The window was grey with the light of dawn before Grant’s mind had calmed down enough for sleep. When Linder awoke him it was noon.
“You sleep well on your Big Idea,” was his comment.
“No better than you did last night,” retorted Grant, springing out of bed. “Let me see.... yes, I still have it clearly. I’ll tell you about it sometime, if you can stay awake. When do we eat?”
“Now, or as soon as you are presentable. I’ve a notion to give you three days’ C.B. for appearing on parade in your pyjamas.”
“Make it a cash fine, Sergeant, old dear, and pay it out of what you owe me. Now that that is settled order up a decent meal. I’ll be shaved and dressed long before it arrives. You know this is a first-class hotel, where prompt service would not be tolerated.”
As they ate together Grant showed no disposition to discuss what Linder called his Big Idea, nor yet to give any satisfaction in response to his companion’s somewhat pointed references as to his doings of the night before.
“There are times, Linder,” he said, “when my soul craves solitude. You, being a sergeant, and therefore having no soul, will not be able to understand that longing for contemplation—”
“It’s all right,” said Linder. “I don’t want her.”
“Furthermore,” Grant continued, “to-night I mean to resume my soliloquies, and your absence will be much in demand.”
“The supply will be equal to the demand.”
“Good! Here are some morsels of money. If you will buy our railway tickets and settle with the chief extortionist downstairs I will join you at the night train going west.”
Linder sprang to attention, gave a salute in which mock deference could not entirely obscure the respect beneath, and set about on his commissions, while Grant devoted the afternoon to a session with Murdoch and Jones, to neither of whom would he reveal his plans further than to say he was going west “to engage in some development work.” During the afternoon it was noted that Grant’s interest centred more in a certain telephone call than in the very gratifying financial statement which Murdoch was able to place before him. And it was probably as a result of that telephone call that a taxi drew up in front of Murdoch’s home at exactly six-thirty that evening and bore Miss Phyllis Bruce and an officer wearing a captain’s uniform in the direction of the best hotel in the city.
The dining-room was sweet with the perfume of flowers, and soft strains of music stole vagrantly about its high arching pillars, mingling with the chatter of lovely women and of men to whom expense was no consideration. Grant was conscious of a delicious sense of intimacy as he helped Phyllis remove her wraps and seated himself by her at a secluded corner table.
“By Jove!” he exclaimed. “I don’t make compliments for exercise, but you do look stunning to-night!”
A warmth of color lit up her cheek—he had noticed at Murdoch’s how pale she was—and her eyes laughed back at him with some of their old-time vivacity.
“I am so glad,” she said. “It seems almost like old times—”
They gave their orders, and sat in silence through an overture. Grant was delighting himself simply in her presence, and guessed that for her part she could not retract the confession her love had wrung from her so long ago.
“There are some things which don’t change, Phyllis,” he said, when the orchestra had ceased.
She looked back at him with eyes moist and dreamy. “I know,” she murmured.
There seemed no reason why Grant should not there and then have laid himself, figuratively, at her feet. And there was not any reason—only one. He wanted first to go west. He almost hoped that out there some light of disillusionment would fall about him; that some sudden experience such as he had known the night before would readjust his personality in accordance with the inevitable...
“I asked you to dine with me to-night,” he heard himself saying, “for two reasons: first, for the delight of your exquisite companionship; and second, because I want to place before you certain business plans which, to me at least, are of the greatest importance.
“You know the position which I have taken with regard to the spending of money, that one should not spend on himself or his friends anything but his own honest earnings for which he has given honest service to society. I have seen no reason to change my position. On the contrary the war has strengthened me in my convictions. It has brought home to me and to the world the fact that heroism is a flower which grows in no peculiar soil, and that it blossoms as richly among the unwashed and the underfed as among the children of fortune. This fact only aggravates the extremes of wealth and poverty, and makes them seem more unjust than ever.
“For myself I have accepted this view, but our financial system is founded upon very different ethics. I wonder if you have ever thought of the fact that when the barons at Runnymede laid the foundations of democratic government for the world they overlooked the almost equally important matter of creating a democratic system of finance. Well—let’s not delve into that now. The point is that under our present system we do acquire wealth which we do not earn, and the only thing to be done for the time being is to treat that wealth as a trust to be managed for the benefit of humanity. That is what I call the new morality as applied to money, although it is not so new either. It can be traced back at least nineteen hundred years, and all our philanthropists, great and little, have surely caught some glimpse of that truth, unless, perhaps, they gave their alms that they might have honor of men. But giving one’s money away does not solve the problem; it pauperizes the recipient and delays the evolution of new conditions in which present injustices would be corrected. I hope you are able to follow me?”
“Perfectly. It is easy for me, who have nothing to lose, to follow your logic. You will have more trouble convincing those whose pockets it would affect.”
“I am not so sure of that. Humanity is pretty sound at heart, but we can’t abandon the boat we’re on until we have another that is proven seaworthy. However, it seems to me that I have found a solution which I can apply in my individual case. Have you thought what are the three greatest needs, commercially speaking, of the present day?”
“Production, I suppose, is the first.”
“Yes—most particularly production of food. And the others are corollary to it. They are instruction and opportunity. I am thinking especially of returned men.”
“Production—instruction—opportunity,” she repeated. “How are you going to bring them about?”
“That is my Big Idea, as Linder calls it, although I have not yet confided in him what it is. Well—the world is crying for food, and in our western provinces are millions of acres which have never felt the plow—”
“In the East, too, for that matter.”
“I know, but I naturally think of the West. I propose to form a company and buy a large block of land, cut it up into farms, build houses and community centres, and put returned men and their families on these farms, under the direction of specialists in agriculture. I shall break up the rectangular survey of the West for something with humanizing possibilities; I mean to supplant it with a system of survey which will permit of settlement in groups—villages, if you like—where I shall instal all the modern conveniences of the city, including movie shows. Our statesmen are never done lamenting that population continues to flow from the country to the city, but the only way to stop that flow is to make the country the more attractive of the two.”
“But your company—who are to be the shareholders?”
“That is the keystone of the Big Idea. There never before was a company like this will be. In the first place, I shall put up all the money myself. Then, when I have prepared a farm ready to receive a man and his family, I will sell him shares equivalent to the value of his farm, and give him a perpetual lease, subject to certain restrictions. Let me illustrate. Suppose you are the prospective shareholder. I say, Miss Bruce, I can place you on a farm worth, with buildings and equipment, ten thousand dollars. I do not ask any cash from you; not a cent, but I want you to subscribe for ten thousand dollars stock in my company. That will make you a shareholder. When the farm begins to produce you are to have all you and your family—this is an illustration, you know—can consume for your own use. The balance is to be sold, and one-third of the proceeds is to be paid into the treasury of the company and credited on your purchase of shares. When you have paid for all your shares in this way you will have no further payments to make, except such levy as may be made by the company for running expenses. You, as a shareholder of the company, will have a voice with the other shareholders in determining what that levy shall be. You and your descendents will be allowed possession of that farm forever, subject only to your obeying the rules of the company. You—”
“But why the company? It simply amounts to buying the land on payments to be made out of each year’s crop, except that you want me to pay for shares in the company instead of for the land itself.”
“That, as I told you, is the keystone of my Big Idea. If I sold you the land you would be master of it; you could do as you liked with it. You could let it lie idle; you could allow your buildings and machinery to get out of repair; you could keep scrub stock; all your methods of husbandry might be slovenly or antiquated; you could even rent or sell the land to someone who might be morally or socially undesirable in the community. On the other hand you might be peculiarly successful, when you would proceed to buy out your less successful neighbors, or make loans on their land, and thus create yourself a land monopolist. But as a shareholder in the company you will be subject to the rules laid down by the company. If it says that houses must be painted every four years you will paint your house every fourth year. If it rules that hayracks are not to be left on the front lawn you will have to deposit yours somewhere else. If it orders that crops must be rotated to preserve the fertility of the soil you will obey those instructions. If you do not like the regulations you can use your influence with the board of directors to have them changed. If you fail there you can sell your shares to someone else—provided you can find a purchaser acceptable to the board—and get out. The Big Idea is that the community—the company in this case—shall control the individual, and the individual shall exert his proper measure of control over the community. The two are interlocked and interdependent, each exerting exactly the proper amount of power and accepting proportionate responsibility.”
“But have you provided against the possibility of one man or a group of men buying up a majority of the stock and so controlling the company? They could then freeze out the smaller owners.”
“Yes,” said Grant, toying with his coffee, “I have made a provision for that which I think is rather ingenious. Don’t imagine that this all came to me in a moment. The central thought struck me last night on my way home, and I knew then I had the embryo of the plan, but I lay awake until daylight working out details. I am going to allot votes on a very unique principle. It seems to me that a man’s stake in a country should be measured, not by the amount of money he has, but by the number of mouths he has to feed. I will adopt that rule in my company, and the voting will be according to the number of children in the family. That should curb the ambitious.”
They laughed over this proviso, and Phyllis agreed that it was all a very wonderful plan. “And when they have paid for all their shares you get your money back,” she commented.
“Oh, no. I don’t want my money back. I didn’t explain that to you. I will advance the money on the bonds of the company, without interest. Suppose I am able to finance a hundred farms that way, then as the payments come in, still more farms. The thing will spread like a ripple in a pool, until it covers the whole country. When you turn a sum of money loose, WITH NO INTEREST CHARGE ATTACHED TO IT, there is no limit to what it can accomplish.”
“But what will you do with your bonds, eventually? They will be perfectly secured. I don’t see that you are getting rid of your money at all, except the interest, which you are giving away.”
“That, Phyllis, is where autocracy and democracy meet. All progress is like the swinging of a pendulum, with autocracy at one end of the arc and democracy at the other, and progress is the mean of their opposing forces. But there are times when the most democratic countries have to use autocratic methods, as, for example, Great Britain and the United States in the late war. We must learn to make autocracy the servant of democracy, not its enemy. Well—I’m going to be the autocrat in this case. I am going to sit behind the scenes and as long as my company functions all right I will leave it alone, but if it shows signs of wrecking itself I will assume the role of the benevolent despot and set it to rights again. Oh, Phyllis, don’t you see? It’s not just MY company I’m thinking about. This is an experiment, in which my company will represent the State. If it succeeds I shall turn the whole machinery over to the State as my contribution to the betterment of humanity. If it fails—well, then I shall have demonstrated that the idea is unsound. Even that is worth something.
“I like to think of the great inventors, experimenting with the mysterious forces of nature. Their business is to find the natural laws that govern material things. And I am quite sure that there are also natural laws designed to govern man in his social and economic relationships, and when those laws have been discovered the impossibilities of to-day will become the common practice of to-morrow, just as steam and electricity have made the impossibilities of yesterday the common practice of to-day. The first need is to find the law, and to what more worthy purpose could a man devote himself? When I landed here yesterday—when I walked again through these old streets—I was a being without purpose; I was like a battery that had dried up. All these petty affairs of life seemed so useless, so humdrum, so commonplace, I knew I could never settle down to them again. Then last night from some unknown source came a new idea—an inspiration—and presto! the battery is re-charged, life again has its purposes, and I am eager to be at work.
“I said ‘some unknown source,’ but it was not altogether unknown. It had something to do with honest old Murdoch, and his good wife pouring coffee for the midnight supper in their cozy dining-room, and Phyllis Bruce across the table! We never know, Phyllis, how much we owe to our friends; to that charmed circle, be it ever so small, in which every note strikes in harmony. I know my Big Idea is only playing on the surface; only skimming about the edges. What the world needs is just friends.”
Grant had talked himself out, but he continued to sit at the little table, reveling in the happiness of a man who feels that he has been called to some purpose worth while. His companion hesitated to interrupt his thoughts; her somewhat drab business experience made her pessimistic toward all idealism, and yet she felt that here, surely, was a man who could carry almost any project through to success. The unique quality in him, which distinguished him from any other man she had ever known, was his complete unselfishness. In all his undertakings he coveted no reward for himself; he was seeking only the common good.
“If all men were like you there would be no problems,” she murmured, and while he could not accept the words quite at par they rang very pleasantly in his ears.
A movement among the diners reminded him of the flight of time, and with a glance at his watch he sprang up in surprise. “I had no idea the evening had gone!” he exclaimed. “I have just time to see you home and get back to catch my train.”
He called a taxi and accompanied her into it. They seated themselves together, and the fragrance of her presence was very sweet about him. It would have been so easy to forget—all that he had been trying to forget—in the intoxication of such environment. Surely it was not necessary that he should go west—that he should see HER again—in order to be sure.
“Phyllis,” he breathed, “do you imagine I could undertake these things if I cared only for myself—if it were not that I longed for someone’s approval—for someone to be proud of me? The strongest man is weak enough for that, and the strongest man is stronger when he knows that the woman he loves—”
He would have taken her in his arms, but she resisted, gently, firmly.
“You have made me think too much of you, Dennison,” she whispered.
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