natural about his voice, as though it didn't ever say things he didn't mean.

Well, for Heaven's sake here was the old minister started off again on one of his historical spiels. Mr. Welles glanced cautiously at Vincent to see if he were in danger of blowing up, and found him looking unexpectedly thoughtful. He was evidently not paying the least attention to Mr. Bayweather's account of the eighteenth century quarrel between New Hampshire and Vermont. He was apparently thinking of something else, very hard.

He himself leaned back in his chair, but half of one absent ear given to Mr. Bayweather's lecture, and enjoyed himself looking at Mrs. Crittenden. She was pretty, Mrs. Crittenden was. He hadn't been sure the first day, but now he had had a chance to get used to her face being so long and sort of pointed, and her eyes long too, and her black eyebrows running back almost into her hair, he liked every bit of her face. It looked so different from anybody else's. He noticed with an inward smile that she was fidgety under Mr. Bayweather's historical talk. He was the only person with any patience in that whole bunch. But at what a price had he acquired it!

By and by Mrs. Crittenden got up quietly and went out into the other office as if on an errand.

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, sunshiny 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 polishing 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 polishing 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 workmanship 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 screwing 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 accomplishing 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 polishing 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 competition 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 identity 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 carcass 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.

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