Perhaps he was still in preparation. We have not really completed the circle of any accomplishment until we have put it in action. Certainly Bellair had not done that, since the Unknowable ended. He had made no great friends among men or women; though almost thirty, he had met no stirring love affair, at least in this period. He had done the most common duties of trade, for a common reward in cash; lived in a common house—moved in crowds of common men and affairs. It was as if he were a spy, trained from a child, but commanded at the very beginning of his manhood, not only to toil and serve in an insignificant post—but to be insignificant as well. It was by accident, for instance, that they discovered at Lot & Company’s that Bellair was schooled in the Sanscrit.
Before usual he was astir that Monday morning, but late at the office for all that. A drop of consciousness somewhere between shoe-buttons, and a similar trance between collar and tie. In these lapses a half hour was lost, and queerly enough afterward the old purports of his life did not hold together as before. A new breath from somewhere, a difference in vitality, and the hum-drum, worn-sore consciousness given to his work with Lot & Company, had become like an obscene relative, to be rid of, even at the price of dollars and the established order of things. It had been very clear as he drank his coffee that he must give quit-notice at the office, yet when he reached there, this was not so easy, and he was presently at work as usual in his cage with Mr. Sproxley, the cashier.
The Quaker firm of Lot & Company was essentially a printing establishment. During the first half of the period in which Bellair had been connected, though he was not stupider than usual, he had not realised the crooked weave of the entire inner fabric of the house. Lot & Company had been established for seventy-five years and through three generations. Its conduct was ordered now like a process of nature, a systematised tone to each surface manner and expression. All the departments were strained and deformed to meet and adjust in the larger current of profit which the cashier had somehow bridged without scandal for twenty-seven years. Personally, so far as Bellair knew, Mr. Sproxley was an honest man, though not exactly of the manner, and underpaid.
The cashier’s eyes were black, a black that would burn you, and unquestionably furtive, although Bellair sat for two years at a little distance from the cashier’s desk before he accepted the furtiveness, so deeply laid and set and hardened were his first impressions. They were hard eyes as well, like that anthracite which retains its gleaming black edge, though the side to the draft is red to the core.
Mr. Sproxley’s home was in Brooklyn, an hour’s ride from the office—a little flat in a street of little flats, all with the same porches, brickwork and rusty numerals. An apartment for two, and yet Mr. and Mrs. Sproxley had not moved, though five black-eyed children had come to them. The cashier of Lot & Company was a stationary man—that was his first asset.... A hundred times Bellair had heard the old formula, delivered by firm members to some caller at the office:
“This is our cashier, Mr. Sproxley. He has been with us twenty-seven years. We have found him the soul of honour”—the last trailing off into a whisper—a hundred times in almost the same words, for the Lots and the Wetherbees bred true. The visitor would be drawn off and confidently informed that Mr. Sproxley would die rather than leave a penny unaccounted; indeed, that his zeal on the small as well as large affairs was frequently a disturbance to the office generally, since everything stopped until the balance swung free. Bellair knew of this confidential supplement to the main form, because he had taken it into his own pores on an early day of his employment. The lift of that first talk (in Bellair’s case it was from the elder Wetherbee, an occasional Thee and Thou escaping with unworldly felicity) was for Bellair sometime to attain a similar rock-bound austerity of honour.... Always the stranger glanced a second time at Mr. Sproxley during the firm-member’s low-voiced affirmation of his passionate integrity.
Passing to the second floor, the visitor would meet Mr. Hardburg, head of the manuscript and periodical department, for Lot & Company had found a good business in publishing books of story and poetry at the author’s expense. Here eye and judgment reigned, Mr. Hardburg’s, on all matters of book-dress and criticism; yet within six or seven minutes, the formula would break through for the attention of the caller, thus:
“Lot & Company is a conservative House—that’s why it stands—a House, sir (one felt the Capital), that has stood for seventy-five years on a basis of honour and fair dealing, if on a conservative basis. Lot & Company stands by its agents and employés first and last. Lot & Company does not plunge, but over any given period of time, its progress is apparent and its policy significantly successful.”
Mr. Hardburg’s eyes kindled as he spoke—grey tired eyes, not at all like Mr. Sproxley’s—but the light waned, and Mr. Hardburg quickly relapsed into ennui and complaint, for he was a living sick man. The impression one drew from his earlier years, was that he had overstrained as an athlete, and been a bit loose and undone ever since.... Now Mr. Hardburg would be called away for a moment, leaving the stranger in the office with Miss Rinderley, his assistant. With fluent and well directed sentences, this lady would outline the triumphs of Mr. Hardburg from college to the mastery of criticism which he was now granted professionally.
“But what we love best about him,” Miss Rinderley would say, glancing at the enlarged photograph above his desk, “is the tireless way he helps young men. Always he is at that. I have seen him talk here for an hour—when the most pressing matters of criticism and editorial responsibility called—literally giving himself to some one needing help. Very likely he would miss his train for the country. Poor Mr. Hardburg, he needs his rest so——”