“You’re a great success.”
“There’s such big stuff ahead,” she mused. “And I’m going after it, Matthew. It gives me something to do. It’s the sort of thing I can do. There’s a reason for all this society. I’m going to go up to the top and find out the reason.”
“That’s the deepest thing you ever said,” said Matthew, lighting a final cigarette. “It was a great success,” he repeated, and went on to his library to work for a few hours. Fliss sat still, her eyes in the future as they had been long ago on the night of the High School dance. Work, heights, a future—still ahead.
CHAPTER XXVIII
THE town of Allenby had grown in the five years since the birth of Dorothea Harrison in Mrs. Olson’s house. It had a hotel now, a moving picture house, several emporiums, a Main Street, which was lit up by night and offered a meeting and loafing place for the people who lived there. The hotel was a square frame building, new, still fresh with paint, with kalsomined walls and hardwood floors. It called itself the best hotel in a hundred miles and was fairly accurate.
Dick lived there. It amused him at first, after the luxury of his home and his club, to walk down the resounding, uncarpeted corridor to the room which was his own with its golden oak bureau and white iron bedstead and uncomfortable rocking chair. The chair was only used as a clothes rack anyway, so it did not matter whether it was comfortable or uncomfortable. The bed was clean and comfortable and he was always grateful for that. He had made Allenby and the Allenby Hotel his headquarters because that seemed the most natural thing to do, but he did not stay there all the time. There were four or five small towns, most of them a little smaller, one larger, which were also part of his business, for they had grown up around the mines in which his company was interested, and he divided his time more or less among them all.
He had found the position very difficult. He was taking no one’s place, so the organizations of the mines did not know quite what to do with him. The attitude of the superintendents at first had been to treat him as a visitor, to “show” him things. When it came to them fully that he proposed making an extended stay among them, there was suspicion of his purposes. The undercurrent idea was at once that he was on some secret investigation, that some one was “going to be fired.” They didn’t like it. The simple statement which he made to them that the company had felt that a man on the ground might help the unsatisfactory situation met great skepticism. For a couple of weeks the relations were strained. But Dick made friends quickly, and what was more, he made himself useful. All of every day he was busy, going from one thing to another; talking to superintendents, foremen, men; sizing things up; listening to complaints when he must, but never encouraging them. He made no trouble, usurped no authority, did no meddling, with the result that he very soon found things brought to him for consultation and decision. Several grievances, small things in themselves, but which had been moot and bitter points between the miners and their superiors, were adjusted before they had developed so far that they made real trouble. And other things happened. Dick had consultations with some of the grocers and dealers in fuel in the towns and a certain amount of exploitation ceased as Dick pointed out that rival stores which could easily be started might put them out of business. He found out no more than the skilled investigator would have found out after a few days’ survey. But the difference between Dick’s work and that of a professional investigator was that Dick did something about it. He was not only investigating and observing, but he had, in a large measure, power to act and the brains to proceed.
These small successes gave him no illusions any more than his small failures confused his mind. He knew that the great dissatisfactions would not be solved by even model conditions, and model conditions were impossible to get. But he worked along and even garnered unexpected praise from that hard-thinking group of men who had allowed him permission to try his experiment.
It was a very simple life. All day at the mines, absorbed in study of practical things, varied perhaps in some way by a discussion with some of the foremen or some of the men themselves. He was amazed to find how hard every one was thinking. Nearly every man he met had some idea that changes were needed in mind, state or nation. He heard wise comments often as well as ridiculous ones, but he found no common basis for all the comments—nothing to build upon—no standard which they all would follow. He puzzled about it somewhat. At the end of the day, in the short evenings, he thought of these things, sometimes sitting in the unkempt lobby of the hotel, sometimes walking swiftly in the cold night. And as he walked he would see lights come out from the windows of the little houses and shadows pass the windows, and he would be very lonely. More lonely than he had been in Carrington, for he felt closer to these houses and yet shut out from them. He had the sense of men behind the windows, with their families—men basically like himself, women fundamentally like Cecily. And as he walked he often wondered, too, what it was that had parted him and Cecily again on that Christmas morning, why they could not have been happy together. Sometimes it seemed so cruelly abnormal to him that he was tempted to go to her again. Things looked simpler here in this little streetcarless, snow covered, hard driven town. Men were husbands and women were wives, and mental quibbles were of such little consequence. In these clear moments of normality it was amazing to him that he and Cecily had ever quarreled. She, the beautiful, loyal mother of his children; he, her husband, devoted to his children and loving Cecily so deeply. And yet there it was. In some way they had torn their marriage into shreds. Because she did not want him to like the things, the people, the amusements which she did not like; because she had rated him cheap and held herself dear; because she had insisted on her standards for both of them.
Trivialities, no doubt of it. They had thrown away vital things for trivialities. They’d won their points. He might go where he liked, amuse himself as he liked, live by his own standards. And where was he? A man without a home, without a family; and yet always with the precious sense of that family, his even though he was not with it. And she—he could imagine her sitting quietly in that long living-room of hers, with her book—alone. Or was she? Matthew had said it could not go on that way; that some man was bound to disturb Cecily. Cecily’s husband put that thought from his mind with distaste.