Grant’s first concern was to get a grasp of the business affairs which had so unexpectedly come under his direction. To accomplish this he continued the practice of the Landson ranch; he was up every morning at five, and had done a day’s work before the members of his staff began to assemble. For advice he turned to Jones and Murdoch, and the management of routine affairs he left entirely in the hands of the latter. He had soon convinced himself that the camaraderie of the ranch would not work in a staff of this kind, so while he was formulating plans of his own he left the administration to Murdoch. He found this absence of companionship the most unpleasant feature of his position; it seemed that his wealth had elevated him out of the human family. He wavered between amusement and annoyance over the deference that was paid him. Some of the staff were openly terrified at his approach.
Not so Miss Bruce. Miss Bruce had tapped on the door and entered with the words, “I was your father’s stenographer. He left practically all his personal correspondence to me. I worked at this desk in the corner, and had a private office through the door there into which I slipped when my absence was preferred.”
She had crossed the room, and, instead of standing respectfully before Grant’s desk, had come around the end of it. Grant looked up with some surprise, and noted that her features were not without commending qualities. The mouth, a little large, perhaps—
“How do you think you’re going to like your job?” she asked.
Grant swung around quickly in his chair. No one in the staff had spoken to him like that; Murdoch himself would not have dared address him in so familiar a manner. He decided to take a firm position.
“Were you in the habit of speaking to my father like that?”
“Your father was a man well on in years, Mr. Grant. Every man according to his age.”
“I am the head of the firm.”
“That is so,” she assented. “But if it were not for me and the others on your pay roll there would be no firm to require a head, and you’d be out of a job. You see, we are quite as essential to you as you are to us.”
Grant looked at her keenly. Whatever her words, he had to admit that her tone was not impertinent. She had a manner of stating a fact, rather than engaging in an argument. There was nothing hostile about her. She had voiced these sentiments in as matter-of-fact a way as if she were saying, “It’s raining out; you had better take your umbrella.”
“You appear to be a very advanced young woman,” he remarked. “I am a little surprised—I had hardly thought my father would select young women of your type as his confidential secretaries.”
“Private stenographer,” she corrected. “A little extra side on a title is neither here nor there. Well, I will admit that I rather took your father’s breath at times; he discharged me so often it became a habit, but we grew to have a sort of tacit understanding that that was just his way of blowing off steam. You see, I did his work, and I did it right. I never lost my head when he got into a temper; I could always read my notes even after he had spent most of the day in death grips with some business rival. You see, I wasn’t afraid of him, not the least bit. And I’m not afraid of you.”
“I don’t believe you are,” Grant admitted. “You are a remarkable woman. I think we shall get along all right if you are able to distinguish between independence and bravado.” He turned to his desk, then suddenly looked up again. He was homesick for someone he could talk to frankly.
“I don’t mind telling you,” he said abruptly, “that the deference which is being showered upon me around this institution gives me a good deal of a pain. I’ve been accustomed to working with men on the same level. They took their orders from me, and they carried them out, but the older hands called me by my first name, and any of them swore back when he thought he had occasion. I can’t fit in to this ‘Yes sir,’ ‘No sir,’ ‘Very good, sir,’ way of doing business. It doesn’t ring true.”
“I know what you mean,” she said. “There’s too much servility in it. And yet one may pay these courtesies and not be servile. I always ‘sir’d’ your father, and he knew I did it because I wanted to, not because I had to. And I shall do the same with you once we understand each other. The position I want to make clear is this: I don’t admit that because I work for you I belong to a lower order of the human family than you do, and I don’t admit that, aside from the giving of faithful service, I am under any obligation to you. I give you my labor, worth so much; you pay me; we’re square. If we can accept that as an understanding I’m ready to begin work now; if not, I’m going out to look for another job.”
“I think we can accept that as a working basis,” he agreed.
She produced notebook and pencil. “Very well, SIR. Do you wish to dictate?”
The selection of a place to call home was a matter demanding Grant’s early attention. He discussed it with Mr. Jones.
“Of course you will take memberships in some of the better clubs,” the lawyer had suggested. “It’s the best home life there is. That is why it is not to be recommended to married men; it has a tendency to break up the domestic circle.”
“But it will cost more than I can afford.”
“Nonsense! You could buy out one of their clubs, holus-bolus, if you wanted to.”
“You don’t quite get me,” said Grant. “If I used the money which was left by my father, or the income from the business, no doubt I could do as you say. But I feel that that money isn’t really mine. You see, I never earned it, and I don’t see how a person can, morally, spend money that he did not earn.”
“Then there are a great many immoral people in the world,” the lawyer observed, dryly.
“I am disposed to agree with you,” said Grant, somewhat pointedly. “But I don’t intend that they shall set my standards.”
“You have your salary. That comes under the head of earnings, if you are finnicky about the profits. What do you propose to pay yourself?”
“I have been thinking about that. On the ranch I got a hundred dollars a month, and board.”
“Well, your father got twenty thousand a year, and Roy half that, and if they wanted more they charged it up as expenses.”
“Considering the cost of board here, I think I would be justified in taking two hundred dollars a month,” Grant continued.
Jones got up and took the young man by the shoulders. “Look here, Grant, you’re not taking yourself seriously. I don’t want to assail your pet theories—you’ll grow out of them in time—but you hired me to give you advice, and right here I advise you not to make a fool of yourself. You are now in a big position; you’re a big man, and you’ve got to live in a big way. If for nothing else than to hold the confidence of the public you must do it. Do you think they’re going to intrust their investments to a firm headed by a two-hundred-dollar-a-month man?”
“But I AM a two-hundred-dollar-a-month man. In fact, I’m not sure I’m worth quite that much. I’ve got no more muscle, and no more sense, and very little more experience than I had a month ago, when in the open market my services commanded a hundred and board.”
“When a man is big enough—or his job is big enough—” Jones argued, “he arises above the ordinary law of supply and demand. In fact, in a sense, he controls supply and demand. He puts himself in the job and dictates the salary. You have a perfect right to pay yourself what other men in similar positions are getting. Besides, as I said, you’ll have to do so for the credit of the firm. Do you call a doctor who lives in a tumble-down tenement? You do not. You call one from a fine home; you select him for his appearance of prosperity, regardless of the fact that he may have mortgaged his future to create that appearance, and of the further fact that he will charge you a fee calculated to help pay off the mortgage. When you want a lawyer, do you seek some garret practitioner? You do not. You go to a big building, with a big name plate”—the pugnacious moustache gave hint of a smile gathering beneath—“and you pay a big price for a man with an office full of imposing-looking books, not a tenth part of which he has ever read, or intends ever to read. I admit there’s a good deal of bunco in the game, but if you sit in you’ve got to play it that way, or the dear public will throw you into the discard. Many a man who votes himself a salary in five figures—or gets a friendly board of directors to do it for him—if thrown unfriended between the millstones of supply and demand probably couldn’t qualify for your modest hundred dollars a month and board. But he has risen into a different world; instead of being dictated to, he dictates. That is your position, Grant. Look at it sensibly.”
“Nevertheless, I shall get along on two hundred a month. If I find it necessary in order to protect the interests of the business to take a membership in an expensive club, or commit any other extravagance, I shall do so, and charge it up as a business expense. Besides, I think I can be happier that way.”
“And in the meantime your business is piling up profits. What are you going to do with them? Give them away?”
“No. That, too, is immoral—whether it be a quarter to a beggar or a library to a city. It feeds the desire to get money without earning it, which is the most immoral of all our desires. I have not yet decided what I shall do with it. I have hired an expert, in you, to show me how to make money. I shall probably find it necessary to hire another to show me how to dispose of it. But not a dollar will be given away.”
“And so you would let the beggar starve? That’s a new kind of altruism.”
“No. I would correct the conditions that made him a beggar. That’s the only kind of altruism that will make him something better than a beggar.”
“Some people would beg in any case, Grant. They are incapable of anything better.”
“Then they are defectives, and should be cared for by the State.”
“Then the State may practise charity—”
“It is not charity; it is the discharge of an obligation. A father may support his children, but he must not let anyone else do it.”
“Well, I give up,” said Jones. “You’re beyond me.”
Grant laughed and extended a cigar box. “Don’t hesitate,” he said, “this doesn’t come out of the two hundred. This is entertainment expense. And you must come and see me when I get settled.”
“When you get settled—yes. You won’t be settled until you’re married, and you might as well do some thinking about that. A man in your position gets a pretty good range of choice; you’d be surprised if you knew the wire-pulling I have already encountered; ambitious old dames fishing for introductions for their daughters. You may be an expert with rope or branding-iron, but you’re outclassed in this matrimonial game, and some one of them will land you one of these times before you know it. You should be very proud,” and Mr. Jones struck something of an attitude. “The youth and beauty of the city are raving about you.”
“About my money,” Grant retorted. “If my father had had time to change his will they would every one of them have passed me by with their noses in the air. As for marrying—that’s all off.”
The lawyer was about to aim a humorous sally, but something in Grant’s appearance closed his lips. “Very well, I’ll come and see you if you say when,” he agreed.
Grant found what he wanted in a little apartment house on a side street, overlooking the lake. Here was a place where the vision could leap out without being beaten back by barricades of stone and brick. He rested his eyes on the distance, and assured the inveigling landlady that the rooms would do, and he would arrange for decorating at his own expense. There was a living-room, about the size of his shack on the Landson ranch; a bathroom, and a kitchenette, and the rent was twenty-two dollars a month. A decorator was called in to repaper the bathroom and kitchenette, but for the living-room Grant engaged a carpenter. He ordered that the inside of the room should be boarded up with rough boards, with exposed scantlings on the walls and ceiling. No doubt the tradesman thought his patron mad, or nearly so, but his business was to obey orders, and when the job was completed it presented a very passable duplicate of Grant’s old quarters on the ranch. He had spared the fireplace, as a concession to comfort. When he had gotten his personal effects out of storage, when he had hung rifle, saddle and lariat from spikes in the wall; had built a little book-shelf and set his old favorites upon it; had installed his bed and the trunk with the big D. G.; sitting in his arm chair before the fire, with Fidget’s nose snuggled companionably against his foot, he would not have traded his quarters for the finest suite in the most expensive club in the city. Here was something at least akin to home.
As he was arranging the books on his shelf the clipping with the account of Zen’s wedding fell to the floor. He sat down in his chair and read it slowly through. Later he went out for a walk.
It was in his long walks that Grant found the only real comfort of his new life. To be sure, it was not like roaming the foothills; there was not the soft breath of the Chinook, nor the deep silence of the mighty valleys. But there was movement and freedom and a chance to think. The city offered artificial attractions in which the foothills had not competed; faultlessly kept parks and lawns; splashes of perfume and color; spraying fountains and vagrant strains of music. He reflected that some merciful principle of compensation has made no place quite perfect and no place entirely undesirable. He remembered also the toll of his life in the saddle; the physical hardship, the strain of long hours and broken weather. And here, too, in a different way, he was in the saddle, and he did not know which strain was the greater. He was beginning to have a higher regard for the men in the saddle of business. The world saw only their success, or, it may be, their pretence of success. But there was a different story from all that, which each one of them could have told for himself.
On this evening when his mind had been suddenly turned into old channels by the finding of the newspaper clipping dealing with the wedding of Y.D.‘s daughter, Grant walked far into the outskirts of the city, paying little attention to his course. It was late October; the leaves lay thick on the sidewalks and through the parks; there was in all the air that strange, sad, sweet dreariness of the dying summer.... Grant had tried heroically to keep his thoughts away from Transley’s wife. The past had come back on him, had rather engulfed him, in that little newspaper clipping. He let himself wonder where she was, and whether nearly a year of married life had shown her the folly of her decision. He took it for granted that her decision had been folly, and he arrived at that position without any reflection upon Transley. Only—Zen had been in love with him, with him, Dennison Grant! Sooner or later she must discover the tragedy of that fact, and yet he told himself he was big enough to hope she might never discover it. It would be best that she should forget him, as he had—almost—forgotten her. There was no doubt that would be best. And yet there was a delightful sadness in thinking of her still, and hoping that some day—He was never able to complete the thought.
He had been walking down a street of modest homes; the bare trees groped into a sky clear and blue with the first chill presage of winter. A quick step fell unheeded by his side; the girl passed, hesitated, then turned and spoke.
“You are preoccupied, Mr. Grant.”
“Oh, Miss Bruce, I beg your pardon. I am glad to see you.” Even at that moment he had been thinking of Zen, and perhaps he put more cordiality into his words than he intended. But he had grown to have considerable regard, on her own account, for this unusual girl who was not afraid of him. He had found that she was what he called “a good head.” She could take a detached view; she was absolutely fair; she was not easily flustered.
Her step had fallen into swing with his.
“You do not often visit our part of the city,” she essayed.
“You live here?”
“Near by. Will you come and see?”
He turned with her at a corner, and they went up a narrow street lying deep in dead leaves. Friendly domestic glimpses could be caught through unblinded windows.
“This is our home,” she said, stopping before a little gate. Grant’s eye followed the pathway to a cottage set back among the trees. “I live here with my sister and brother and mother. Father is dead,” she went on hurriedly, as though wishing to place before him a quick digest of the family affairs, “and we keep up the home by living on with mother as boarders; that is, Grace and I do. Hubert is still in high school. Won’t you come in?”
He followed her up the path and into a little hall, lighted only by chance rays falling through a half-opened door. She did not switch on the current, and Grant was aware of a comfortable sense of her nearness, quite distinct from any office experience, as she took his hat. In the living-room her mother received him with visible surprise. She was not old, but widowhood and the cares of a young family had whitened her hair before its time.
“We are glad to see you, Mr. Grant,” she said. “It is an unexpected pleasure. Big business men do not often—”
“Mr. Grant is different,” her daughter interrupted, lightly. “I found him wandering the streets and I just—retrieved him.”
“I think I AM different,” he admitted, as his eye took in the surroundings, which he appraised quickly as modest comfort, attained through many little economies and makeshifts. “You are very happy here,” he went on, frankly. “Much more so, I should say, than in many of the more pretentious homes. I have always contended that, beyond the margin necessary for decent living, the possession of money is a burden and a handicap, and I see no reason to change my opinion.”
“Phyllis is a great help to me—and Grace,” the mother observed. “I hope she is a good girl in the office.”
Grant was hurrying an assent but the girl interrupted, perhaps wishing to relieve him of the necessity of an answer.
“‘Decent living’ is a very elastic term,” she remarked. “There are so many standards. Some women think they must have maids and social status—whatever that is—and so on. It can’t be done on mother’s income.”
“That quality is not confined to women,” Grant said. “I know I am regarded as something of a freak because I prefer to live simply. They can’t understand my preference for a plain room to read and sleep in, for quiet walks by myself when I might be buzzing around in big motor cars or revelling with a bunch at the club. I suppose it’s a puzzle to them.”
Miss Bruce had seated herself near him. “They are beginning to offer explanations,” she said. “I hear them—such things always filter down. They say you are mean and niggardly—that you’re afraid to spend a dollar. The fact that you have raised the wages of your staff doesn’t seem to answer them; they rather hold that against you, because it has a tendency to make them do the same. Other office staffs are going to their heads and saying, ‘Grant is paying his help so much.’ That doesn’t popularize you. To be a good fellow you should hold your staff down to the lowest wages at which you can get service, and the money you save in this way should be spent with gusto and abandon at expensive hotels and other places designed to keep rich people from getting too rich.”
“I am afraid you are satirizing them a little, but there is a good deal in what you say. They think I’m mean because they don’t understand me, and they can’t understand my point of view. I believe that money was created as a medium for the exchange of value. I think they will all agree with me there. If that is so, then I have no right to money unless I have given value for it, and that is where they part company with me; but surely we can’t accept the one fact without the other.”
Grant found himself thumbing his pockets. “You may smoke, if you have tobacco,” said Mrs. Bruce. “My husband smoked, and although I did not approve of it then, I think I must have grown to like it.”
He lighted a cigarette, and continued. “Not all the moral law was given on Mount Sinai. It seems to me that the supernaturalism which has been introduced into the story of the Ten Commandments is most unfortunate. It seems to remove them out of the field of natural law, whereas they are, really, natural law itself. No social state can exist where they are habitually ignored. But of course these natural laws existed long before Moses. He did not make the law; he discovered it, just as Newton discovered the law of gravitation. Well—there must be many other natural laws, still undiscovered, or at least unaccepted. The thing is to discover them, to obey them, and, eventually, to compel others to obey them. I am no Moses, but I think I have the germ of the law which would cure our economic ills—that no person should be allowed to receive value without earning it. Because I believed in that I gave up a fortune and went to work as a laborer on a ranch, but Fate has forced wealth upon me, doubtless in order that I may prove out my own theories. Well, that is what I am doing.”
“It shouldn’t be hard to get rid of money if you don’t want it,” Mrs. Bruce ventured.
“But it is. It is the hardest kind of thing. You see, I am limited by my principles. I believe it is morally wrong to receive money without earning it; consequently I cannot give it away, as by doing so I would place the recipient in that position. I believe it is morally wrong to spend on myself money which I have not earned; consequently I can spend only what I conceive to be a reasonable return for my services. Meanwhile, my wealth keeps rolling up.”
“It’s a knotty problem,” said Phyllis. “I think there is only one solution.”
“And that is?—”
“Marry a woman who is a good spender.”
At this moment Grace and Hubert came in from the picture-show together, and the conversation turned to lighter topics. Mrs. Bruce insisted on serving tea and cake, and when Grant found that he must go Phyllis accompanied him to the gate.
“This all seems so funny,” she was saying. “You are a very remarkable man.”
“I think I once passed a similar opinion about you.”
She extended her hand, and he held it for a moment. “I have not changed my first opinion,” he said, as he released her fingers and turned quickly down the pavement.
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