The matter was referred to the next day when it was decided to accept Bellair’s amount of one thousand dollars, which Lot & Company could not touch without his consent, except in the event of his departure with company funds; and which Bellair could not draw without written statement from Lot & Company to the effect that he was leaving with a balanced account.
Thereafter he was one with Mr. Sproxley in the financial management, under the eye of Seth Wetherbee. One by one he learned the points of the system. Wherever the accounts had run over a series of years, there were byways of loot. These pilferings were not made at once, on the same basis that a gardener does not cut asparagus for market from young roots. The plants were encouraged to establish themselves. After that the open market was supplied with a certain output, the rest belonging to Lot & Company’s table. It frequently occurred to Bellair with a sort of enveloping darkness that he had the institution in his power; and with a different but equal force that he had a life position in all naturalness; that his life would be spent with slowly increasing monetary reward for juggling the different accounts—the field of crooked canes which was the asparagus-bed of Lot & Company. He did not like it. He was not happy; and yet he realised that the adjustments his nature had already made to the facts, suggested an entire adjustment later, the final easy acceptance.
3
Bellair had thought many times of getting out from under the die, but it never came to [Pg 40]him with quite the force as on that Monday morning, after watching the Jade fare forth from the Brooklyn water-front. Something had turned within him as a result of that little pilgrimage, something that spurred to radicalism and self-assertion. At no time had Bellair credited himself with a fairer honesty than most men. He had never given it a large part of thinking. Roughly he had believed that to be honest is the common lot. The corruption in the office which he could not assimilate had to do with extensive ramifications, its lying to itself. The instant seizing upon Mr. Prentidd’s alleged weakness on the part of the younger Lot and the elder Wetherbee; the action of Mr. Sproxley with the ledger; the subtle will-breaking and spiritual blinding of all the employés in a process that never slept and was operative in every thought and pulse of the establishment—the extent and talent of these, and the untellable blackness of it all, prevailed upon Bellair with the force of a life-impression.
Bellair’s present devil was a kind of inertia. Granting that the Unknowable had been charged with periods of intense action of several kinds, the recent half-decade might be regarded as its reflex condition. There is an ebb and flow to all things, and it is easier to adjust Bellair’s years at Lot & Company as a sort of resting period for his faculties, than to accept a constitutional inertia in his case, for subsequent events do not quite bear that out. He doubtless belonged to that small class of down town men who do their work well enough, but without passion, who have faced the modern world and its need of bread and cake, and who have compromised, giving hours in exchange for essential commodities, but nothing like the full energies of their lives. It is a way beset with pitfalls, but the unavoidable result of a system that multiplies products and profits and minimizes the chances for fine workmanship on every hand. Moreover in Bellair’s case there is a philosophical detachment to be considered. The aims and purports of the printing establishment were coldly and absolutely material. These did not challenge him to any fine or full expenditure of his powers; and if he had touched that higher zone of philosophy which makes a consecration of the simplest and the heaviest tasks, he had at least found it impracticable to make it work among the systems of Lot & Company’s business.
The two years or more since he was made assistant cashier had brought many further items and exhibits. He was now used on the left hand side of the throne, developed in the darkness-department already overworked, the eye of which was Mr. Seth and the hand, Mr. Sproxley. For as yet Bellair believed that even Eben Wetherbee had only suspicions. This was the bite of the whole drama. There were men in the building who would have died for their conviction that the House was honest. You might have told these men that Lot & Company was a morgue of conservatism; that having existed under a certain policy for seventy-five years, was the chief reason for its changing; that free, unhampered genius never found utterance through that House—and any of a dozen clerks would have laughed, spoken proudly of unerring dividends and uncanny stability, granting the rest. But that Lot & Company was structurally crooked was incredible except to the few who performed the trick. Bellair knew, for instance, that his best friend in the office, Broadwell, head of the advertising, was innocent....
Monday passed without his giving notice. He quailed before the questions that would be asked. If it were not for the one thousand dollars, he would have escaped with a mere “Good-night,” though a panic would have started until the Company was assured of the innocence of his departure. As for a panic, Lot & Company had that coming, he thought. Now he knew that he would not be able to get his surety-deposit until all was made certain in his regard by the firm....
Bellair wasn’t greedy, nor caught in any great desire for wealth. He had fallen into the Down town Stream, but did not belong. Every month had weakened him. He disliked to lose his beginnings toward competence; all the subtle pressures of Lot & Company worked upon him not to change. There was no other way open. He had been touched by the fear of fear—a sort of poorhouse horror that dogs men up into the millions and down to the grave. In a way, he had become slave to the Job. He even had the suspicion that more men maim their souls by sticking to their jobs than by any dissipation. This is the way to the fear of fear—the insane undertow of modern materialism.
He had tried to find peace outside his work in music and different philanthropies, but the people he met, their seriousness, perhaps more than anything else, and the vanity of their intellectualism, aroused his sense of humour. Bellair believed in the many, but was losing belief in himself. Often he had turned back to evenings in the room, and realised that the days were draining him too much for his own real expression of any kind. Always he felt that Lot & Company was too strong for his temper, that his edge was dulled in every contact. From his depressions, he saw ahead only two ways—a life of this, or a moment in which he had Lot & Company in his power unequivocably. The last was poisonous, and he knew it. He would have to fall considerably to profit by this sort of thing, but the inevitable conclusion of the whole matter, was that the life with Lot & Company was slowly but surely getting him down.
On Tuesday noon, Mr. Seth asked him to take to lunch a certain young stationer from Philadelphia, named Filbrick. They were made acquainted in the corridor. Passing out, Bellair and his companion met the smile of Mr. Sproxley. Bellair began the formula of the cashier’s absolute and autocratic integrity. He did not really hear himself, until he reached this part: