Now, in a year, the change had come over his face—the jump as abrupt as that by which a young girl grows up—the transition from middle age to old age. It was not so much that his full, iron-gray hair and mustache had bleached and silvered. It was more that the cheeks were falling from middle-aged masses to old-age creases, more that the skin was drawing up, most that the inner energy which had vitalized his walk and gestures was his no longer.
In the mind, too—though no one perceived that, he least of all—had come a change. Here and there, a cell had disintegrated and collapsed. They were not the cells which vitalized his business sense. They lay deeper down; it was as though their very disuse for thirty years had weakened them. In such a cell his consciousness dwelt while he gazed on Trinity Churchyard, and especially upon that modest shaft of granite, three graves from the south entrance. And the watch on his desk clicked off the valuable seconds, and the electric clock on the wall jumped to mark the passing minutes. "Click-click" from the desk—seventy-eight cents—"Click-click"—one dollar and fifty-seven cents—"Clack" from the wall—forty-seven dollars.
Presently, when watch and clock had chronicled four hundred and seventy dollars of wasted time, he leaned back, looked for a moment on the brazen September heavens above, and sighed. He might then have turned back to his desk and the table of gross earnings, but for his secretary.
"Mr. Bulger outside, sir," said the secretary.
"All right!" responded Mr. Norcross. In him, those two words spoke enthusiasm; usually, a gesture or a nod was enough to bar or admit a visitor to the royal presence. Hard behind the secretary, entered with a bound and a breeze, Mr. Arthur Bulger. He was a tall man about forty-five if you studied him carefully, no more than thirty-five if you studied him casually. Not only his strong shoulders, his firm set on his feet, his well-conditioned skin, showed the ex-athlete who has kept up his athletics into middle age, but also that very breeze and bound of a man whose blood runs quick and orderly through its channels. His face, a little pudgy, took illumination from a pair of lively eyes. He was the jester in the court of King Norcross; one of the half-dozen men whom the bachelor lord of railroads admitted to intimacy. A measured intimacy it was; and it never trenched on business. Bulger, like all the rest, owed half of his position to the fact that he never asked by so much as a hint for tips, never seemed curious about the operations of Norcross. There was the time on Wall Street when Norcross, by a lift of his finger, a deflection of his eye, might have put his cousin and only known relative on the right side of the market. He withheld the sign, and his cousin lost. The survivors in Norcross's circle of friends understood this perfectly; it was why they survived. If they got any financial advantage from the friendship, it was through the advertising it gave. For example, Bulger, a broker of only moderate importance, owed something to the general understanding that he was "thick with the Old Man."
Norcross looked up; his mustache lifted a little, and his eyes lit.
"Drink?" he said. His allowance was two drinks a day; one just before he left the office, the other before dinner.
"Much obliged," responded Bulger, "but you know where I was last night. If I took a drink now, I would emit a pale, blue flame."
Norcross laughed a purring laugh, and touched a bell. The secretary stood in the door; Norcross indicated, by an out-turned hand, the top of his desk. The secretary had hardly disappeared before the office-boy entered with a tray and glasses. Simultaneously a clerk, entering from another door as though by accident, swept up the balance sheets of the L.D. and M. and bore them away. Bulger's glance followed the papers hungrily for a second; then turned back on Norcross, carefully mixing a Scotch highball.
As Norcross finished with the siphon, his eyes wandered downward again.