The “exciting part!” Here was a clue, and I eagerly probed further.
“Then the interest lies in the doing, not in the results?” I asked, speaking from the depths of my ignorance of what it feels like to be a millionaire.
“Yes,” said J. R. Booth, “to build up and afterwards to improve—that occupies the mind, and is a great pleasure; but he is a miserable man who gets to the end of it.”
His words carried a note of pathos to the ear. There was no mistaking the implication—a great organising capitalist, a millionaire many times over, was suggested as a case for compassion.
I did not speak. The earnest expression of those blue eyes told me there was more to come.
“The advantage,” J. R. Booth went on, “is certainly with the manual worker, as distinguished from the man who does the mental part. If he is healthy, and sleeps well, and eats well, no man enjoys life more than the working man. Only,” he added ruefully, “you can’t make him believe it. I have been in both places, and I prefer the heavy end of it.”
Those words were ringing in my memory when, later in the afternoon, I was talking with one of J. R. Booth’s lieutenants. He was telling me something that I scarcely needed to be told, namely, that the entire staff felt, not merely respect, but personal affection for the old man—the wonderful old man whose knowledge, patience and industry seemed without limit; the old man who was never known to be beaten by a difficulty.
And even while we were talking I chanced to look through the glass panel of a door that gave entrance to an inner office. In that office I again saw J. R. Booth. But it was J. R. Booth in a new aspect—an aspect that held my eyes enthralled. The Lumber King was leaning over a desk studying some document, his face alight with interest, yet immovable as marble.
Only once before in my life had I seen that absorbed expression on a human countenance. I was being conducted over the library of the late William Ewart Gladstone, while the venerable statesman sat there writing at his table near the window. A member of the family accompanied me, and began to explain, in a loud voice, the space-saving arrangement of the books. “Hush!” I whispered, “we must not disturb Mr. Gladstone.” “He will not hear,” came the hearty reply. “I had no idea,” was my comment, “that his deafness was so serious.” “Neither is it,” I was informed; “but when Mr. Gladstone is absorbed in mental work a pistol-shot would not disturb him.”
The unmoving face I saw last year in the Ottawa office, like that other unmoving face I saw years ago in the Hawarden library, seemed mesmerised, and to have the power of mesmerising me.