Bojo wandered through long mathematical rooms with mathematical young men perched high on desk stools all with the same mathematical curve of the back, past squadrons of clicking typewriters, clicking endlessly as though each human unit had been surrendered into the cogs of a universal machine. He passed one by one a row of glassed-in rooms with names of minor officers displayed, marking them solemnly as though already he saw the long slow future ahead: Mr. Pelton, treasurer; Mr. Spinny, general secretary; Mr. Colton, second vice-president; Mr. Horton, vice-president; Mr. Rhoemer, general manager, until he arrived at the outer waiting-room with its faded red leather sofas and polished brass spittoons, where he had come first as a boy in need of money.
Richardson, an old young man, who walked as though he had never been in a hurry and spoke in a whisper, showed him into the inner office of Jotham B. Crocker, explaining that his father would return presently. Everything was in order; chairs precisely placed, the window shades at the same level, bookcases with filed memoranda, even to the desk, where letters to be read and letters to be signed were arranged in neat packages side by side.
On the wall was extended an immense oil painting fifteen feet by ten, of Niagara Falls in frothy eruption, with a large and brilliant rainbow lost in the mist and several figures in the foreground representing the noble Indians gazing with feelings of awe upon the spectacle of nature. Behind the desk hung a large black and white engraving of Abraham Lincoln, with one hand resting on the Proclamation of Emancipation, flanked by smaller portraits of Henry Ward Beecher and the author of the McKinley tariff. Opposite was an old-time family group done in crayons, representing Mr. and Mrs. Crocker standing side by side, with Jack in long trousers and Tom in short, while on the shining desk amid the papers was a daguerrotype mounted in a worn leather frame, of the wife who had been dead fifteen years.
Bojo selected a cigar from the visitors box and strode up and down, rehearsing in his mind the arguments he would bring to bear against the expected ultimatum. From the window the lower bay expanded below him with its steam insects crawling across the blue-gray surface, its wharf-crowded shores, beyond the ledges on ledges of factories trailing cotton streamers against the brittle sky. Everywhere the empire of industry extended its stone barracks without loveliness or pomp, smoke-grimed, implacable prisons, where multitudes herded under artificial light that humanity might live in terms of millions.
As he looked, he seemed already to have surrendered his individuality, swallowed up in the army of labor, and the revolt arose in him anew. What was the use of money if it could not bring a wider horizon and greater opportunities? And a sort of dull anger moved in him against the parental ambition which limited him to unnecessary drudgery.
Of all the persons he had met the greatest stranger to him was his father. Since his mother's death, when he was but eight years of age, his life had been spent in boarding school and college, in summer camps or on visits to chums. Their relations had been formal. At the beginning and end of each summer he had come down the long avenue of desks, past the glass doors into the private office, to report, to receive money, and to be sped with a few appropriate words of advice. Several times during the year his father would appear on a short warning, stay a few hours, and hurry off. On such occasions Tom had always felt that he was being surveyed and estimated as a lumberman watches the growth of a young forest.
His father was always in a hurry, always in good health, matter of fact, and generous. That his business had prospered and extended he knew, though to what extent his father's activities had multiplied he still was ignorant. Conversation between them had always been difficult in those tours of inspection; but Bojo, instinctively, censored the lithographs on the wall (harmless though they were) and the choice of novels which his father would be sure to examine with a critical eye.
Klondike, the sweep, arranged the room in military order and Fred DeLancy was enjoined to observe a bread-and-milk diet. Bojo had an idea that his father was very stern, rigid, and exact, with the unrelenting attitude toward folly and leisure which had characterized the Crocker family in the days of their seven celebrated divines.
"How are you, Tom?" said a chest-voice behind him. "Turn around. You look in first-class shape. Glad to see you."
"Glad to see you, father," he said hastily, taking the stubby, powerful hand.