“Four years,” she answered, tossing a pebble into the fountain and showing little interest in anything but her own thoughts.
“And I five.”
As she said nothing, presently he went on: “Now, I want you to do me a service, a real service. I want you to decide a question, an important question for me, and I have determined to abide by your decision, whatever it may be. Yes, I will do exactly as you say.”
Expecting a word or look of interest from her, he paused; but she went on drawing lines on the gravel walk with her parasol, in silence. Being of the large, fair type of man, his face flushed with every emotion. Just now he colored deeply because of her apparent unconcern, but continued:
“There are times in each life when it is necessary to do one of two things. Until we reach this point we get on very well, and are untroubled by doubts. But when we have to decide whether to keep the right hand road or take the left, then we look about for something or somebody to cast the die for us. The doing is always comparatively easy; it’s the deciding that muddles and troubles us. Now I have come to the place where the road divides, and I want some help on the decision.”
She looked up at him now with unaffected interest.
“I am thinking that I ought to strike out and do something better than I am doing,—be something more than a cog in a great machine. I am tired of that. In the office over there”—making a motion with his hand in the direction of the commercial part of the city—“are men who would faint, I am sure, or weep like children, if they should lose their situations, such cowards have they become by long dependence on the weekly salary. Some have been there years, and have given their manhood as well as their time in exchange for the money they pocket every Saturday. They act like slaves in the presence of their employer. If he had bought them at the auction block they could not be more cringing to him. When he is in sight self-respect withers and they are mere worms, crawling in spirit at his feet. I don’t want to become like that, and yet I am sure to if I remain. That sort of thing is contagious. No man can stand forever against it. I know just enough of the degrading feeling to be willing to make a sacrifice to avoid familiarity with it. In reality the wage-earner and the man who hires him engage in a form of coöperation, each to be respected by the other; but the relation is universally misunderstood. The employer develops into an autocrat and the employee into a serf, and so both are injured. To be an employee too long is to become a dependent, helpless, pitiable being, a degenerate man. I am sure of it. Believing that, I feel I must escape from such direful consequences.
“Yet it takes courage to voluntarily give up what they call a good salary, and go into the wilderness, so to speak, and take the risks that all that implies. A ship sails from New York for San Francisco day after to-morrow. I have been thinking I would resign my situation and take passage on her. The territories are big and full of opportunities. I thought to go to one of them and carve out life for myself on broader lines, if possible. I have a little money, and I can still put forth effort. As I have no family to consult—not a relative in the world—and being on the fence, as it were, in the matter of deciding, I have a fancy for leaving it to you and will do what you say. Tell me, shall I go or stay?”
She looked at him with something like admiration shining in her eyes.
“Go,” she said, unhesitatingly. “Go, and be an individual, a fully developed unit, a man, not a mere cog in somebody else’s wheel. Cogs have their uses, but they have also their limitations, and they are so plentiful. You can be a whole machine, if you try. Yes, go and be a figure in the world, on your own account, not simply a cipher, useful only as auxiliary to the figures.”