CHAPTER XIV
As the days went by Jim Ashe acquired a marked aversion to the upper right-hand drawer of his desk. For it contained the unpaid bills of the Ashe Clothespin Company. When Jim came the drawer had been empty; now it looked as if he would have to add an annex to care for the overflow. There were supply bills, machinery bills, stock bills. And Jim did not dare to pay them, for his account at the bank was running perilously low. Bills may be put off, but the pay-roll must be met on the minute.
From nothing the unsecured indebtedness climbed to five thousand, to ten thousand dollars. Much as it grieved Jim to see discount days pass with discounts not taken, it grieved Grierson more. He had served the company for many years. Never before in his experience had it failed to discount its bills—and to a bookkeeper of Grierson’s type discounts are sacred. Grierson’s type of mind would borrow money at six per cent. to take a two-per-cent. discount.
Finally statements began to arrive, some accompanied by letters setting forth in the polite verbiage of the business world that the creditor would be glad to have the company’s check “for this small amount at its convenience.” Dunning letters! Grierson was shocked. He blushed as he bent over his ledgers. The Ashe Clothespin Company had to be dunned as if it were a dubious individual with an overlarge bill at the corner grocery.
Jim was not yet the complete business man, but he did discover that certain larger creditors were willing to accept notes for the time, notes bearing interest at six per cent. Somehow it relieved his anxiety to issue this paper. At any rate, it postponed the day of reckoning in each case for three or four months. But Grierson was bitterly ashamed. He regarded it as such a makeshift as an unstable enterprise would avail itself of to ward off insolvency. Jim caught the old bookkeeper looking at him accusingly. Such things had never come to pass in his father’s day.
Yet these were the very things Clothespin Jimmy had predicted. He had told Jim there would be sleepless nights and anxious days; he had confessed to milking the business. Now Jim appreciated what his father meant. With the fifty thousand dollars which Clothespin Jimmy had subtracted from the assets the company would be as sound as the Bank of England.
What worried Jim more than the accumulation of bills was the failure to make shipments as rapidly as the necessities required. Where he should have shipped a car-load a day he had been able to bill out an average of less than four cars a week. Customers clamored to have their orders filled; cancellations were threatened; yet the mill failed to produce as it should produce. Somewhere something was wrong. Clothespin-machines that ought to have made their eighty five-gross boxes a day did not climb above sixty. Total shipments that should have amounted to thirty thousand dollars a month faltered and failed at fifteen or sixteen thousand. In short, he was spending every week a great deal more money than he was earning.
Much of this, he knew, was due to breakdowns caused by Kowterski; some of it to poor timber; some to timber spiked by Kowterski’s brother. But aside from that, changes had to be made in machines; the mill did not run smoothly. Where construction should have ceased to lay its expense on the company it continued to demand its thousands of dollars every month.
But Kowterski was gone. Jim did not believe Moran would venture to send down more spiked timber. The mill was slowly but surely rising to a point of efficiency. Jim was confident in it; he placed full dependence on Nels Nelson, his millwright, on Beam, his superintendent. He knew they were doing their intelligent best and that their worries stood shoulder to shoulder with his own. Given time, he would be firm on his feet; given capital to carry him through this dubious period, and the company would pay bigger dividends, reach a more stable credit than it had ever before enjoyed. But the time and the capital!
In his heart he knew that if one creditor lost faith and brought pressure to bear, the whole edifice would come down in ruin. Construction, rebuilding, repairs, had devoured the money that should have paid bills. Bills had multiplied by reason of supplies necessary for construction. One thing was essential—construction must cease. Men employed in construction must be laid off.
“Grierson,” he said, “make me a statement of our condition—a full statement; one that will show everything and show it truly. I’m going to see if there isn’t somebody in the world who will appreciate being told the whole uncolored truth.”
With this statement in his pocket Jim went to the city to its largest bank.
“I’m Ashe, of the Ashe Clothespin Company up at Diversity,” he told the president, “and I’m in a hole. I’ve got to have some money.”
“We’ve got lots of it,” the president said, genially, “if you can show us. Let’s look into the hole you’re in and see.”
Jim gave him the statement; it was fully, minutely itemized. Every debit was shown in full; no credit was inflated. The banker studied it half an hour, nodding now and then.
“Would you attach your name to that statement?” he asked.
“Yes,” said Jim.
“You believe you can make money?”
“I know it.”
“Show me,” said the banker, and Jim showed him for an hour. He gave production figures, costs, prices, profits.
“It’s a good statement, a sound statement,” the banker said. “You have no quick assets—that’s bad. That demand-paper I don’t like; but otherwise—otherwise it is a very creditable statement.”
Jim was astonished.
“How much do you want?” the banker asked.
“Twenty-five thousand dollars,” Jim said, hesitatingly.
“I guess we can fix that up. The board meets at noon. Can you come in and tell them your story?”
“Certainly.”
“You believe twenty-five thousand dollars will bring your mill to efficiency and carry you to a point where your own sales will take care of expenses?”
“I’m sure of it.”
“Come in at twelve, then, and we’ll see.”
Jim returned at twelve and repeated his facts to the assembled board. Before they broke up Jim had given them the company’s note for twenty-five thousand dollars, had that amount on deposit in the bank, and a book of blank checks under his arm.
“We’ve passed this loan,” said a white-haired old gentleman, “because we like the moral risk. Your statement was fair; what you have said to us was spoken as an honest man speaks. You seem to have gotten a dollar of value for every dollar you have put into this mill, and we hope you’ll win out. We believe you will or we wouldn’t be lending you our money. You haven’t evaded a question; you haven’t held anything back. You’ve confessed to us that you thought you were in a bad hole, which is a poor argument for a borrower to bring forward. Maybe we’d have lent you on the security of the mills; maybe not. What we’ve done is to lend it on the security of you. I say this to you because it must give you pleasure to hear it and because it gives me pleasure to be able to say it. I cannot say such things as often as I wish. Now go to it, young man, and lick the stuffing out of that other crowd.”
Jim went out, his head in a pink cloud, his feet treading something lighter than mundane pavement. Why, they had not thought he was in a hole at all! The things Grierson and he had looked on as scarcely creditable makeshifts were approved as sound business, and they had given him money. How easy money was to get! It astonished him. Thirty thousand dollars he had borrowed from the Diversity Bank, with no difficulty; twenty-five thousand more poured into his purse from the City Bank, with compliments attached. His policy had won. He had found some one who appreciated being told the whole uncolored truth. After all, the world had not trampled its ideals into the mire of money-chasing. Even to-day the sound things of life commanded a market value. Business men, in high places of trust, business men of tested capacity, placed the moral before the material risk.
The president of the bank had said, “I would rather lend a known honorable man money on doubtful security than to venture a loan to a dubious man on Government bonds.”
So Jim brought back from the city more than money. He brought back a renewed, an increased faith in the virtue of mankind. It was an asset not to be despised. The mighty hand of business reached out to encourage, to help with concrete aid, the honest man. It withheld its support, even though ample security were offered, from the man whose honor was dubious. Therefore, this modern god of business was a virtuous god. If evil were committed in its name the god itself was not smirched save in the eyes of the ignorant; if false sacrifices were offered to it by charlatans and liars and cheats, by jack priests of commerce, the god was not more dishonored than is the God of Israel by horrors that have been committed in His name.
As Jim rode home on the train his first feeling of elation dwindled. Doubt returned. He weighed the sides of his ledger against each other and determined all was not yet secure. How could it be secure when he had but added to his liability the not inconsiderable sum of twenty-five thousand dollars? Part of his debts he could pay. The balance must wait, for he could not divest himself of ready money, nor would the reserve he could set aside last forever.
The demand-note of thirty thousand dollars reared itself as a threat, assumed the guise of a poised bird of prey biding its moment. No, he was not free from the chains of his difficulties. His competitors—he thought of them as enemies—were as yet strong, untouched, unready for peace. They were capable of striking, would strike if a telling blow could be launched. There was Michael Moran.
The task of defending his own was just begun; the feat of bringing his enemies to overtures of peace was distant from accomplishment; and again there was Michael Moran. It was Jim’s first contact with that black spirit called hatred. He hated Michael Moran because it was inevitable he should do so, because Michael Moran was the exponent of all things at the remotest pole from Jim’s ideals.
With something like consternation he admitted to himself that he hated Michael Moran because the man’s life orbit had touched with pitch the life of a woman who had assumed preponderating importance in Jim’s universe.
As he alighted from the train at Diversity he saw Marie Ducharme as he had first seen her weeks ago. She stood motionless, a statue with lines of loveliness surmounted by a face of hopeless discontent. In her eyes was the look of hunger, like that of the starving woman in the bread-line. She gazed after the departing train as one might gaze after a hope dispelled.
Jim walked toward her. She saw him and nodded coolly.
“School’s out early,” he said.
“It’s Saturday,” she replied, shortly.
She turned away from the depot, no cordiality in her manner, but Jim was not to be rebuffed. He kept at her side.
“Since I have been here,” he said, “I have never driven out along the lake shore. They tell me it is a beautiful drive.”
“Yes,” she replied, without interest.
“The train was warm, the dust got into my throat. Seems as if I were filled with it. All the way I kept thinking of expanses of clean water and of breezes off the lake. Won’t you extend our truce to a drive out there with me this evening?”
She turned to him with a queer, abrupt, birdlike, startled movement. There was no pretense about it, she was surprised, jolted so that one peeped for an instant through her mask of sullenness to the loneliness, the yearning within. The crack closed instantly.
“Why do you ask me?” she demanded. “You don’t like me.”
“I asked you because I want very much to have you go. And I do not dislike you.”
“Everybody does.”
“I can’t speak for everybody, but I doubt it. You—you have a way of shouldering folks off, of retiring behind the barbed wire. Folks would be willing enough to like you if you’d let them.”
She pondered this and shook her head slightly.
“Part of what you say is true. There aren’t many people here I want to like me. Haven’t you lived here long enough to see that the people who stay here are the culls, the weak ones? Is there a young man or a young woman here with gumption? Just as soon as a boy amounts to a row of pins, gets an education or has ambition, he goes away. It is the same with the girls. The desirable go, the other sort stay. This is a backwater of life with nothing in it but human driftwood.”
Jim appreciated the insight of her words. She spoke with some exaggeration, but with more sound truth. Her words might be a true arraignment of the average small town, secluded, with insufficient outlet or inlet. They might apply to a thousand villages in Michigan, in Vermont, in New York, in Tennessee. He understood her better than ever before—indeed, here was his first step in comprehension.
“You’re lonesome,” he said, more to himself than to her.
“Yes,” she said, simply. “Lonesome—and bored, horribly bored.”
“I am lonesome, too. Lonesome, but not bored. I have too much on my mind to be bored, which is better for me, probably. So won’t you mend my lonesomeness for one evening by driving with me?”
“If you will say on your honor that you want me to,” she said.
Jim listened for a note of wistfulness in her voice; fancied he distinguished it; was not certain he did.
“On my honor,” he said, half-laughingly, “I do want you.” Then, “Might we not ask Mrs. Stickney to put up a lunch for us and start right away?”
Again she looked at him, for there had been a note of boyish eagerness in his voice, and she smiled a very little. The smile was a revelation; while it lasted her face was not the face of a discontented woman, versed in the unpleasant things of the world, but of a girl, an eager, wistful girl.
“I should like it,” she said.
How was Jim to know this was an event in Marie Ducharme’s life? How was he to know it was her first social invitation from a man whom she cared to have as a companion, who was fitted by intelligence, by ideals, to be her companion? How was he to know that she had never driven with a young man as other country girls drive with neighboring boys? She was excited. Something welled up inside her that made breathing difficult, but that was delightful.
Jim, too, was young. His experience had not taught him how hard is the problem of the girl in the village—how marriage looms before her as the sole end to be desired, and how difficult is a suitable marriage to attain. He did not know how many girls with brains, with ideals, with ambitions, have, to escape spinsterhood and its dreariness, allowed themselves to be married to bumpkins, whose sole recommendation was their ability to provide support. Nor did he know how many such girls wore out their souls and their hearts in bitterness through lengthening years. Such a fate Marie Ducharme was determined to escape.