CHAPTER V
A COLLECTOR OF FACTS
WHEN Jerry came in “off the road” Saturday, he found a note from Eaton asking him to call at his office that evening. To comply with this request, Jerry was obliged to forego the delights of a dance at the Little Ripple Club to which he had looked forward with the liveliest anticipations all the week. But Eaton was not, in Amidon’s estimation, a person to whom one telephoned regrets with impunity, and at eight o’clock he knocked at Eaton’s door on the fifteenth floor of the White River Trust Building and was admitted by the lawyer in person.
Eaton’s office always exerted a curious spell on Jerry’s imagination. This was attributable in some measure to the presence of cabinets filled with models of patentable and unpatentable devices—queer contrivances with each its story of some inventor’s success or failure. The most perfect order was everywhere apparent. Books from the ample library were never strewn about in the manner of most law offices, and Eaton’s flat-top desk in the last room of the suite was usually clear; or if papers were permitted to lie upon it, they were piled evenly and weighted with a smooth stone that was never visible unless in use. The file-cases (of the newest and most approved type) contained not only letters, legal papers, and receipts, but, known to no one but the girl who cared for them, newspaper clippings and typewritten memoranda on a thousand and one subjects that bore no apparent relation to the practice of law.
Facts were Eaton’s passion; with facts, one might, he believed, conquer the world; indeed, he was capable of demonstrating that all the battles in history were lost or won by the facts carried into the contest by the respective commanders. He had so often disturbed the office of the Commissioner of Patents with his facts that the public servants in charge of that department were little disposed to risk a brush with him on points that involved facts, facts that seemed, in his use of them, to glitter like the lenses of his eyeglasses.
He seated himself in his office chair—a leathern affair with a high back—and bade Amidon shed his coat and be comfortable.
“Smoke?” he suggested, opening a drawer containing cigars and cigarettes. Jerry hated ready-made cigarettes, but he was afraid to produce the “makings” before Eaton, who had once complained that the odor of the tobacco he affected was suggestive of burning jimson weed. Eaton produced a glass ash-tray, and filled a pipe with the deliberation he brought to every act.
“Business is bad, I suppose, as usual,” he remarked leadingly.
“Rotten! The shark that runs the credits has cut off one or two of my easiest marks; but I managed to end last month with a ten-per-cent advance over last year’s business, and that helps some.”
“You have spoken well, Amidon. I suppose you were received with joyous acclaim by the boss, and urged to accept a raise in wages?”
“Stop kidding me! I’m sensitive about my wages. They still pretend they’re just trying me out—not sure I’ll make good and that sort of piffle!”
“That sort of piffle” was a phrase he had taken over bodily from Eaton’s familiar discourse. So sensitive was he to Eaton’s influence that he imitated, with fair success, the unruffled ease that was second nature to the lawyer. He was also practicing Eaton’s trick of blinking before uttering a sentence, and then letting it slip with a casual, indifferent air. Eaton had used this in the cross-examination of witnesses to good purpose. Amidon had exercised it so constantly in commercial and social conversation that he had to be on guard lest Eaton, whose discernment seemed to him to partake of the supernatural, should catch him at it and detect its spuriousness.
“Won a case somewhat in your line the other day; defended a trade-mark of the Pomona Velvet Complexion Cream, warranted to remove whole constellations of freckles in one night. Seductive label, showing a lovely maiden unfreckling herself before a mirror; bottle of Pomona in her hand. Basely and clumsily imitated by a concern in Kansas that’s been feloniously uttering a Romona Complexion Cream. The only original Pomona girl held the bottle in her right hand; label on Romona nostrum showed it clenched in her left.”
“Hard luck!” said Amidon, deeply interested. “We’ve been pushing that Kansas beautifier—a larger discount for the jobber than the Pomona. Reckon we’ll have to chuck it now. I suppose the judge didn’t know Pomona removes the cuticle—hasn’t the real soothing effect of the Romona.”
“I’ll mention that to the district attorney and he can pass it on to the government inspectors. I’m annoyed by your revelation. Shock to my conscience—defending a company that poisons the young and beautiful of the republic.”
“Now that you know what a swindle you defended, I suppose you’ll turn back your fee—if you’ve got it?”
“Retainer of a thousand dollars,” Eaton replied easily; “it would be immoral to return it, thus increasing the dividends of such an unscrupulous corporation. However, I’ll consider giving half of it to the Children’s Aid Society.”
It was pleasant in any circumstances to sit in Eaton’s presence, to enjoy his confidence; and yet nothing so far disclosed justified Jerry’s relinquishment of the Little Ripple Club dance.
“Which of our noble streams did you follow this trip—the Pan-haunted Wabash or the mighty Ohio, sacred to the muses nine?”
Allusions of this sort, to which Eaton was prone, were Jerry’s despair. He felt that it would be worth subjecting one’s self to the discomforts of a college education to be able to talk like this, easily and naturally. But he was aware that Eaton was driving at something; and while it was the lawyer’s way to lead conversations into blind alleys, he always arrived somewhere and fitted a key into the lock that had been his aim from the start.
“I shook hands with the trade along the Ohio this trip. I can tell you it’s lonesome at night in those river burgs; the folks just sit and wait for the spring flood—and even it fails sometimes. They turn the reel once daily in the movies, and the whole town’s asleep at nine-thirty.”
“A virtuous and home-loving people, but crime occasionally disturbs the peace. Murders should always occur along navigable streams, so the victim can be sent cruising at once toward New Orleans and the still-vexed Bermoothes.”
Amidon thought he caught a gleam; but experience had taught him the unwisdom of anticipating the unfolding of Eaton’s purposes.
“Oh, there’s always a lot of crooks loafing along the river; they keep their skins filled with whiskey and they fish and shoot muskrats and do a little murdering on the side.”
“Interesting type,” said Eaton musingly. “If you were at Belleville this week, you must have heard of a murder down there—man found stabbed to death in a house-boat.”
Jerry grinned, pleased with his own perspicacity in having surmised the object of the interview. Murder was not, Amidon would have said, within the range of Mr. John Cecil Eaton’s interests; and yet this was not the first time that the lawyer’s inquiries had touched affairs that seemed wholly foreign to his proper orbit.
“I was there the day after they found the body. They had already arrested the wrong man and turned him loose—as usual. They always do that; and they’ll probably pick up some tramp who was visiting old college friends in New York when the murder was committed and indict him so the prosecuting attorney can show he’s on the job.”
“You shouldn’t speak in that manner of sworn officers of the law,” Eaton admonished. “Better that forty innocent men should be hanged than that one guilty man escape.”
Jerry fidgeted nervously as Eaton’s glasses were turned for a full minute upon the ceiling.
“A Cincinnati paper printed an item yesterday about that murder case, mentioning the arrest of a suspect at Henderson on the Kentucky shore.” Eaton hesitated. “The suspect’s name was Corrigan. You have known Corrigans, perhaps?”
There was a faint tinkle in the remote recesses of Jerry’s consciousness as the shot, so carelessly fired, reached the target.
“The name’s common enough; I’ve known a number of Corrigans.”
“But,” the lawyer continued, “there have been instances of Corrigans ceasing to be Corrigans and becoming something else.”
“You mean,” Amidon replied, meeting Eaton’s eyes as they were bent suddenly upon him, “that a Corrigan might become a Farley. Am I right?”
“Quite right. I was just wondering whether you had picked up anything about this particular case down along the river. I have no interest in it whatever—only the idlest curiosity. I happened to recall that Miss Farley had been a Corrigan; I have a note of that somewhere.”
He swung his chair round and surveyed the file-cases back of him. His gaze fell upon a drawer marked F, as though he were reading the contents through the label—a feat which Amidon thought not beyond Eaton’s powers.
Jerry resented the idea that Nan Farley might still be affected by the lawless deeds of any of her kinsfolk; he became increasingly uncomfortable the more he reflected that the lawyer, with all his indifference, would not be discussing this subject unless he had some reason for doing so.
“It was stated that this particular Corrigan had wealthy connections—that always sounds well in such news items, as though rich relations were a mitigating circumstance likely to arouse public sympathy. Mere snobbishness, Amidon; and snobbishness is always detestable. If that particular Corrigan hopes to obtain help from a sister now known as Farley, it occurred to me that I ought to possess myself of the fact. You understand that what we’re saying to each other is entirely sub rosa. We’ve never happened to speak of Miss Farley; but having been connected with the Copeland-Farley Company before Farley retired, you probably have heard of her. A very interesting girl—slightly spoiled by prosperity, but really refreshingly original. Do you mind telling me whether you have any reason for believing that the particular Corrigan arrested down there as a suspect, and with those wealthy connections so discreetly suggested in the newspaper, is related in any way to Nan Farley?”
“Well, there was a Corrigan boy, considerably older than I am—probably about thirty now, and not much to brag of. I’ve asked about him now and then when I dropped off at Belleville, and I never heard any good of him—just about the kind of scamp that would mix up in a cutting scrape and get pinched.”
“And who, having been pinched,—what we may call a pinchee, one who has been pinched,—might perhaps remember that he had a prosperous sister somewhere and appeal to her for help? Such things have happened; it would be very annoying for a young woman who had emerged—risen—climbed away from her state of Corriganism, so to speak, to have her relationship with such a person printed in the newspapers of her own city. I merely wish to be prepared for any emergency that may arise. Not, of course, that this is any of my business; but it’s remarkable how other people’s affairs become in a way our own. Somebody has remarked that life is altogether a matter of our reciprocal obligations. There’s much truth in that, Amidon.”
Jerry did not wholly grasp this, but he confirmed it with a nod. Now that Nan Farley had been mentioned, he hoped Eaton would drop life’s reciprocal obligations and talk of her; and he began describing his meeting with her, in such manner as to present his quondam schoolmate in the most favorable light.
Eaton listened to this recital with as much interest as he ever exhibited in anything that was said to him. He smiled at the young fellow’s frank acknowledgment that it was in a spirit of the most servile imitation that he had gone forth with his fly-box. The ways in which Amidon aped him amused Eaton. He addressed him as “Amidon,” or as “my dear Amidon,” or “my dear fellow,” and talked to him exactly as he talked to his cronies at the University Club; for while he was looked upon as an aristocrat,—the last of an old family that dated back to the beginnings of the town,—at heart he was the soundest of democrats. Jerry’s meeting with Nan on the river bank seemed to him the most delightful of confrontations, and he sought by characteristic means to extract every detail of it.
“Well, sir, after she had been so nice and turned to go, she swung round and came back—actually came back to shake hands! I call that pretty fine; and me just a little scrub that was only a bunch of freckles and as tough a little mutt as ever lived when she used to know me. Why, if she’d said she never heard of me, she’d have put it over and I couldn’t have said a word!”
“She mentioned the meeting to me a little later,” observed Eaton carelessly.
“Like thunder she did!” exploded Jerry. “So you knew all about it and let me go ahead just to kid me! Well, I like that!”
“Merely to get as much light on the subject as possible. We stumble too much in darkness; the truth helps a good deal, Amidon. Miss Farley spoke of you in terms that would not have displeased you. I assure you that she had enjoyed the interview; her description of it was flattering to your tact, your intuitive sense of social values. But it was all very sketchy—you’ve filled in important omissions. For instance, the giving of her hand, as an afterthought, was not mentioned; but I visualize it perfectly from your narrative. We may read into that act good-fellowship, graciousness, and all that sort of thing. She’s a graceful person, and I can quite see her extending a perfectly gloved hand—”
“Wrong for once; she hadn’t on any gloves! But she had a handkerchief. It was drying on a bush.”
“Ah! That is very important. Tears, perhaps? Her presence alone on the shore rather calls for an explanation. If she had gone down there by herself to cry, it is imaginable that life hadn’t been wholly to her taste earlier in the afternoon.”
“She didn’t look as though she had ever cried a tear in her life, and why should she?”
“The Irish,” replied Eaton reflectively, “are a temperamental race. I had knowledge of her—remote but sufficient—before she sought the cool, umbrageous shore. Her companions were the gayest, and they doubtless bored her until a mood of introspection seized her—sorrow, regret, a resolve to do quite differently. Very likely you were a humble instrument of Providence to win her back to a good opinion of herself. So she seemed quite jolly and radiant? Conceivably your appearance caused her to think of her blessings—of her far flight from those scenes your presence summoned from the past.”
“Well, she’s a fine girl all right,” Amidon commented to cover his embarrassment at being unable to follow Eaton in his excursion into the realm of psychology. “You wouldn’t have thought that girl, born in a shack with as good-for-nothing folks as anybody ever had, would grow up to be about the finest living girl! I guess you’d hunt pretty hard before you’d find a girl to touch her.”
“I’ve thought of that myself, though not in quite your felicitous phrases.”
“Don’t rub it in!” Amidon protested. “I guess the less I think about a girl like that the better for me. And I guess there’s plenty of fellows got their eye on her. I’ve heard some talk at the store about her and the boss.”
“She doesn’t lack admirers, of course. When you say ‘boss,’ you refer, I assume, to Mr. Copeland?”
Eaton looked up from the polishing of his glasses—a rite performed with scrupulous care. The vague stare of his near-sighted eyes, unprotected by his glasses, added to a disinterestedness expressed otherwise by his careless tone.
“Well,” Amidon began, defensively, “Copeland is the boss, all right,—that is, when he’s on the job at all. He’s some sport, but when he calls me into his pen and goes over my orders, he knows whether I’m on the right side of the average. Only he doesn’t do that with any of the boys more than once in two months. He doesn’t quite get the habit; just seems to think of it occasionally.”
“Capacity without application! Unfortunate, but not incurable. To be sure, an old business like Copeland-Farley is hard to kill. Billy Copeland’s father had the constructive genius, and Farley had the driving power. It’s up to Billy not to let the house die on his hands. Trouble is, the iron diminishes in the blood of a new generation: too easy a time of it, soft-handed, loss of moral force, and that sort of thing.”
“I guess Copeland travels a pretty lively clip, all right,” ventured Amidon, not without a tinge of pride in his boss. “He and Kinney are pace-setters; they’ve got plenty of gasoline in the buggy and like to burn it. The boss may be a sport, but he’s a good fellow, anyhow. I guess if he wants to marry Miss Farley he’s got a right to.”
He uttered this tamely, doubtful as to how his guide and mentor might receive it, but anxious to evoke an expression.
“A trifle weak, but well-meaning,” remarked Eaton, as though he had been searching some time for a phrase that expressed his true appraisement of Copeland. “It’s deplorable that fellows like that—who really have some capacity, but who are weak-sinewed morally—can’t be protected from their own folly; saved, perhaps. Our religion, Amidon, is deficient in its practical application. A hand on your boss’s shoulder at the right moment, a word of friendly admonition, might—er—save him from a too-wasteful expenditure of gasoline. If I had the gift of literary expression, I should like to write a treatise on man’s duty to man. It’s odd, Amidon,” he went on, refilling his pipe, “that we must sit by—chaps like you and me—and see our brothers skidding into the ditch and never feel any responsibility about them. Doubtless you and I are known to many of our friends as weak mortals, in dire need of help,—or, perhaps, only a word of warning that the bridges are down ahead of us would suffice,—and yet how rarely do we feel that hand on the shoulder? We should be annoyed, displeased, hot clean through, if anybody—even an old and valued friend—should beg us to slow down. It’s queer, Amidon, how reluctant we are to extend the saving hand. Timidity, fear of offending and that sort of thing holds us back. It becomes necessary to perform our Christian duty in the dark, by the most indirect and hidden methods.”
Amidon frowned, not sure that he understood; and he hated himself when he did not understand Eaton. Not to grasp his friend’s ideas convicted him of stupidity and ignorance. Religion in Amidon’s experience meant going to church and being bored. He remembered that the last time he had visited a church he had gone to hear a girl acquaintance sing a solo. She sang very badly, indeed, and he had been depressed by the knowledge that she was spending for music lessons wages earned as a clerk at the soap and perfumery counter in a department store. Eaton’s occasional monologues on what, for a better name, he called his friend’s religion, struck him as fantastic; he was never sure that Eaton wasn’t kidding him; and the suspicion that you are being kidded by a man at whose feet you sit in adoration is not agreeable. But Eaton had become intelligible again.
“I’ve sometimes wondered whether Copeland shouldn’t be saved—a good subject for experiment, at least. To demonstrate that we have the courage of our convictions we must take a hard nut to crack. Queer thing, that religious effort, as we now see it, is directed solely to the poor and needy—the down-and-outers. Take a man of the day laborer type, the sort that casually beats his wife for recreation: gets clear down in the gutter, and the Salvation Army tackles his case—sets him up again; good work! Great institution—the Army. But you take the men who belong to clubs and eat course dinners; they don’t beat their wives—only say unpleasant things to them when the bills run too high; when such fellows get restless, absorb too much drink, neglect business, begin seeing their bankers in the back room—where’s your man, society, agency, to put the necessary hand on that particular shoulder? What we do, Amidon, when we see such a chap turning up Monday morning with a hang-over from Saturday night, is to remark, ‘Too bad about Tom’—or ‘Dick’ or ‘Harry’—and then go to the club and order a cocktail. That’s how we meet our reciprocal obligations!”
There seemed nothing that Amidon could add to this; but plainly it was “Billy” Copeland, who was in Eaton’s mind, and no imaginary Tom, Dick, or Harry; so he ventured to remark:—
“Well, I guess the boss hasn’t let go yet; he’ll pull up. He’s the best man on the street to work for—when you can feel you are working for him.”
“Pleasanter to work for a boss than the boss’s creditors, of course. And minor stockholders sometimes get anxious and cause trouble.”
These utterances were like important memoranda jotted down on the margin of a page whose text is of little value in itself. Amidon stared blankly.
“Well, I don’t know about that; I guess the house has always made money. We do more business than any other drug house in the State.”
“An excellent business, of course. And we’d imagine that a man falling heir to it would take pride in holding on to it. But if he doesn’t, somebody else will take the job. I’ve seen the signs change on a good many business houses in my day. Your boss has taken several little flyers on the outside since his father died; he’s rather fascinated with the idea of being vice-president of new concerns: minor trust companies, doubtful manufacturing schemes, and that sort of thing. All this is entirely in confidence; I’m using you as an incentive to thought. Kindly consider that my reflections are all inter nos. That murder business got us started—but of course, it hasn’t anything to do with your boss. It had occurred to me, though, that both you and I may have certain reciprocal obligations in some of these matters we have touched on. One never can tell where the opportunity to serve—to lay that friendly hand on a particular shoulder—may present itself!”
During a rather long silence Amidon pondered this, wholly mystified as to just what he or John Cecil Eaton had to do with the affairs of William B. Copeland, a gentleman whose shoulder did not, on the instant, seem to present itself as a likely object for the laying on of hands. But Eaton was saying:—
“Coming to the matter of outside investments, there’s Kinney’s ivory cement. The Kinney Manufacturing Company’s a client of mine, and it wouldn’t be proper for me to express an opinion even to you, Amidon, on the stability of its patents.”
“Well,” said Amidon, “everybody thinks Kinney’s making all the money there is; he’d have to, to put as much jam on his bread as he’s spreading. I meet his road men now and then, and they sob because they can’t fill orders. They’re not looking for new business; they’re shaking hands with the customers they’ve already got and telling ’em to sit at the freight house until the factory catches up with orders. And before he hit that cement, Kinney was bookkeeper in a brickyard!”
“Have a care, Amidon! You must be careful of your facts even in social conversation. Mr. Kinney had a small interest in a brickyard, which is very different. By the way, your opportunities for cultivating Mr. Copeland’s acquaintance are rather restricted? Except on those rare occasions when he summons you to make sure your orders cover your expense account, you don’t see much of him?”
“Oh, he used to give me a jolly occasionally before I went on the road—ask me why our ball team was glued to the tail of the league and things like that. Once he asked me to look up a good chauffeur for him—and I got him a chap who’d been a professional racer. I guess that made a hit with him.”
“An assumption not wholly unwarranted. I hope he finds the chauffeur satisfactory?”
“I guess he does; he must like him, for he bails him out about once a week when he gets pinched for speeding.”
“Rather unfortunate that you’re not an inside man, so you could observe the boss more closely; not, of course, to the extent of exercising an espionage—but it might be possible—er—”
“Well, I can have an inside job if I want it. My being on the road was just a try-out, and I’m not so keen about hopping ties with the sample-cases. If I’m going to tackle the reading you’ve laid out for me, I’ll have to change my job. The head stock-man’s quitting to go into heavy chemicals on his own hook; I guess I could get his place.”
“Don’t refuse it without full consideration. My attitude toward you thus far has been wholly critical; I’ve refrained from compliments; but it would interest me to—er—see what you can do with your brains. I suggest that you learn everything there is about the business outside and in: become indispensable, be tolerant of stupidity, forbearing amid jealousy, and indifferent to contumely; zealous, watchful, polite, without, let us say, sissiness. Manners, my dear boy, are appraised far too low in our commercial life.”
The grin occasioned by these injunctions died on Amidon’s face as he realized that the lawyer was in earnest; but he was very much at sea. Eaton was a busy man, as his generous office space and the variety of his paraphernalia testified; just why he had sought an interview, for the sole reason, apparently, of extracting a little information and giving a little advice, caused Amidon to wonder. He was still wondering when Eaton rose and glanced at the tiniest of watches, which he carried like a coin in his trousers pocket and always looked at as though surprised to find he had it.
“Time for me to be off; arguing a case in Pittsburg Monday.”
He opened a bag that lay beside him on the floor, pulled a packet from a drawer and dropped it in, and told Jerry he might, if he had nothing better to do, accompany him to the station.