CHAPTER XI
PADDOCK DELIVERS AN INVITATION
IT WAS remarked by the clerical staff in the Craighill offices that in the weeks following Walsh’s removal to the jobbing house, Wayne was unusually attentive to his office duties. Clerks in the habit of leaving reports on his desk found themselves questioned in regard to them before the young man gave his visé, which had been scrawled carelessly heretofore upon anything thrust before him. It should not too lightly be assumed that Wayne had experienced any sudden conversion or that his unwonted diligence was due to the prickings of conscience; but it had occurred to him, at the passing of Walsh, that he really knew little of his father’s affairs.
Roger Craighill’s reputation for business ability was solidly established. Until it became the fashion for trust companies to perform such services, he had often been chosen to administer estates; but in keeping with his wish to give more time to public service he had gradually freed himself of such duties. His marriage, changing necessarily the ultimate distribution of his estate, had piqued Wayne’s curiosity as to his father’s wealth. His long-gathering resentment against his father needed facts with which to fortify and strengthen itself. He was skeptical as to all of his father’s virtues and the marriage had demolished his confidence in his father’s conservatism and caution. He now began to test the outward gilt of the resplendent statue of Roger Craighill already imaginably set up by admiring fellow-citizens in the market place. He had only the vaguest idea of the nature of contracts; but he examined a great number of these documents, affecting the ownership and control of properties whose titles were only names to him. He even began summarizing and tabulating these, the better to study them. His father, as of old, referred to him, day by day, matters whose triviality now struck him with greater force than before in view of his growing grasp of affairs.
Wayne had really believed, like everyone else, that his father was a man whose fortune entitled him to be classed with comfortable millionaires—not, indeed, among the Pittsburg collossi, but among the eminently solid and unspectacular rich. As he pondered his computations and scanned the precis derived from them he reached the startling conclusion that his father’s fortune was in reality a huge and unsupported shell. He had begun studying his father’s affairs in the hope of finding some weapon which, at the fitting moment, he might use to humiliate this proud and self-sufficient parent, who had been so intolerant of his sins and weaknesses. Any trifling error or some badly judged investment would have served; but for the fact that his curiosity had been awakened in the beginning as to the amount of his father’s possessions he would have abandoned his researches long before.
It was now perfectly clear that Roger Craighill had ceased to be a factor in the coal and iron industries; that he had been gradually relinquishing his holdings in the substantial enterprises with which he had earlier been identified and that he had re-invested his money in securities of little or no standing in the market. These reflected, Wayne realized, his father’s large, imaginative way of viewing “world questions”—as Colonel Craighill called them. For example, his faith in American colonial development was represented in large holdings in Philippine and Porto Rican ventures that struck Wayne as being properly a pendant to an address his father had delivered Somewhere before Something on “America’s Duty to Her Colonies.”
Wayne had, during the summer of nineteen hundred and seven, given little heed to the whispered rumours of approaching panic. The Great Prosperity had become an old story, and pessimists had predicted its termination for several years without shaking faith in it. On Saturday, the twenty-sixth of October, business closed confidently; before Monday morning a mysterious stifling fog had stolen over the country. It did not seem possible that any human agency could have so thoroughly diffused the word—whatever it was—that paralyzed the financial energy of the remotest village, for it was paralysis, not panic. The newspapers ignored the situation and suppressed the truth; a few men around mahogany director’s tables alone dealt in facts; the rest of the country groped among rumours. Money went into hiding; banks drew the curtains over paying-tellers’ windows and calmly declared that there was no cause for alarm. Finance whistled in a graveyard and everyone pretended that nothing was the matter. Colonel Craighill, astute student of affairs, fed the journals with optimistic statements affirming the perfect security of the national glory as proved by credible statistics. Everybody was rich, yet nobody had any money; credits were never sounder, but nobody could borrow a cent. The Great Prosperity had been followed by the Great Scare and yet there was no panic in the strict sense of the term. Colonel Craighill was encouraged by his business friends to talk in the newspapers; no one else was so plausible, no one else could so deftly enwreathe the smiling brow of Mammon. His pronouncements soothed the fretful and put to shame those dull persons who had been disposed to question the edicts of the Mahogany Tables. If Colonel Craighill said that Finance is a science not intended to be understanded of the people, it must be so, and mere ignorant mortals did well not to bother their poor heads about it.
Colonel Craighill, believing firmly that merit and length of tenure should be favoured in promotions, had installed as Walsh’s successor an accountant who had been chief book-keeper in the office for many years. Walsh had mildly suggested Wayne, but Colonel Craighill rejected the recommendation.
“The suggestion does credit to your kindness of heart, Walsh, but—you must know it is impossible.”
Paddock called on Wayne at the office one afternoon to find him bending studiously over a mass of papers. Wayne greeted his old friend amiably.
“Don’t be afraid! I’ll not bite you this time.”
He cleared a chair of papers and bade the clergyman make himself at home.
“I won’t conceal it from you, old man, that I was in bad shape that night you came in on me here. I saw everything red—not pink, but a bright burning scarlet. You won’t mind my saying it, but your call was deucedly inopportune. I had come up here with my tongue hanging out to drink that quart, and to be caught with the goods on by a gentleman of the cloth annoyed me. I’ll not spare your feelings in the matter! And then you looked so fresh and fit and good that that riled me too. I was ashamed of it afterward—the way I received your life confession. And the bottle——”
“Did you eat it?” laughed Paddock, delighted to find his old friend in this gay humour.
“I told you I was going to the bad that night, and you went out with a hurt look as though I had kicked your dog or done some low thing of that sort. Your tact is wholly admirable. If you had said one word to me when I told you I had started for hell I should have screamed and made a terrible fuss. Strong men could not have held me. You went away and left me, by which token I know you possess the wisdom of serpents. And I proceeded at once to get beautifully drunk.”
Paddock said nothing, but smiled sadly.
“But I have cut it out now. I shall look no more upon the rum bottle when it’s red, not because I don’t like it, but because I’ve thought of much more dreadful and heinous sins.”
“Then,” said Paddock, not understanding, “I have merely stimulated your ambition as a sinner.”
“That’s exactly it. There’s something rather contemptible about drunkenness. A man of education ought to do worse or be very, very good. Well, how goes the work?”
“First rate. That’s what I came in to see you about. I want you, as a leading citizen, to come and look at my plant.”
“Certainly, I’ll do that with pleasure, sometime, provided your real design isn’t to show me off as an awful example. Mind you, I don’t stand for that. At any rate, I was brought up in the strict letter of the Presbyterian faith, and if I have any value as an example of what shouldn’t be, the Presbyterians have first call. It would be low down in me to pose for you Episcopalians, who are a rival body.”
“I don’t want you to pose as anything; just sit on the back seat and watch the events of an evening. The hat isn’t passed—no sermon—maybe a song or two, but you don’t have to sing. Your chauffeur will know how to take you out; he quite eclipses me. His batting averages make him a marked man; his record of strike-outs his last season on the diamond lifted him quite out of the back-lot class.”
“Am I to understand that Joe Denny has fallen under your spell and frequents the parish house? Well, I thought he was sneaking the machine out at night pretty often, but I didn’t give him credit for anything so noble. I thought it was somebody’s housemaid.”
“He says he can pitch with his left hand just as well as with his right, but he’s passed up the cheering diamond out of devotion to you. He talks about you with tears in his eyes.”
“He takes quite the paternal attitude toward me—looks after me as though I were four years old. The paternal attitude,”—Wayne repeated musingly—“odd phrase that, Paddock. When is it you want me to come to your joss-house?”
“Why not to-night? The various sections are going to get together for the first time, and it will be interesting to see how they mix. Jim Balinski of Altoona will do a sparring stunt with Mike the motorman; songs and recitations will be provided and the girls’ cooking class will attend to the refreshments. I dare you to do better.”
“I’m embarrassed,” laughed Wayne, lacing his fingers behind his head and sprawling out in his chair. “I’m due to sit in a poker game to-night with a few hardened veterans; but your programme appeals to me as more wholesome. I’ll come as long as it’s you, but with the distinct understanding that you don’t try to convert me. I’ll do it once for an old friend; our friendship will suffer if it ever happens again. But,” and he drew down his hands and squared himself in his chair, “but how about all these people you are working for down there? You are going to feed them on cakes and ale and make them dissatisfied, so that they will march into the East End some pleasant evening and tear the citizens from their homes and decorate the trolley poles with them. Your mission in life is pretty, but after all, Jimmy Paddock, can you stick a lever under the lower stratum of society and lift it?”
He struck a match and lighted a cigarette.
“Let me see,” replied Paddock soberly, “whether I can explain just what my idea really is. I don’t propose to lift the whole mass with my little lever. It seems to me that the books on these subjects are just a lot of phrases. I don’t know anything about the deep philosophy of our social organization—I can’t understand those things. I haven’t the brains to debate social questions with people who don’t see them my way. I can’t talk to people who say my kind of work is futile; I can’t discuss it with them or defend my idea, for two reasons: one is that I don’t even understand their phraseology; and the other is that they make me so hot that I want to beat their brains out with a featherduster. There, you see, old man, the wild Indian in me isn’t all dead yet; I’m far from being a saint. I don’t believe that even the most ignorant and depraved are going to be spoiled, as you say, by being treated like human beings. I don’t think the taste of cakes and ale will send them up into the East End to kill and loot. I may be mistaken, but I believe that those singed and scorched fellows in the steel mills are just as good as I am. I don’t recognize class distinctions. I positively decline to allow any sociologist to classify me and pin me on a card like a new kind of flea. But every man is a social class by himself as I look at it. I’m not big enough or strong enough morally or intellectually to try to pull up one of the social strata and transplant it; but I can go out and find some poor devil who is down on his luck or who has got into the gutter, and I can put my poor individual lever under him and pull for all I’m worth and maybe, by the grace of God, I can lift him up a little, just a little bit. Now, you think I’m crazy, don’t you?”
“No,” said Wayne, “not in the least. You’re worse; you’re a blooming sentimentalist. But you’re a good fellow anyhow, and I don’t think you ought to be discouraged. I’d like to contribute——” and he glanced toward a check-book that lay on his desk.
“No you don’t!” cried Paddock. “I don’t want your money. I suppose you could give me a good-sized sum and never miss it; but I don’t want that kind of money. I accept contributions not as a favour to me but as a favour to the giver; you see, there’s a large difference. The richest churchwarden in Pittsburg came out with a party of ladies the other Sunday. He sent me a check for a thousand dollars the next day and advised me to ventilate my chapel; he didn’t like the smell of my congregation. I sent him back his check. A girl who works in a laundry for six dollars a week offered me one of those dollars to help pay for the refreshments to-night and I took it!”
“By George, you have it bad! I suppose the laundry girl’s money carried with it the idea of purification. I do wish they would keep chemicals out of my shirts. Perhaps if you would reason with them, Jimmy, you could stop the havoc.”
“You illustrate the individual in his most selfish aspect,” laughed the minister. “You see only your own torn shirt. Your remedy lies not with the girl but with her employer. You tell him you want better work and that unless he raises the wages of his employees you’ll carry your shirts elsewhere.”
“That would be far too much trouble; it’s a lot easier to buy new linen.”
“That’s the secret of the whole situation we’re talking about; it’s easier to buy a new shirt than to take care of the one you’ve got. By the same token it’s easier to wear out a coal miner and throw him away when you can’t use him any longer than to preserve the men who are digging our coal to-day. They all go on the rubbish heap—they’re just old scrap. I’ve been up in the anthracite districts where children under the age limit are employed in the breakers; and in the churches of the towns up there men devoutly thank God every Sunday for so kindly putting all this mineral wealth in the hills of the State of Pennsylvania so they may give their own children comforts and luxuries won by the blackened hands of other men’s children.”
“We have laws that cover such cases; enforce the laws. I’m for that,” said Wayne.
“But we don’t want to do it that way! We must do it not by law but by love,” and the minister smiled his sad smile.
Wayne laughed and threw away his cigarette.
“You’re a mighty good fellow, Jimmy Paddock, but you’re a sentimentalist, that’s all. There may be some of that in me down underneath somewhere, but I doubt it. Anyhow, I’ll take a peep at your little party to-night; I dare say it won’t do me any harm.”