II
Perhaps this tendency of Johnathan’s toward sudden discretion, diplomacy and tact had been partly augmented by the past month’s events at the factory.
The boy had begun to show a perturbing independence. He gave veiled hints daring his father to thrash him. For instance, the week following the quarrel about the Richards girl’s pay, Nathan had absolutely refused to work, “sulked” was what John Forge called it.
“If you can run that bunch upstairs better than I, that’s your privilege, Pa,” was the way he had put it.
Johnathan had purposed to demonstrate whether he was to be bullied and bulldozed by a few spoiled employees and a stiff-necked, incorrigible son. He had talked dramatically about the sharpness of a serpent’s tooth, thrown things about the office, stormed upstairs, donned a duster coat and proceeded to “boss his own factory.”
He had “bossed” it so adequately and completely that at twenty minutes to three o’clock that same afternoon, the men “walked out flat”, and all the girls but Milly Richards had been mysteriously missing one by one each time Johnathan came back from office calls downstairs.
Johnathan said all right! he was glad they had gone—it saved him the trouble of firing a lot of cheap help whom his boy had spoiled with too much money. He would hire new and train them as he wanted them trained. Meanwhile he ’phoned for Edith and his wife to come down and paste boxes. Mrs. Forge came humbly enough but a dour time followed with Edith. According to Johnathan she was assimilating altogether too much of her brother’s growing incorrigibility.
During the next day John began hiring “new” help. It was a discouraging business. All workmen were spoiled these days, anyhow. They knew their places no longer. They expected too much money. All the men who responded wanted three to four dollars a day. No girls could be procured on a piece-work basis at any price because the cutting of the piece rate had quickly percolated through the laboring element of the community. John “took on” old Mike Taro to help unload a car of cardboard and two rouged and perfumed young ladies who had never held one job for two consecutive weeks anywhere in our section of Vermont. They were temporarily willing to accept three dollars a week apiece because they had “gentlemen friends”, they explained, who would help their otherwise slender exchequers. But all three of these failed to show up for work the second morning because Taro was dead drunk, and the rouged young ladies had been mysteriously warned to remain in discreet desuetude or direful calamities were liable to fall upon them from unexpected quarters, chiefly police.
The fourth day Johnathan sent for Joe Partridge, one of Nathan’s cutter-men. Joe came down late in the afternoon dressed in his painful best and smoking a cheap cigar. Johnathan took him into the office and “went into conference” with him. Joe listened for a time with an exasperating lack of servility.
“I don’t understand none of them big words,” Joe finally confessed. “But so far as us working folks is concerned, the situation is just this: Your boy Nat knows how to run this business better’n you. And until he comes back, we don’t care about working.”
This was flat and frank. Johnathan was angrily jolted.
“If that’s the way you feel about it, you’ll never come back,” he roared.
“I ain’t so sure about that.”
“You mean you’ll dictate to me how to run my own business?”
“No, but I reckon we got something to say about who’ll fill our jobs.”
“I’ll hire other people to take your places——!”
“Why ain’t you hired ’em already?”
“Because I wanted to be fair and square——”
“Oh, hell! You ain’t been able to get nobody to take our places! And you won’t be able to get nobody so long’s Nat stays away. We’re seein’ to that.”
“You mean you’ll intimidate any persons I may hire in your places?”
“We’ll knock the blocks off any one who takes a job here while we’re out. Yes!”
“You get out of my office!”
“Surest thing you know!”
Johnathan held out for nine days.
“I’m too nervously constituted to handle such cheap humanity as factory help,” he explained stiffly to Nathan the evening of the ninth day. “I’m not giving in, understand, or admitting you’re anything but a bumptious, swelled-headed boy. But I want you to go back upstairs and get those orders off—somehow! It’s only because I haven’t the patience and time to give to the manufacturing end that I’m temporarily sacrificing my principles——”
“The piece rate stands, Pa?”
“For the present, yes! When I’ve had time to study into it, we’ll go into conference over it.”
“All right—if you’ll promise to keep hands off, I’ll try to get the wheels turning once more. But, Pa!”
“Well?”
“I’m getting kind of sick working here for next to nothing. I want to go down on the books for twenty dollars a week.”
“Twenty dol——”
Johnathan nearly fell on his forehead.
“Twenty dollars, yeah!”
“Not a measly penny! You’re having two whole dollars a week now to squander——”
“I’m filling a superintendent’s job here that couldn’t be filled by any one else short of thirty. I’ll pay board at home. But I want what I’m worth and I’m not a bit unreasonable to ask it.”
They compromised on twelve dollars.
The box-shop “help” trooped back exultantly. Nat knew how to handle human nature. The peak of production was regained in a single afternoon.
Outside, the labor differences at the Forge plant were colloquially known as “the box-shop strike.” But Johnathan would have had an arm torn out before he would have admitted any strike. His boy had simply “poisoned the minds” of the help against his own father and they had refused to work.
“I’ve got an awful problem on my hands, Doctor Dodd,” he told the pastor of the Methodist church the following Thursday evening. “And where it’s going to end, the Father only knows. My son’s behavior is graying my hair. Think of him having no more filial loyalty than engineering a walk-out of my employees and keeping them out until I give him a raise in his wages of six hundred per cent!”
“God will humble him,” the kindly old man solaced. “The sympathy of the community is with you, Brother Forge!”