THE VILLAGE MAIDEN.
Months had passed. Western Ontario was turning brown; heaps of leaves had already fallen. The village of Creek Bend was sleeping through the Indian Summer day. So was Evan Nelson—he lay sprawled on a hammock swung between two apple-trees behind the bank.
It is not to be inferred, however, that Evan was lazy, or that he had spent the summer lazily. Every morning before seven he had been out for a three-mile run, and every evening it had been football with the village team or a ride on the bicycle. He knew that physical exercise was necessary to health, and he took it as regularly as his mother used to make him take a spring tonic.
The work of the Creek Bend branch was ludicrously light. The manager was not a real one—he signed "acting." The branch had been opened for the sole purpose of keeping another bank out. Evan signed "pro-accountant." The first time he decorated a money order after that fashion a thrill made itself felt along his spine and in his hair.
Nelson's duties at first consisted of doing what little ledger work there was to do, writing settlement drafts and so forth, and attending to the mail. By degrees the manager, E. T. Dunn, initiated him into other work, until at last he did practically everything, even to the writing of returns.
As he sprawled now in the hammock between the apple-trees he gradually became conscious and his mind resumed the thread of thought sleep had broken off. He thought, with his eyes shut, about clerical work. Mentally he took a deposit from a customer, entered it in his "blotter," wrote it in the supplementary, and posted it in a ledger; it was included in the cash-book total, and from there found its way to the general ledger. So it was with every entry, credit or debit. "Returns" were merely copies of general-ledger balances, or parts thereof. Evan saw his way from beginning to end of the routine, and wondered that anything so simple as bank work could ever worry a man. He recalled the first week of his clerkship in Mt. Alban, and a grin crept over his somnolent features.
But Evan was not only musing—he was thinking. He knew the banking system was uniform throughout; and until he should be manager, he saw himself spending years working out some part of the routine now so simple to him. Mr. Dunn had worked at head office, and he told Nelson that there were clerks down there who did nothing from morning till night but add. Others there were who spent every hour of the day "checking" branch figures. What an existence! he thought; what a brainless life! Human automatons!
Thinking in these channels made Evan dissatisfied, and sometimes he offered pointed observations to the acting-manager. Dunn would smile and agree with anything that was said—but invariably settled down to his pipe and paper again, contented to let the business take care of him as it would. Dunn was one of a large class, in the bank, who are satisfied with six cigars a day, a bed each night, and seventy-five dollars a month.
The exercise Evan had accustomed himself to gave him increased vitality, and there being neither work nor social life enough in Creek Bend to satisfy this new vim he fell into the habit of reading and studying considerably. Dunn frequently expressed his surprise at seeing a bankclerk labor so, but the junior officer paid no attention, since the senior raised no objection. Evan gave his mind an excursion every day into the large world beyond him; the further he travelled the more ridiculous his present occupation seemed. But he encouraged reaction from these fits of treason and in the end criticized his own imagination more than those things, which, like the bank, are generally recognized to be tangibly great.
A book lay beneath the hammock this dreamy Autumn afternoon. It was "The Strenuous Life," by Roosevelt. One would have thought the reclining figure had grown weary of ambition and had cast the incentive from him. An Indian Summer day is not conducive to aspirations: mellow late-Autumn is more tolerant of beauty and love.