He looked at the clock. It was half-past three. Marise had said she would be there about four. He gave a calculating glance at the stack of letters. He would never be able to get through those. "We"ll have to get a move on," he remarked. "Things got pretty well piled up while I was away."
He began to dictate rapidly, steadily, the end of a sentence clearly in his mind before he p.r.o.nounced the first word. He liked to dictate and enjoyed doing it well. The pale young stenographer bent over his note-book, his disfigured face intent and serious.
"Turned out all right, Arthur has," thought Neale to himself. "I wasn"t so far off, when I thought of the business college for him." Then he applied himself single-mindedly to his dictation, taking up one letter after another, with hardly a pause in his voice. But for all his diligence, he had not come to the bottom of the pile when four o"clock struck; nor ten minutes later when, glancing out of the window, he saw Marise and the children with Mr. Bayweather and the two other men coming across the mill-yard. Evidently Mr. Bayweather had dropped in just as they were going to start and had come along. He stopped dictating and looked at the group with a certain interest. Marise and the children had had a good deal to say yesterday about the newcomers to Crittenden"s.
It seemed to him that the impression he had received of them had been as inaccurate as such second-hand impressions were apt to be. The older man was just like any elderly business man, for all he could see, nothing so especially attractive about him, although Marise had said in her ardent way that he was "the sort of old American you love on sight, the kind that makes you home-sick when you meet him in Europe." And as for Mr.
Marsh, he couldn"t see any signs of his being such a record-breaking live-wire as they had all said. He walked along quietly enough, and was evidently as resigned as any of them to letting Mr. Bayweather do all the talking. On the other hand, none of them had told him what a striking-looking fellow he was, so tall, and with such a bold carriage of that round dark head.
"Here they come, Arthur," he remarked. "No more time. But I"ll try to squeeze in a minute or two, while they are here, to finish up these last ones."
The young man followed the direction of his eyes and nodded. He continued looking at the advancing group for a moment, and as he stood up, "You could tell that Mr. Marsh is a millionaire by the way his clothes fit, couldn"t you?" he remarked, turning to go back to his desk in the outer office.
They were coming down the hall now. Neale went forward to open the door, met and breasted the wave of children who after hugging casually at his knees and arms, swept by; and stepped forward to be presented to the newcomers. They had not crossed the threshold, before his first impression was reversed in one case. Marsh was a live-wire all right.
Now that he had seen his eyes, he knew what Elly had meant when she said that when he looked at you it was like lightning.
Mr. Bayweather barely waited for the first greetings to be p.r.o.nounced before he burst out, "Do they say, "backwards and forwards" or "back and forth"?"
Neale laughed. Old Bayweather was perennial. "Backwards and forwards, of course," he said. "English people always say everything the longest possible way." He explained to the others, "Mr. Bayweather is an impa.s.sioned philologist ..."
"So I have gathered," commented Marsh.
"... and whenever any friends of his go on travels, they are always asked to bring back some philological information about the region where they go."
He turned to Marise (how sweet she looked in that thin yellow dress).
"Where do you want your personally conducted to begin, dear?" he asked her. (Lord! How good it seemed to get back to Marise!)
Mr. Bayweather cut in hastily, "If I may be permitted to suggest, I think a history of the mill would be advisable as a beginning. I will be glad to tell the newcomers about this. I"ve just been working the subject up for a chapter in history of Ashley."
Neale caught an anguished side-glance from Marise and sent back to her a shrugged message of helplessness in the face of Destiny. The man didn"t live who could head old Bayweather off when he got started on local history. And besides, this would give him time to get those last three letters finished. Aloud he said, "I wouldn"t dare say a word about history in Mr. Bayweather"s presence. I have a few letters to finish.
I"ll just step into the outer office and be ready to start when you"ve heard the history lecture." He turned to the children, who were tapping on the typewriter. "Look here, kids, you"d be better off where you won"t break anything. Get along with you out into the mill-yard and play on the lumber-piles, why don"t you? Paul, you see if you can tell yellow birch from oak this time!"
He and the children beat a retreat together into the outer office, where he bent over Arthur"s desk and began to dictate in a low voice, catching, as he did so, an occasional rotund phrase from the disquisition in the other room. "... the glorious spirit of manly independence of the Green Mountain Boys ..."
To himself Neale thought, "He"d call it bolshevism if he met it today ..."
"... second building erected in the new settlement, 1766, as a fort... . No, _no_, Mr. Marsh, _not_ against the Indians! Our early settlers _here_ never had any trouble with the Indians."
Neale laughed to himself at the clergyman"s resentment of any ignorance of any detail of Ashley"s unimportant history.
"... as a fort against the York State men in the land-grant quarrels with New Hampshire and New York, before the Revolution." Neale, smiling inwardly, bet himself a nickel that neither of the two strangers had ever heard of the Vermont land-grant quarrels, and found himself vastly tickled by the profound silence they kept on the subject. They were evidently scared to death of starting old Bayweather off on another line. They were safe enough, if they only knew it. It was inconceivable to Mr. Bayweather that any grown person should not know all about early Vermont history.
At this point Marise came out of the office, her face between laughter and exasperation. She clasped her hands together and said, "Can"t you do _any_thing?"
"In a minute," he told her. "I"ll just finish these two letters and then I"ll go and break him off short."
Marise went on to the accountant"s desk, to ask about his wife, who sang in her winter chorus.
He dictated rapidly: "No more contracts will go out to you if this stripping of the mountain-land continues. Our original contract has in it the clause which I always insist on, that trees smaller than six inches through the b.u.t.t shall not be cut. You will please give your choppers definite orders on this point, and understand that logs under the specified size will not be accepted at the mill." He held out to the stenographer the letter he was answering. "Here, Arthur, copy the name and address off this. It"s one of those French-Canadian names, hard to spell if you don"t see it."
He paused an instant to hear how far Mr. Bayweather had progressed, and heard him saying, "In the decade from 1850 on, there was a terrible and scandalous devastation of the mountain-land ..." and said to himself, "Halfway through the century. I"ll have time to go on a while. All ready, Arthur." He dictated: "On birch brush-backs of the model specified, we can furnish you any number up to ..." He wound his way swiftly and surely through a maze of figures and specifications without consulting a paper or record, and drawing breath at the end, heard Mr.
Bayweather p.r.o.nouncing his own name. "... Mr. Crittenden has taught us all a great deal about the economic aspects of a situation with which we had had years of more familiarity than he. His idea is that this mountainous part of New England is really not fit for agriculture.
Farming in the usual sense has been a losing venture ever since the Civil War high prices for wool ceased. Only the bottoms of the valleys are fit for crops. Most of our county is essentially forest-land. And his idea of the proper use to make of it, is to have a smallish industrial population engaged in wood-working, who would use the bits of arable land in the valleys as gardens to raise their own food. He has almost entirely reorganized the life of our valley, along these lines, and I daresay he cannot at all realize himself the prodigious change from hopelessness and slow death to energy and forward-looking activity which his intelligent grasp of the situation has brought to this corner of the earth."
The young stenographer had heard this too, and had caught the frown of annoyance which the personal reference brought to Neale"s forehead. He leaned forward and said earnestly, "It"s so, Captain ... Mr. Crittenden.
It"s _so_!"
Mr. Bayweather went on, "There is enough wood in the forests within reach of the mill to keep a moderate-sized wood-working factory going indefinitely, cutting by rotation and taking care to leave enough trees for natural reforestration. But of course that has not been the American way of going at things. Instead of that steady, continuous use of the woods, which Mr. Crittenden has shown to be possible, furnishing good, well-paid work at home for the men who would be otherwise forced off into cities, our poor mountains have been lumbered every generation or so, on an immense, murderous, slashing scale, to make a big sum of money for somebody in one operation. When old Mr. Burton Crittenden"s nephew came to town it was a different story. Mr. Neale Crittenden"s ideal of the lumber business is, as I conceive it, as much a service to mankind as a doctor"s is."
Neale winced, and shook his head impatiently. How ministers did put the Sunday-school rubber-stamp on everything they talked about--even legitimate business.
"And as Mrs. Crittenden"s free-handed generosity with her musical talent has transformed the life of the region as much as Mr.
Crittenden"s high and disinterested ..."
"Oh _Gosh_, Arthur, never mind about the rest!" murmured Neale, moving back quickly into the inner office to create a diversion. "All ready?"
he asked in a loud, hearty voice, as he came up to them. "Up to 1920 by this time, Mr. Bayweather?" He turned to Marsh, "I"m afraid there is very little to interest you, with your experience of production on a giant scale, in a business so small that the owner and manager knows every man by name and everything about him."
"You couldn"t show me anything more _out_ of my own experience,"
answered Marsh, "than just that. And as for what I know about production on a giant scale, I can tell you it"s not much. I did try to hook on, once or twice, years ago--to find out something about the business that my father spent his life in helping to build up, but it always ended in my being shooed out of the office by a rather irritable manager who knew I knew nothing about any of it, and who evidently hated above everything else, having amateur directors come horning in on what was no party of theirs. "If they get their dividends all right, what more do they want?"
was his motto. I never was able to make any sense out of it. It"s all on such a preposterously big scale now. Once in a while, touring, I have come across one of our branch establishments and have stopped my car to see the men come out of the buildings at quitting-time. That"s as close as I have ever come. Do you really know their _names_?"
"I can"t p.r.o.nounce all the French-Canadian names to suit them, but I know them all, yes. Most of them are just the overflow of the rural population around here."
He said to himself in congratulation, "Between us, we pried old Bayweather loose from his soft soap, pretty neatly," and gave the man before him a look of friendly understanding. He was a little startled, for an instant, by the expression in the other"s bright eyes, which he found fixed on him with an intentness almost disconcerting. "Does he think I"m trying to put something over on him?" he asked himself with a pa.s.sing astonishment, "or is he trying to put something over on me?"
Then he remembered that everyone had spoken of Marsh"s eyes as peculiar; it was probably just his habit. "He can look right through me and out at the other side, for all _I_ care!" he thought indifferently, meeting the other"s gaze with a faintly humorous sense of something absurd.
Marise had come back now, and was saying, "You really must get started, Neale, the men will be quitting work soon."
"Yes, yes, this minute," he told her, and led the way with Mr. Welles, leaving Marise and Mr. Bayweather to be showman for Mr. Marsh. He now remembered that he had not heard the older man say a single word as yet, and surmised that he probably never said much when the fluent Mr. Marsh was with him. He wondered a little, as they made their way to the saw-mill, what Marise saw in either of them to interest her so much. Oh well, they were a change, of course, from Ashley and Crittenden"s people, and different from the Eugenia Mills bunch, in New York, too.
He stood now, beside Mr. Welles, in the saw-mill, the ringing high crescendo scream of the saws filling the air. Marise stood at the other end talking animatedly to the two she had with her. Marise was a wonder on conversation anyhow. What could she find to say, now, for instance?
What in the world was there to say to an ex-office manager of a big electrical company about a wood-working business?
His eyes were caught by what one of the men was doing and he yelled at him sharply, "Look out there, Harry! Stop that! What do I have a guard rail there for, anyhow?"
"What was the matter?" asked Mr. Welles, startled.
"Oh, nothing much. One of the men dodging under a safety device to save him a couple of steps. They get so reckless about those saws. You have to look out for them like a bunch of bad children."
Mr. Welles looked at him earnestly. "Are you ... have you ... Mr.
Bayweather has told us so much about all you do for the men ... how they are all devoted to you."
Neale looked and felt annoyed. Bayweather and his palaver! "I don"t do anything for them, except give them as good wages as the business will stand, and as much responsibility for running things as they"ll take.
Beyond that, I let them alone. I don"t believe in what"s known as "welfare work." I wouldn"t want them messing around in my private life, and I don"t believe they"d like me in theirs."
The necessity to raise his voice to a shout in order to make himself heard above the tearing scream of the saws made him sound very abrupt and peremptory, more so than he had meant. As he finished speaking his eyes met those of the older man, and were held by the clarity and candor of the other"s gaze. They were like a child"s eyes in that old face. It was as though he had been abrupt and impatient to Elly or Mark.
As he looked he saw more than candor and clarity. He saw a deep weariness.