I
Nathan was in love again!
The winter of 1906-1907 contributed two incidents of far-reaching importance to this account of hectic romance.
Johnathan Forge bought the local box-shop.
Miss Carol Gardner came to Paris from Ohio—pronounced “A-higher”—and when the boy met her, “to his eye there was but one beloved face on earth and that was shining on him.”
It developed that for a considerable time, unsuspected by his family, Johnathan had been “looking around for some good business”, professedly of a manufacturing nature where the labor of others might accrue to his benefit in more sizable portions than the cobbling business allowed. Henry Campbell died suddenly in November. The executors offered his property for sale. The first inkling Paris received that the town cobbler had aspirations toward capitalism came via the Telegraph one February evening. A deal had gone through that day with Johnathan Forge for the box-shop. The cobbler was assuming management at once.
Mrs. Anna Forge heard the news via the Telegraph also, by the way.
The Campbell Press-Board Company, as the firm had been listed in town directory and telephone book, made pasteboard boxes. In them were packed the products of the larger industries of Paris, the Thorne Knitting Mills, the Stevens Hard-Rubber Process Works. The business was considered profitable, in a modest way, if expenses were held to a minimum. Johnathan felt himself especially born to that business. If there was one thing he emphatically knew how to do, in business or family, it was holding expenses to a minimum. To his wife’s stupefaction, he drew eighteen hundred dollars from the Paris Savings Bank and gave notes aggregating thirty-two hundred in addition. Thus Johnathan became a “manufacturer.”
The “box-shop” was located on the northern edge of town where Paris “ran out” in cheap pastureland and cat-tail bog. It was a big ark of a building, constructed on filled-in-land, two stories in height and painted a dirty yellow. In the southeast corner, facing the roadway, was a fourteen-foot room known as the “office.” In this office Johnathan established himself, and the son, the moon and the stars were summoned to rise and set at his bidding.
Only the son obeyed, however. The moon and the stars were not at all affected by Johnathan’s new industrial importance. Nathan was called upon to relinquish his position in Caleb Gridley’s office on the simple hypothesis that “his father needed him.” The idea was that office help cost money. “Until the business was firmly established” (it had been running twelve years), the boy should be willing to work for his father, gratis. Besides, there was the need for saving him from poetry.
Nathan demurred against leaving old Caleb. If he had tutored the tanner in the gentle art of poetic composition, the tanner had reciprocated by schooling Nathan in the fundamentals and finesse of business until to-day, down here in 1921, that same education is responsible for my friend holding down a position that nets him an annual salary of—but that is anticipating. Old Caleb laid the foundation for all that Nathan knows about business. If Nathan has gone far and is going further, what old Caleb taught him is responsible, augmented by his own artist’s imagination and inherent creative ability. Yet Nathan’s demurring availed him nothing. Nat bade old Caleb a tearful good-by one February night and the tannery was a closed chapter in his life.
After six months without Nathan, old Caleb sold the tannery.
There were several antiquated job presses in the Campbell plant, fitted with cutting dies, on which orders for folding cartons were executed. But the bulk of the work was done by girls on a piece-work basis. There were about twenty of these girls when Johnathan assumed the management. Their average weekly wage was seven dollars. Johnathan looked over this “organization”, was at once persuaded that Henry Campbell had not “held expenses down to a minimum”, conceived that if all hands did twice as much work, half the employees could be dispensed with, and the labor item thereby reduced just fifty per cent. So the second morning the “organization” consisted of one lone male to work the paper-cutter and ten girls to paste the boxes. Nothing was said about giving these eleven more money. They should count themselves lucky to retain jobs at any wage. “Twice as much output or discharge” was the cheery motto that Johnathan hung in his “factory” and he pursued it consistently.
He pursued it so consistently, in fact, that the second week no one was working but Johnathan, Anna Forge, Nathan, Edith and an undersized boy with adenoids. The pay roll had been cut from $163.00 a week to $4.50. The boy got the $4.50. He had to be paid money or his folks wouldn’t let him work.
Johnathan was so intent on holding expenses to a minimum that the art and necessity of likewise holding his help was entirely overlooked. The box-shop girls may have been only seven-dollar caliber but they had their ideas about slavery, as practiced by Johnathan on his immediate family. They walked out to a girl and the man with them. Then local firms began wrathfully demanding boxes.
Johnathan knew how to hold down expenses. There was not a doubt about it. Pay out no money, whether necessary or not. Bank the balance and work the family.
Thus matters drifted along into the second week and the third, Anna Forge trying to do the work of four former girls and Edith doing about one-half of one girl. Nathan ran the paper-cutter. Johnathan spent most of his time down in the office, punching out “important correspondence” on an old blind typewriter with his two forefingers. The adenoidal boy spent his time out on the back platform clandestinely smoking cigarettes.
By the end of the first month so many orders had been cancelled and the remainder were in such a hopeless state of chaos that Nathan, with old Caleb’s training and the imagination of the artist, saw that something had to be done and done quickly. As usual, there was no one to do it but himself.
“Pa,” he observed one noontime, “I’ve got a proposition to make that will save us money.”
“Go back to your work!” snapped Johnathan. “If we don’t get a gross of Number Sevens to the knitting mill by five o’clock we lose their business.”
“That’s exactly why I want to make you a proposition. I’d like you to turn over that room upstairs to me absolutely and let me organize and systematize the production end as I please——”
“Turn over the business to you? Have you gone crazy or do you think I have?”
“—for a specified price per box over the cost of materials and profit. Let me spend the money as I choose so long as I turn you out the boxes and have them on schedule time on the shipping platform?”
“Do you mean to infer you know more about running a business than your father, who’s wiser and older and therefore must——”
“I’m not arguing that I want to run the business! I only want to run the production. We’ve got an order for fifty thousand Number Tens for the process works. We’re far behind, already. You’re getting eight cents a piece for those boxes. The stock costs three and you’re figuring half a cent profit. That leaves four and a half cents to cover labor and all factory expense. Will you give me three and a half cents for producing every box, regardless of how I spend the money? You stay down here and run the office and have no care but supplying the materials, getting the orders and collecting the money?”
“No!” snapped Johnathan, “I will not! Get back to your work.”
One week later the order for the process works was cancelled. The process works announced they were putting in their own box department. They had no time to waste while Johnathan ran a factory as he ran his family. Moreover, the knitting mills also delivered an ultimatum. Johnathan called his son to his “office.”
“Nathaniel,” he declared, in a large voice, “I’ve been thinking over what you suggested Friday. I don’t know but I’m disposed to give it a trial. For one week, say—to see if you could assume such a big responsibility. I doubt it. But I’ve got so much work and worry here in the office, with this correspondence and all——”
“A week! I couldn’t work out anything permanently effective inside of three months.”
“Three months? What would take three months?”
“Getting order out of that awful chaos upstairs. There’s got to be a careful organization planned, routings for the work laid out and systems installed.”
Johnathan shied at that word “organization.” It meant spending money, giving hard cash to indolent employees who “soldiered” the moment his back was turned. But in the end he capitulated. He had to capitulate.
Nathan, with the high heart of youth eternal, set to work. The boy traded with his father until he made him promise on his honor not to cut the piece rate if Nathan cut the costs. On that promise the artist-imagination of the lad built soundly and swiftly.
Johnathan was horrified at the number of girls and women Nathan set to work at the long tables. That they were being paid piece rates and if they failed to deliver, got no money, cut small figure. The great, stark, horrible fact remained that some of them were earning eight, ten, twelve, fourteen dollars a week. Money was running out like water, or blood from a wound in Johnathan’s side. So many boxes were being produced that it was taxing him to the utmost to get materials up to the benches. Not only were all booked orders being filled on schedule, but others had to be secured to keep the little plant running. All this was never once weighed against the money going out for pay rolls. One cow-like little girl, Milly Richards, had perfected a certain operation so deftly that she was drawing fifteen to eighteen dollars a week, and it could not continue!
What mattered it if Nathan had used his imagination and inherent creative ability to cut corners and manage efficiently until the cost per box had dropped to less than a cent and a half? That Richards girl was drawing eighteen perfectly good dollars every Saturday noon. And it could not continue!
Johnathan awoke in the night and agonized over it.
Finally, while checking up the pay roll one week, the father threw down his pencil and banged an angry fist on the desk.
“I’ll not pay that Richards girl eighteen dollars a week! I’ll not do it! This nonsense stops right here and now!”
“She’s earned it!”
“Before she came here she worked in the process works and was content with eight dollars. But you get her down here and the first thing I know, she’s run eight dollars up to eighteen. Eighteen dollars! For a woman! I’ll not pay it. You can go and tell her so.”
“You mean you’ll cut the rate?”
“I mean I won’t pay any female eighteen dollars for six days’ work! That’s what I mean and it stands!”
“You made a bargain with me for three and a half cents a box. I get the cost down to a cent and a half and you want to break your promise.”
“I’ll not pay any girl eighteen dollars for six days’ work!” This outrageous thing had become an obsession with Johnathan. “Why, you obstreperous young dolt, you’ve gone and gathered an organization here that’s making so much stuff I can’t get materials or orders to keep it going! And you want to pay one girl eighteen dollars a week!”
“I should think the proper thing would be to hustle out and put in your valuable time getting more orders—not waste it worrying over the high wages one clever girl has managed to make by applying herself to her job.”
“Don’t give me any lip, young man! I know how much business I want to do. And you’ve built an organization to do too much! Another phase of your youthful indiscretion, the same that made you write that obscene poem about slaves before you knew your own mind and I stopped it. If I gave you a free rein here, you’d wreck the place!”
“If you gave me a free rein here I’d build a sales force that would find firms who would consume our boxes,” the lad answered grimly.
“And where would the money come from to swing all that business?”
“I’d go to the bank and borrow it!”
“Huh! I suppose you think banks are just lying awake nights hoping I’ll come and ask to relieve them of their surplus? Maybe you’d enjoy knowing that I’ve been to the banks here twice. Each time I’ve been refused, but you’d still keep paying eighteen dollars to eight-dollar girls.”
Nathan felt that he knew why Judge Farmer, president of the People’s Bank, might have refused Johnathan money. But he said nothing.
“Well,” snapped Johnathan. “Answer me!”
“If the bank wouldn’t loan me money, then I’d get out and incorporate this business and put out some seven per cent stock. I’ve got twenty-five girls and four men upstairs. A certain percentage of work must be turned out to carry this overhead,—rent, taxes, depreciation, insurance. It isn’t how little we can do or how much we can do. It’s how much we’re obliged to do, to operate at a profit. And I’ve found that figure exactly. Not a man or girl can be turned off without crippling our output and losing us money by running up our overhead per unit of production. What’s more, if you cut the piece rate, the girls are going to get discouraged and quit, or if they don’t quit, do just enough to hold their jobs. What’s the answer? It’s somebody’s business around here to find orders and I’d say it was up to you. I’ve done my part. Now you do yours.”
Johnathan arose, his face pale.
“We’ll go into that some other time, you saucy young pup,” he snapped. “Just now I’ve got to get to the bank. But I’m marking down the Richards girl to ten dollars. That’s all I’ll give her. Not a cent more. Not a cent less! Ten dollars!”
“But, Pa!” cried the son aghast. “You’re not going to cut her this week—on the work she’s done already?”
“Four times I’ve told you I’ll pay no female eighteen dollars a week. I could get a man—a man as old as me—to work for eighteen dollars!”
“What’s the use of a man—what ice would a man cut anyhow—if a girl can do the work as well and quicker?”
“Don’t sass me and don’t argue! This is my business and you’re my son! I propose to run both in any way I please.”
And Johnathan slammed out the door, fully persuaded that no man’s earthly trial is greater than headstrong offspring.
The pay envelopes were made out that afternoon, Johnathan getting great enjoyment from writing the names on each in a very precise hand and admiring his penmanship with great self-pride. When they were filled, he took them upstairs personally. “Paying off” was something he always reserved for himself. It gave dignity to the owner of a business. The help thereby associated him with money. Finally the Richards girl’s envelope remained.
“You give her this, and explain why it’s short,” the father ordered, tossing it across to the boy when he returned to the office. Such a thing was good discipline for obstreperous youth.
Nathan removed his overalls and went upstairs. He had eight dollars clandestinely removed from the petty cash.
‘There’s a mistake in your envelope, Milly,” he said. “It only holds ten dollars. So here’s the other eight to make it right. And Milly?”
“Yes?”
“Monday morning I’m not coming back. If you know of a better job, you’d better take it.”
“Where you goin’, Nathan?”
“Back to the tannery, to keep the books for Mr. Gridley.”
The girl’s face fell. She was pretty in a dumpish, common sort of way. She flushed slightly and turned toward the window looking down on the acres of rushes.
“I dunno as I care to keep my job here—if you’re going, Nathan,” she confessed.
Then she fled down the stairs, leaving the boy stupefied.