Читать книгу The Master of The Mill - Frederick Philip Grove - Страница 6

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During the drive, swift and smooth, the senator relaxed till he sat as if his body were unsupported by a skeleton. Maud never looked at him; she knew it might break the train of his thought.

This is what passed through his mind.

After Captain Stevens had been taken into the concern as chief clerk, by the senator's father, he had soon held a high and responsible position for one so young. Simultaneously, the senator, then universally called Mr Sam, had engaged a young lady, younger even than Mr Stevens, as his private secretary. That had been two years before Mr Rudyard Clark's sudden death.

These two, Mr Stevens and Miss Dolittle, were destined to play opposite if complementary parts in the history of the mill; whenever either rose, the other sank; for, as Mr Stevens had loyally aligned himself with all the policies of the founder of the mill, so Miss Dolittle had, from no calculation of future advantage, but rather from temperament and inclination, championed the cause of his son.

Had Mr Rudyard Clark lived, Mr Stevens would most likely have moved up into the inner circle of those who, in that interval between Edmund's birth and death, determined the development of the mill. For, while Mr Rudyard Clark kept his son in entire ignorance of the financial and administrative structure of the concern, Mr Stevens had rapidly risen to all sorts of confidential posts--that of the head of the employment bureau, for instance, which enabled him to engage and dismiss, with few exceptions, the whole personnel of the office staff as well as the superintendents, foremen, bosses, and hands employed at the mill as such--till he had finally become the secretary-treasurer, a paid, not an elected functionary, of the vast concern and all its subsidiary enterprises. Had Mr Rudyard Clark lived, he would undoubtedly have made him one of the three chief executives.

But Mr Rudyard Clark had died, and his son had taken his place; and so it was Miss Dolittle who, backed by the son, assumed the title and the somewhat empty function of the vice-presidency. At the time, during the last years of the century, it was an extraordinary thing for a woman to rise, by sheer ability, to such a height in the business world. In any enterprise like that of the mill there are two fundamental and opposite activities: producing and selling; and production depended on sales. From the start Mr Clark junior had been in charge of the sales-organization; but as, with the growth of the mill, brought about by his very success in selling, the ramifications became ever more complex, till there was an organization, international in scope, with offices at New York, London, and half a dozen capitals of European countries, Miss Dolittle had come into her own; and since this growth had coincided with the partial assumption, by Mr Clark junior, of the functions of a general manager, due to Mr Clark senior's accident--he had been caught up by a belt and hurled against the wall--Miss Dolittle, nominally private secretary to the vice-president, had imperceptibly assumed all his duties as sales-manager, till, feeling that he was losing touch with things, he had turned the sales-office over to her entirely, engaging Miss Albright as her successor in his own office. For two reasons, however, he had retained the nominal sales-managership: in the first place, his father would have asked awkward and sarcastic questions if he had openly resigned, for, coming from an era when he had held every executive office 'under his hat' as he expressed it, that father would have said his son was trying to shirk. While he, the father, had organized the mill and had provided for the channels and methods of its growth; while he had, with a grasp and cunning amazing in a 'man of the people', so split up the manifold functions of the vast enterprise that no outsider and few shareholders ever could unravel the structure as a whole, he had entirely failed to realize the complication and the multiplication of details taken care of by subordinates, whether they were his son, Mr Stevens, Mr Brook, 'superintendent of works', or Miss Dolittle. He had never realized, as had his son, that, if any one of these left, there would have been serious disturbances. He would indignantly have denied that he depended on them; to the very end he considered himself as the all-sufficient source of power. In the second place, the sales-crews, consisting now of several hundred men all over the country, and in foreign countries as well, would, at the time, still have resented being directed by a woman; and so all letters leaving the general sales-office, even those of which Mr Clark junior remained in ignorance, were signed with a rubber-stamp of his signature so cunningly made that only a graphological expert could have said that the signature was not written by hand and in ink.

After Mr Rudyard Clark's death, Mr Clark junior assuming the presidency, the vice-presidency had become vacant; and the choice for that office stood between Mr Stevens and Miss Dolittle; to the vast surprise of outsiders, it had promptly fallen to the lady.

Mr Stevens and Miss Dolittle, both still in their twenties, had, each in his own sphere, been geniuses. But for Mr Clark junior there had never been any hesitation.

He was in his forties at the time; and for years he had been a dreamer. He had never spoken of his dreams; but by a sort of divination, he had felt that Miss Dolittle understood and applauded. Like himself, and unlike Mr Stevens, she belonged to that younger generation--spiritually younger--which was more sensitive, more vulnerable, less sure of itself, and certainly more interesting than the older generation of the fathers had been. Those fathers, for instance, had bluntly spoken out to convey their meaning; to the younger people, a glance, or a motion, sufficed: such as lifting a finger or drawing up an eyebrow, both gestures familiar to the new president. They were more complex, more difficult, perhaps cleverer, too; and certainly less confident; they did not have so robust a conscience.

Nobody knew, of course, that, had he not been married before he came to know her, Miss Dolittle might in many ways have been an inspiration to him; he would more openly have allowed her to fight his battles. He had never admitted this even to himself; but thus it had been. The time was to come, and to the senator reclining in the car as it shot through the woods it was already present, when another woman, trying to break down his resistance to her own attack on him, boldly asserted that Miss Dolittle was in love with him and that, behind her loyalty, stood the plain, sexual fact. He was to feel then that he might have succumbed had it not been for that allusion to Miss Dolittle. Yes, as he sat there in the car, reviewing those facts, a still later time was present to him, a time at which, after the death of his wife, many years later, he would gladly have taken her to himself had it not suddenly been too late. Why had it been too late? An idle question. All questions beginning with 'why' were idle. Nothing counted but fact.

Theoretically he would, in his old age, say that he and Miss Dolittle had been socialists; and socialists are dreamers.

What had that dream of his been? One day, so he had said to himself before his father's death, he would be the master; he would direct the fortunes of the mill for the good of mankind. To do so, he would have to buy out the other shareholders till the mill was his property. Whether that would be possible, he did not know; for, beyond the fact that there were outside shareholders, he knew nothing of the mill; his father, with his secretive ways, had never allowed him a glimpse into anything that was not a matter of public record; and public record was fragmentary. It was characteristic that, when he had been promoted to the vice-presidency formerly held by a 'dummy', and when, therefore, it had become necessary for him to be a shareholder, his father had given him one 'qualifying share', making him sign a paper which appointed him, the father, his son's proxy in matters requiring a vote.

He had dreamt of many things; above all of the Terrace, that vast flat covered with cottages in which the mill-hands lived. They were all exactly alike, four-roomed, closely packed, distinguished from each other by their numbers only, in six parallel streets. All had diminutive front and back yards with lanes between them; all had running water, tiny bathrooms, and a fireplace each. Any single one might have been called convenient, compact, sanitary. In their agglomeration they were a horror. Unfortunately he had been down there, had seen how cramped they were, had breathed the disheartening atmosphere of worry and trouble which filled these little abodes of men who worked and slept and at best knew one recreation: to get drunk at intervals.

All that he would change. He would begin by building a huge hall with a gymnasium, with rooms for games and reading, with a swimming-pool and a lecture hall. He would raise wages and give the men a voice in the administration.

He had dreamt of the farmers whose wheat was bought by the mill. His father, of course, had always bought in the cheapest market, depressing that market by every device known to human cunning; never, for instance, letting it be known that the best-milling wheat was not the coveted grade Number One Northern, but a mixture into which a lower grade, Number Three, entered largely. That same father had raised the price of his product to the consumer by every means in his power: by price-agreements with other producers; by price-wars eliminating competitors; by refusing to let dealers handle his flour unless they agreed to handle no other.

It was true, that father had never made any personal use of the resulting wealth; he had used his son and his daughter-in-law, spending vicariously.

All that he, Sam, was going to change. He was going to pay the farmer a price for his wheat commensurate with the price the milled flour fetched in the market; he would sell flour at a price which would just ensure the prosperity of the mill and yield a modest income for himself.

Producers, mill-hands, and consumers, all were to profit. That had been his dream.

When his father had died, he had suddenly become the master of the mill. Had he? On the very threshold of this new era he had encountered the sinister figure of William Swann.