“Not much! He’ll like it, and stick to it, and bring others, and you’ll extend operations and build shops, and in no time you’ll go the way of all the world—a big factory, running night and day; you on the keen jump every minute; dust an inch thick over your books and music; nerves taut; head humming with business schemes to beat your competitors; forget your wife most of the time except to give her money; making profits hand over fist; suborning legislators to wink at your getting special railroad rates for your stuff; can’t remember how many children you have; grand success; notable example of what can be done by attention to business; nervous prostration at forty-five; Bright’s disease at fifty; leave a million.”
Rankin burst into a great roar of boyish laughter at this prophetic flight. The doctor gnawed his lower lip, and looked at him without smiling. “I’ve got ten million blue devils on my back to-night,” he said.
“So I see—so I see.” Rankin was still laughing, but as he continued to look into his old friend’s face his own grew grave by reflection. “You don’t believe all that?”
“Oh, you won’t mean to. It’ll come gradually.” He broke out suddenly, “Good Heavens, Rankin, give me a serious answer.”
“Answer!” The cabinet-maker’s bewilderment was immense. “Have you asked me anything?”
The doctor turned away to his desk with the pettish gesture of a woman whose inner thoughts are not divined.
“He makes me feel very thick-witted and dense,” Rankin appealed to the two women.
Mrs. Sandworth exonerated him from blame. “Oh, nobody ever can make out what he’s driving at. I never try.” She took out a piece of crochet work. “Lydia, they’re at it now. I know the voice Marius gets on. Would you make this in shell stitch? It’s much newer, of course, but they say it don’t wash so well.” As Lydia’s attention wavered, “Oh, there’s not a particle of use in trying to make out what they’re saying. They just go on and on.”
Rankin was addressing himself to the doctor’s back. “I don’t, you know, see anything wicked in making a lot of chairs by machinery instead of a few by hand. I’m no handcraft faddist. I did that in the beginning only because I had to begin somehow to earn my living honestly without being too tied up to folks, and I couldn’t think of any other way. But I think, now that you’ve put the idea into my head—I think it would be a good thing to gather the boys of the neighborhood around me—and, by gracious! the girls too! That’s one of my convictions—that girls need very much the same treatment as boys. And if it should develop into a large business (which I doubt strongly), what’s the harm? The motive lying back of it would be different from what I so fear and hate in big businesses. You can bet your last cent on one thing, and that is that the main idea would not be to make as much furniture as fast as possible, as cheap as possible, but to make it good, and to make only as much as would leave me and every last one of the folks that work for me time and strength to live—‘leisure to be good.’ Who said that, anyway? It’s fine.”
“Hymn to Adversity,” supplied the doctor, who was better read in the poets than the younger generation. He added, skeptically, “Could you, though, do any such thing? Wouldn’t it run you, once you got to going?”