Part 10

We were shown into the sitting room of her suite, and sat down, both breathing hard. I am fond of Flossie and I was very sorry for her, but I certainly wished her at the other end of the world just then. If I had not feared she would have rushed to lock me in, I would have tried to escape even then, but before I could collect myself, the door opened, and a stout, middle-aged woman came in. Her straight gray hair was bobbed and hanging in strings around a very red, glistening face. It was terribly hot weather and she had, I suppose, just came in from the long motor trip. She had a lighted cigarette in one hand. Her cushiony shapeless feet were thrust into a pair of Japanese sandals. She distinctly waddled as she walked. We supposed that she was Miss Arling’s companion, and I said, because Flossie was too agitated to speak, “We wished to speak to Miss Arling, please.”

“I am Miss Arling,” she said casually. “Won’t you sit down?” I don’t know what I did, but I heard Flossie give a little squeak like a terrified rabbit. So I hurried on, saying desperately the first thing that came into my mind. “We heard you were coming ... in the newspapers ... we are old residents here ... a cliff, water, and pine trees.... I know the view ... we thought perhaps we might show you where....”

She was surprised a little at my incoherence and Flossie’s strange face, but she was evidently a much-experienced woman-of-the-world, whom nothing could surprise very much. “Oh, that’s very kind,” she said civilly, tossing her cigarette butt away and folding her strong hands on her ample knees, “But I went that way on the road coming into town. I remembered it perfectly I find. I used it as the background in a portrait, some years ago.”

She saw no reason for expanding the topic and now stopped speaking. I could think of nothing more to say. There was a profound silence. Our hostess evidently took us for tongue-tied, small-town people who do not know how to get themselves out of a room, and went on making conversation for us with a vague, fluent, absent-minded kindness. “It’s very pleasant to be here again. I stayed here once, you know, a few weeks, many years ago, when I was young. We had quite a jolly time, I remember. There was a boy here ... a slim, dark, tall fellow, with the most perfect early-Renaissance head imaginable, quite like the Jeune Homme Inconnu. I’ve been trying all day to remember his name? Paul?... no. Walter?... it had two syllables it seems to me. Well, at any rate, he had two great beauties, the pale, flat white of his skin, and his great shaggy mass of dark hair. I’ve often used his hair in drawings, since. But I don’t suppose he looks like that now.”

Flossie spoke. She spoke with the effect of a revolver discharging a bullet, “Oh, yes, he does! He looks exactly like that still, only more mature, more interesting,” she said in an indignant tone.

“Ah, indeed,” said the painter with an accent of polite acquiescence. She sighed now and looked firmly at the clock. I rose and said since we could not be of use to her, we would leave her to rest.

She accompanied us to the door pleasantly enough, with the professional, impersonal courtesy of a celebrity.

Outside Flossie sprang into her car, leaving me stranded on the sidewalk. “I must get Peter away,” she said between her teeth.

“But not now, surely!” I cried.

“Now more than ever,” she flung back at me, as she whirled the car around.

Then as I stood open-mouthed, utterly at a loss, she drove the car close to the curb and leaning to my ear, whispered fiercely, “You don’t suppose I’d let him see how she looks _now_.”

Miss Arling was gone before they returned from the two-day fishing-trip on which they started that night. I doubt if Peter ever heard that she had been in town.

The morning after their return, as soon as Peter had gone downtown, Flossie tore down the big photograph from the wall and flung it into the garbage can.

I noticed its absence some days later, when I went over to see them, and asked with a little apprehension, “What did Peter say when he found it gone?”

The strangest expression came into her face. She said in a low tone, “He has never even missed it.” And then she began to cry. As I looked at her, I saw that she had suddenly begun to show her age.

SUPPLY AND DEMAND

The thoughtful intellectual people around the fire were talking with animation and conviction, and I hoped the one business-man present, a relative of mine, was appreciating his privileges. It was not often that you could collect before your fire so many brilliant people representing so many important varieties of human activity; and when you had collected them it was not often that the talk fell on a subject big enough to draw out of each one his most hotly held conviction.

The subject was big enough in all conscience: nothing more or less than what is the matter with the world in general and with our country in particular. They all had different ideas about what the trouble is and about the best cure for it. The head nurse of the big City Hospital had started the ball rolling by some of her usual scornful remarks about the idiocy with which most people run their physical lives, and the super-idiocy, as she put it, “which makes them think that doctors and nurses can put scrambled eggs back into the shell.”

“We’ll never have any health as a nation till we have health as individuals,” she said. “See that the babies have clean milk; give the children plenty of space and time for out-door play; keep the young folks busy with athletic sports; run down all the diphtheria carriers and make it a misdemeanor not to be both vaccinated for small-pox and inoculated against typhoid ... and we’d be a nation such as the world never saw before.”

The political reformer was sincerely shocked by the narrowness of her views, and took her down in a long description of our villainously mismanaged government. “Much good mere physical health would do against our insane tolerance of such political ineptness and corruption!” he ended. “What we need is an awakening to the importance of government as every man’s personal business.”

Mrs. Maynard, the tragic-faced, eloquent Scotch expert on birth-control, now said in that low, bitter voice of hers which always makes every one stop to listen, “I would be obliged if you would point out to me how either physical health or the very best of municipal governments should alleviate in the slightest, the hideous ulcers of our so-called respectable married homes. When the very foundation of every-day human life is cemented in such unthinkable cruelty and suffering to defenseless women, I don’t see how human beings with hearts in their bosoms can stop for an instant to consider such puerile non-essentials as athletics and party politics!”

The two or three happily married women in the group, startled by her fierce acrimony, were silent, feeling abashed by the grossly comfortable way we had managed to escape even a knowledge of the horrors which she so urgently assured us were universal. But Mr. Sharpless, the efficiency engineer, shook his head pityingly. “No, no, my dear lady, you can’t cure anything by going at it with the hammer and tongs of direct action. The economic key is the only one that fits all locks, opens all doors. The women of what we call the ‘upper classes’ do not suffer as you describe. You know they don’t. Now why do we _call_ them the ‘upper classes’? Because they have money. You know it! Hence, if everybody had money ...! I tell you the thing to do is to reorganize our wretched old producing machinery till ever so much more is produced, ever so much more easily; and then invent distributing machinery that will ensure everybody’s getting his share. You may not think home life is much affected by the chemist in his laboratory, devising a way to get nitrogen chiefly from the air, or by the engineer struggling with the problem of free power out of the tides or the sun. But it is. Just once put _all_ women in the comfortable upper classes....”

He was interrupted here by a number of protesting voices, all speaking at once, the loudest of which, Professor Oleny’s finally drowned out the others, “... money without intelligence is the most fatal combination conceivable to man! Economic prosperity would spell speedy destruction without an overhauling of education.” He spun like a pinwheel for a moment, in a sparkling, devastating characterization of American schools, and of their deadening effect on the brains which passed through them, and began on a description of what schools should be.

But I had heard him lecture on that only the day before and, looking away from him, sought out the face of my cousin, the business-man. He had sat through it all, and now continued to sit through the free-for-all debate which followed, without opening his mouth except to emit an occasional thoughtful puff of cigar-smoke. His thoughts seemed to be with the billowing smoke-rings, which he sent towards the ceiling rather than with the great sweep of the subjects being discussed. I knew well enough that his silence did not come in the least from any inability to follow the pyrotechnics about him, and I felt in his absent preoccupation something of the disdain, traditionally felt for talkers and reformers by men of action--when in the twentieth century and in the United States, you say “man of action” you mean of course, “business-man.”

It nettled me a little, and after the others had gone and he was finishing the end of his cigar, I said challengingly, “I suppose you think they are all off! I suppose you think that you know what is the matter with the world and that it is something quite different.”

He considered the end of his cigar meditatively and answered mildly, “I don’t _think_ I know, I _know_ I know.”

“Oh, you do, do you?” I said, amused and ironic. “Would you mind telling me what it is?”

He shucked further down in his chair, tipped his head back and looked up at the ceiling. “Well, if you really want to know, I’ll tell you a story that happened just lately in one of the biggest mail-order houses in this country. Of course, I know that you don’t fully appreciate the importance of mail-order houses, not being in business. And they’re too through and through American a growth for people like your friends to-night to know about or talk about. But some of the best brains and real sure-enough genius in the United States have gone into creating the mail-order house idea. Maybe you might allow that to be a good enough reason for considering for a moment what goes on inside one of them ... what?

“As a matter of fact, the story isn’t just about a mail-order house, but about what is the matter with the world ... the very same subject your friends were debating. My story won’t have so many long words in it as they use, nor so many abstract ideas ... at least on the surface; but it won’t do you any harm to soak it away and think it over. I’ll tell you what, _I’ve_ been thinking it over this evening, as I listened to the talk. I only heard the story this morning, and it’s stuck in my head all day ... and especially this evening, as they were all talking about how to hit on some organization of society that would really fix things up, once and for all.”

He paused for a moment, stretched his legs out straight before him and put his hands into his pockets. “If I really told you all you ought to know, to understand the background and setting of the story, I’d be sitting here to-morrow morning still talking. So I won’t try, I’ll just tell you the plain story as it happened. You try to imagine the background: an organization as big, as complicated, with as many chances for waste motion, or overorganization, or poor organization as society itself. And not only power and glory, but _cash_, plenty of hard cash as immediate reward for the successful use of brains.

“Well now, into that arrives a smart youngster full of enthusiasm for making things run better, just like your friends to-night; dead sure just like them that _he_ has the key; with lots of pep and brains and interest in his job, pushing his way right up from the stenographer’s desk, with his eye on the Manager’s. Do you get him? Well, he’s laid awake nights, thinking how to improve the organization, partly because he wanted to improve it, partly because he wanted to get the credit for it ... just like your friends again. And because he is a smart young fellow as keen as a razor, he soon figured out a way to increase business, to increase it like a house afire, and to handle it once it was increased.

“He went to the big man of the concern and laid out his plans. Now, you’d better believe the big men in any organization always have a glad hand out for anybody in the concern who’ll show interest and brains; and the boy got treated like a king. Sure, he could try out his plan! On a small scale at first, to see how it would work. Let him take a county out of each of six selected states, and concentrate on them. And, sure, yes, indeed, he could have anything in the organization he wanted, to make his try with.

“So the boy went away bounding like a rubber-ball and planned his campaign. I won’t bother you by trying to tell you what it was.... It wouldn’t interest you, and anyhow you couldn’t understand the business details. It was a mixture of intensive publicity, special attention paid to detail, a follow-up system that meant personal care and personal acquaintance with the tastes of customers, and intimate knowledge of what past orders from customers had been. To get the right kind of assistants he went through the various departments of that big organization and hand-picked his staff; the very best of the publicity men, the smartest of the order-clerks, the brightest of the stenographers. And then they just tore in and ate up the territory they were practising on! They plowed it with publicity, and sowed it with personal service, they reaped, by George, a harvest that would put your eye out! Business increased by a twenty-five per cent, by a fifty per cent! At the end of a year, the boy, too big for his skin, paraded into the Manager-in-chief’s office with statistics to prove a seventy-five per cent increase over any business ever done there before! Well, that was simply grand, wasn’t it? Yes, the Manager would certainly sit up and take some notice of a system that had accomplished _that_!”

My cousin had finished his cigar, now threw the butt into the fire-place, and sat looking at the embers with a somber expression. I couldn’t see anything to look somber about. Indeed I found myself stifling a yawn. What did I care how much business a mail-order house did or how they did it?

My cousin answered my thought, “Don’t you see that the story is all about the same general idea you were all discussing this evening? It is about getting things done more intelligently, more efficiently, about avoiding fool mistakes, about rising to big opportunities, about learning how to scramble over the obstacles that prevent human beings from being intelligent and efficient and effective. Now, then, at the first take-off, the boy had soared right over those obstacles, hadn’t he? But the Manager-in-chief knew a thing or two about them, too. In fact he had grown bald and gray trying to climb over those very same obstacles. But you can be sure the boy didn’t once think that his chief might be just as anxious as he was to have things done better. Boys never do....” There was a pause, while my cousin considered the embers moodily.

“So, by and by, after the boy had fizzed the place all foamy with his wonderful statistics, the bald-headed, gray-haired Manager began to come down to brass tacks, and to inquire just how the thing had been done. The boy was crazy to tell him, went into every detail; and the Manager listened hard.

“And then he shook his old bald gray head. He said: ‘Young fellow, you listen to me. It takes _sense_ to run that system of yours. You’re counting on everybody, from you right down to the boy that works your mimeograph, paying attention to what he’s doing, using his brains and using them every minute. If everybody doesn’t, you won’t get your results, will you? Now, consider this, how did you get hold of a staff that would have any brains to use and would use them? _You_ know how! We let you run a fine tooth comb through our whole organization, thousands and thousands of employees. You took out of every department the very best they had; three or four out of hundreds, and they are the only ones out of thousands who amount to anything after years of training at our expense. And then you put your very best licks into it yourself. Now, who are you? You’re the first stenographer we’ve had in ten years, who took enough interest in the business as a whole to have a single idea about it. You tell me something. Suppose we reorganized along your lines, who would I get to run all the other departments and keep up the high-speed efficiency and red-hot ambition you’ve shown, which is the _only_ reason your scheme works? You know as well as I do I can’t find another _one_, let alone the eighty or ninety I’d have to have, if we tried to do business on your plan. And if I could--supposing for the sake of argument that an angel from Heaven served such department heads to me on a silver platter, where am I going to find staffs to work with them. You’ve _got_ all the really efficient employees we’ve been able to rake in from the whole United States in the past twenty years.

“‘Did you ever have to work with a plain, ordinary six-for-a-quarter stenographer, such as the business colleges turn out, such as you mostly get? You’ve built your machine so that only brains and sense will run it. How long would it take a couple of hundred of such stenogs to smash your system into splinters? Did you ever have to try and get work out of the average dressy young employee who puts ninety-eight and a half per cent of what gray matter he has on his neckties and the bets he made on the horse-races, and the little flier he took on stocks; and one and a half per cent of his brains on his work when somebody higher up is looking at him? How do you suppose you can persuade a crowd of light-weights like that to care a whoop whether Mrs. Arrowsmith in Cohoes, N. Y., is satisfied with the color of the linoleum rug she bought?’”

My cousin looked at me hard, and again answered an unspoken thought of mine. “Are you wondering why hadn’t the boy interrupted long before this, to hold up his end, if he was really so enthusiastic as I’ve said? This is the reason. Though he hadn’t let on to the Manager, he really had had plenty of troubles of his own, already, keeping even his hand-picked crew up to the scratch. Many’s the time he’d been ready to murder them! Drive as hard as he might, he couldn’t keep them steadily up to the standard he’d set for his work. He’d noticed that. Oh, yes, of course, he’d noticed it all right, and he’d been furious about it. But until that minute, he hadn’t thought of it--what it meant; and the minute the Manager spoke, he knew in his bones the old man was right. And he felt things come down with a smash.

“It pretty nearly knocked him silly. He never said a word. And the old bald-head looked at him, and saw that in the last three minutes the boy had grown up ... he’d grown up! That hurts, hurts more than any visit to the dentist. I know how he felt; probably the Manager knew how he felt. Anybody who’s ever tried to get anything done has run his head into that stone wall.

“Well, he was sorry for the kid, and tried to let him down easy. He went on talking, to give the boy time to catch his breath. ‘You understand, I’d like, maybe more than you, to reorganize the whole ball o’ wax, on any lines that would work better. And there are lots of good points in your plan that we _can_ use, plenty of ’em. This invention of yours about cross-indexing orders now, that is a splendid idea. I believe we could install that ... it looks _almost_ fool proof! And maybe we might run a special mailing-list along the lines you’ve worked out. Lemme look at it again. Well, I guess the mistakes the stenogs would make _might_ be more than offset by the extra publicity ... maybe!

“But the lad was feeling too cut up to pay any attention to these little poultices. He stood there, and almost fell in pieces, he was thinking so hard. Not very cheerful thoughts, at that. When he could get his breath he leaned over the table and said in a solemn, horrified voice, ‘Good God, Mr. Burton, why then ... why then....’ He was all but plumb annihilated by the hardness of the fact that had just hit him on the head. He broke out, ‘What’s the _use_ of inventing a better system as long as ... as long as ...?’ he got it out finally. ‘Why, Mr. Burton, there just aren’t enough folks with sense to go around!’”

My cousin stood up, moved to the hall, secured his hat and looked in at me through the door-way. “Poor kid!” he commented pityingly. “Just think of his never having thought of that before!”

UNCLE ELLIS

I never saw my Uncle Ellis because he died before I was born, but I heard a great deal about him when I was a child. His stepdaughter married one of our fellow-townsmen, and lived next door to us when I was a little girl, and her mother, my great-aunt, Uncle Ellis’ third wife, lived with her. Whatever Cousin Ruth did not say about her stepfather, Aunt Molly supplied. The two women spent the rest of their lives hating him, and for his sake hated, distrusted and despised all men.

The gruesome impressions of married life which float through the air to most little girls, came to me from their half-heard and half-understood stories of Uncle Ellis. He had killed his first two wives, they said, just as much as though he had taken an ax to them, and only his opportune death had saved Aunt Molly from the same fate. His innumerable children--I would never venture to set down how many he had, all in legal marriage--feared and detested him and ran away from home as soon as they could walk. He was meanness itself, secret, sneaking meanness, the sort of man who would refuse his wife money for a wringer to do the family wash, and spend five dollars on a box of cigars; he would fly into a black rage over a misplaced towel, and persecute the child who had misplaced it, till she was ready to commit suicide; and then open his arms with a spectacular smile to the new baby of a parishioner. After mistreating his wife till she could hardly stand, she used to hear him holding forth in a boys’ meeting, exhorting them to a chivalric attitude towards women.

Aunt Molly died long ago, firing up to the last in vindictive reminiscences of her husband. Ruth is dead now, too, in the fullness of time. I am a middle-aged woman, and probably the only one now alive who ever heard those two talk about Uncle Ellis; and I had forgotten him. If he stayed at all in my memory it was with the vague, disembodied presence of a character in a book.

About a month ago, I accepted an invitation to speak at a convention in a town in the middle-west which I had never seen, but the name of which seemed slightly familiar; perhaps, I thought, because I had learned it in a geography lesson long ago. But when I arrived I understood the reason. It was the town where for many years Uncle Ellis had been pastor of the church. At the railway station, as I stepped down on the platform, one of the older women in the group who met me, startled me by saying, “We have been especially anxious to see you because of your connection with our wonderful Dr. Ellis Randolph. I was a young girl when he died, but I can truly say that my whole life has been influenced for good by the words and example of that saintly man.”