Later in the day he found her name to be Marie Ducharme, daughter of a French-Canadian lumber-lack who had risen to be a walking boss. He found that Diversity returned her dislike, or, if it did not return it, viewed her askance as a person who was “queer.”
To be “queer” in a village of less than a thousand souls is no inconsiderable crime.
CHAPTER V
For the next fortnight Jim Ashe was too busy to give thought to his new environment, to study the new world to which he had been translated. He was studying the clothespin business. It is true he did not come to his work wholly unprepared; being Clothespin Jimmy’s son, that was impossible. His father had talked it, thought it, dreamed it. Jim had assimilated it with his meals. Also, as a boy, before his college days, in vacation times when college days arrived, he had worked in the mills and acquired for the business that distaste which he once vainly fancied was to lead him down widely different vocational paths.
As a lad he had counted and packed pins; later he had dogged in the sawmill; one vacation he had calloused and slivered his hands feeding the drum. He had scaled timber; he had been chore-boy for old Pazzy Miller, the pinmaker. These various jobs were given him out of his father’s wisdom to show him the how and the why of all steps in the manufacture. Nor was he ignorant of other branches of the business, for clothespins were not the sole product, though they were its backbone. He was not unacquainted with the mysteries of the veneer lathe nor with the making of wood ashes. He understood somewhat the technic of the turner, and the processes which went to the making of wooden spoons, rolling-pins, drumsticks, and the like—all turned from seasoned lumber.
Those things he knew as a workman. Something of the marketing problems his father had been able to drop unsuspected into his mind, but this was all incoherent, not card-indexed and pigeonholed and ready for instant use. Jim spent his time—not occupied by immediately pressing concerns and events—in preparing the knowledge he had, in adding to it; in short, in preparing himself as best he could to handle and husband the property that was his. It was surprisingly like trying to swim after a course of twenty lessons from a correspondence school.
A week before the machinery was ready to turn over, the office force with its paraphernalia arrived from the old office and was installed in the new. It consisted of one stenographer, picked by Clothespin Jimmy wholly for efficiency and not at all for adornment; of a middle-aged bookkeeper, who seemed to have been born with something more than the normal quantity of organs, for there grew from his forehead a green eye-shade, without which he was never seen, and there sprouted in his right hand a pen. There was also an assistant bookkeeper, whose business in life was to act and look as much like the bookkeeper, Mr. Grierson, as possible; and a shipping-clerk, whose familiarity with freight-rates and with the occult business of routing freight-cars so they would arrive where they were intended to go, instead of at the other side of the continent, was such as to arouse Jim’s admiration.
The clothespin war was as yet a minor trouble. He had one letter from the secretary of the Club, informing him that the price he had quoted was cut by another five per cent. This cut he met immediately. A flood of orders came in from brokers, traveling-men, wholesalers—all rushing to take advantage of the low market to stock up. These Jim culled over carefully, accepting only enough to keep his plant running to capacity, not overloading himself with orders which he would have to fill in case of a cessation of hostilities and consequent soaring of price.
He called into conference his superintendent, millwright, master mechanic, and the foremen of his departments, but it was not a conference, as the event proved. It consisted merely of a brief statement by Jim.
“The job you fellows are up against,” he said, “is to manufacture better and cheaper than anybody else. Prices are down. I believe we can still show a profit. Any man who has an idea that will save a tenth of a cent on a box of pins will find it profitable to bring it to me. What’s the best day’s average you made in the old plant, Pete?”