More often they discussed the box-shop and its affairs. To old Caleb the boy brought his problems, his newly discovered short cuts, his dilemmas encountered with the idiosyncrasies of employees, his tangles of finance. And old Caleb, from a wealth of Yankee experience and common sense, encouraged the boy in the right places and delicately discouraged him when he might otherwise have “flown off at a tangent” and allowed his enthusiasms to go galloping.
Johnathan never knew of these consultations. He never dreamed that Caleb was really running his shop through his son; that Caleb subsequently knew more about the folding-box business than Johnathan himself. The latter only knew that Nathan “did things” and then “consulted him” afterward. That the “things” which Nathan did reduced expenses, increased production, sold goods, brought money from delinquent creditors, cut small figure with the father. Somehow his boy had no patience when time after time the father expressed a wish to “go into conference.” There were two great joys in being a business man, for Johnathan. One was opening the morning mail. The other was “going into conference.”
The fact of the matter was that Nathan had deftly taken the management of the business out of his father’s hands. There was nothing left for Johnathan to do. There was no one to “boss.” He worried a lot about it.
This worry often broke out in open rebellion. At such times, father and son quarreled. These quarrels had chiefly to do with supplies. One day Nathan ordered a new cutter-knife. It cost twenty-eight dollars. The father’s contention was that while Nathan might have had to get the knife quickly to maintain production, they had not “gone into conference” about it first.
“But you were in Baldwinsville that day—all day!” snapped Nathan. “How could I consult you when you weren’t here to consult?”
“You could have awaited my return!”
“And shut down the cutter to do it—send Partridge home—make him lose a day’s wages and the business a matter of a hundred and seventy-five dollars—just to ask you if I could buy a new knife which you would have had to consent to, anyway? Where’s the sense in that?”
The economics of the thing were swept aside by Johnathan. He clung doggedly to the contention that they had not “gone into conference” about it first. Thereupon he passed the rest of that day evolving a very elaborate order system. With a needle-pointed pencil and a ruler he laid out an order form. He took it up to the local print shop and ordered twenty thousand blanks printed and finished off in pads. Prominently upon the face of each was the line in big type: “No orders valid without the signature of J. H. Forge, Pres.” The bill for the printing was seventy-eight dollars. The fallacy of the system was that Johnathan had to be on hand to sign a blank every time the business required anything from a bottle of paste to the use of a storehouse for goods waiting shipment. This grew to be a nuisance. Nathan began to “countersign” the orders, as he was “on the job” twelve hours a day. The fourth week the blanks were discarded,—as order forms. The second month the office girls were using them for scratch paper. But they cost seventy-eight dollars.
It was Nathan who made a hurried trip to Burlington one Saturday afternoon and landed the Cudworth and Halstead business for candy cartons. It was Nathan who cleverly “tied up” the output of the Cobb City Pressed Board Mills and diverted it to the Forge plant when prices shot up after the depression of 1907. It was Nathan who suggested scrapping all their old presses and putting in the latest type of power machines then being evolved by a Philadelphia firm. To finance this radical move, it was Nathan who suggested that they incorporate the box-shop and put out fifteen thousand dollars’ worth of its preferred stock. And it was Nathan who, under the clandestine tutelage of old Caleb, engineered that organization and got the money.
Against all these departures Johnathan fought tooth and claw,—all but the procuring of new money. The size to which his thumb-nail business had grown began to frighten him. More and more he wanted to “go into conference.” But Nathan, the load of the organization on his enthusiastic young shoulders, formed the habit of humorously responding, “I’m too busy doing things to talk about them!” That angered Johnathan. It pushed him back into a slough of self-pity, outraged dignity and mocked parental authority. All but the procuring of new capital, I say. It was a vast responsibility, being accountable for new capital. It also worried Johnathan mightily. But it was nevertheless a pleasant sort of worry. He inflated in his own esteem. He walked about Paris as a Somebody. He gave less and less time to the “practical” affairs of the company. He no longer “paid off personally” on Saturday afternoons. Instead, he appeared for the first time in tailored clothes, kept banker’s hours and saw himself as a Capitalist.