From his desk in the inner room where he finally buckled down to those estimates about the popple-wood casters, Neale could follow, more or less closely, as his attention varied, the evening activities of the household.
First there had been the clinking and laughter from the dining-room and kitchen where Marise and the children cleared off the table and washed the dishes. How sweet their voices sounded, all light and gay! Every occasion for being with their mother was fun for the kids. How happy Marise made them! And how they throve in that happiness like little plants in the sunshine!
When you really looked at what went on about you, how funny and silly lots of traditional ideas did seem. That notion, solemnly accepted by the would-be sophisticated moderns, for instance, that a woman of beauty and intelligence was being wasted unless she was engaged in being the "emotional inspiration" of some man's life: which meant in plain English, stimulating his sexual desire to that fever-heat which they called impassioned living. As if there were not a thousand other forms of deep fulfilment in life. People who thought that, how narrow and cramped they seemed, and blinded to the bigness and variety of life! But then, of course, everybody hadn't had under his eyes a creature genuinely rich and various, like Marise, and hadn't seen how all children feasted on her charm like bees on honey, and how old people adored her, and how, just by being herself, she enriched and civilized every life that touched her, and made every place she lived in a home for the human spirit. And Heaven knew she was, with all that, the real emotional inspiration of a man's life, a man who loved her a thousand times more than in his ignorant and passionate youth.
Come, this wasn't work. He might as well have stayed out with the family and helped with the dishes. This was being like Eugenia Mills, who always somehow had something to do upstairs when there was any work to do downstairs. Eugenia was a woman who somehow managed to stand from under life, anyhow, had been the most successful draft-dodger he knew. No call had been urgent enough to get her to the recruiting station to shoulder her share of what everybody had to do. But what did she get out of her successful shirking? She was in plain process of drying up and blowing away.
He turned to his desk and drew out the papers which had the figures and estimates on that popple. He would see if the Warner woodlot had as much popple and basswood on it as they thought. It would, of course, be easiest to get it off that lot, if there were enough of it to fill the order for casters. The Hemmingway lot and the Dornwood lot oughtn't to be lumbered except in winter, with snow for the sleds. But you could haul straight downhill from the Warner lot, even on wheels, using the back lane in the Eagle Rocks woods. There was a period of close attention to his papers, when he heard nothing at all of what went on in the rooms next his study. His mind was working with the rapid, trained exactitude which was a delight to him, with a sure, firm grasp on the whole problem in all its complicated parts.
Finally he nodded with satisfaction, pushed the papers away, and lighted his pipe, contentedly. He had it by the tail.
He leaned back in his chair, drawing on the newly lighted pipe and ruminating again. He thought to himself that he would like to see any other man in the valley who could make an estimate like that, and be sure of it, who would know what facts to gather and where to get them, on the cost of cutting and hauling in different seasons, on mill-work and transportation and overhead expenses, and how to market and where, and how to get money and how to get credit and how to manage these cranky independent Yankees and the hot-tempered irresponsible Canucks. It was all very well for advanced radicals to say that the common workmen in a business were as good as the head of the concern. They weren't and that was all there was to be said about it. Any one of them, any single one of his employees, put in his place as manager, would run the business into a hole as deep as hell inside six months. And if you put the whole lot of them at it, it would only be six weeks instead of six months before the bust-up.
There again, what people kept saying about life, things clever people said and that got accepted as the clever things to say, how awfully beside the mark they seem to you, when you found out actual facts by coming up against them. What a difference some first-hand experience with what you were talking about, did make with what you said. What clever folks ought to say was not that the workmen were as good as the head or the same sort of flesh and blood, because they weren't; but that the head exploited his natural capacities out of all proportion, getting such an outrageous share of the money they all made together, for doing what was natural to him, and what he enjoyed doing. Take himself for instance. If by some freak, he could make more money out of being one of the hands, would he go down in the ranks, stand at a machine all day and cut the same wooden shapes, hour after hour: or drive a team day after day where somebody else told him to go? You bet your life he wouldn't! He didn't need all the money he could squeeze out of everybody concerned, to make him do his job as manager. His real pay was the feeling of managing, of doing a job he was fitted for, and that was worth doing.
How fine it had always been of Marise to back him up in that view of the business, not to want him to cheat the umpire, even if he could get away with it, even though it would have meant enough sight more money for them, even though the umpire didn't exist as yet, except in his own conscience, in his own idea of what he was up to in his business. Never once had Marise had a moment of that backward-looking hankering for more money that turned so many women into pillars of salt and their husbands into legalized sneak-thieves.