The “box-shop” was located on the northern edge of town where Paris “ran out” in cheap pastureland and cat-tail bog. It was a big ark of a building, constructed on filled-in-land, two stories in height and painted a dirty yellow. In the southeast corner, facing the roadway, was a fourteen-foot room known as the “office.” In this office Johnathan established himself, and the son, the moon and the stars were summoned to rise and set at his bidding.
Only the son obeyed, however. The moon and the stars were not at all affected by Johnathan’s new industrial importance. Nathan was called upon to relinquish his position in Caleb Gridley’s office on the simple hypothesis that “his father needed him.” The idea was that office help cost money. “Until the business was firmly established” (it had been running twelve years), the boy should be willing to work for his father, gratis. Besides, there was the need for saving him from poetry.
Nathan demurred against leaving old Caleb. If he had tutored the tanner in the gentle art of poetic composition, the tanner had reciprocated by schooling Nathan in the fundamentals and finesse of business until to-day, down here in 1921, that same education is responsible for my friend holding down a position that nets him an annual salary of—but that is anticipating. Old Caleb laid the foundation for all that Nathan knows about business. If Nathan has gone far and is going further, what old Caleb taught him is responsible, augmented by his own artist’s imagination and inherent creative ability. Yet Nathan’s demurring availed him nothing. Nat bade old Caleb a tearful good-by one February night and the tannery was a closed chapter in his life.
After six months without Nathan, old Caleb sold the tannery.
There were several antiquated job presses in the Campbell plant, fitted with cutting dies, on which orders for folding cartons were executed. But the bulk of the work was done by girls on a piece-work basis. There were about twenty of these girls when Johnathan assumed the management. Their average weekly wage was seven dollars. Johnathan looked over this “organization”, was at once persuaded that Henry Campbell had not “held expenses down to a minimum”, conceived that if all hands did twice as much work, half the employees could be dispensed with, and the labor item thereby reduced just fifty per cent. So the second morning the “organization” consisted of one lone male to work the paper-cutter and ten girls to paste the boxes. Nothing was said about giving these eleven more money. They should count themselves lucky to retain jobs at any wage. “Twice as much output or discharge” was the cheery motto that Johnathan hung in his “factory” and he pursued it consistently.
He pursued it so consistently, in fact, that the second week no one was working but Johnathan, Anna Forge, Nathan, Edith and an undersized boy with adenoids. The pay roll had been cut from $163.00 a week to $4.50. The boy got the $4.50. He had to be paid money or his folks wouldn’t let him work.
Johnathan was so intent on holding expenses to a minimum that the art and necessity of likewise holding his help was entirely overlooked. The box-shop girls may have been only seven-dollar caliber but they had their ideas about slavery, as practiced by Johnathan on his immediate family. They walked out to a girl and the man with them. Then local firms began wrathfully demanding boxes.
Johnathan knew how to hold down expenses. There was not a doubt about it. Pay out no money, whether necessary or not. Bank the balance and work the family.
Thus matters drifted along into the second week and the third, Anna Forge trying to do the work of four former girls and Edith doing about one-half of one girl. Nathan ran the paper-cutter. Johnathan spent most of his time down in the office, punching out “important correspondence” on an old blind typewriter with his two forefingers. The adenoidal boy spent his time out on the back platform clandestinely smoking cigarettes.
By the end of the first month so many orders had been cancelled and the remainder were in such a hopeless state of chaos that Nathan, with old Caleb’s training and the imagination of the artist, saw that something had to be done and done quickly. As usual, there was no one to do it but himself.