Читать книгу The Master of The Mill - Frederick Philip Grove - Страница 7

Table of Contents

At various stages of his career prior to his assuming power he had met Swann under puzzling circumstances; and as the car ran swiftly along the road between the walls of primeval forest, he reviewed those circumstances to himself, in brief glimpses.

The first time had been on the day when the first four units of the mill had been inaugurated by letting the water from behind the dam into the great turbines which set the dynamos spinning.

It was on that day, too, that he had met Miss Maud Carter, realizing with a shock that he was not, after all, to be entirely master of his fate. He had just now been thinking of Miss Dolittle and of what she might have been to him; but she would never have upset him in all his notions as Miss Carter had done precisely because she had taken the mill, had taken him as one of the millers, ironically only. But there had been something else. At first sight he had felt that Miss Maud Carter concerned him with a fearful immediacy. In this retrospect he could even say that the region of his own self, and probably the region of her self, which were in some mysterious fashion stirred by their mutual sight were not within their consciousness at all, certainly not within those parts of their being that were under their control or directed by thought and reflection.

At the time there had not yet been any thought of Miss Dolittle who was no more than a school-girl. But, so the old man reflected, the one had gripped him by the things which were beyond, whether above or below, all reason; whereas the other, the younger and later, had left all that the former had stirred as if it did not exist. It was tragic that the older woman, who became his wife, should have turned out to be primarily mind; whereas the younger who, in him, called forth the mind, was, in her relation to him, primarily heart and instinct. He could not explain it; but, with the clairvoyance of old age looking back on youth, he saw that it had been so.

Having seen Miss Carter, having led her through the mill, he had felt that he must, must see her again before she went to join her mother on her way to the Pacific coast; and when, timidly, he had suggested that he drop around to the little hotel where she was to spend the early half of the night with her brother, before boarding the midnight train, he had been amazed at the laughing frankness with which she had encouraged him.

So, the ceremony of the inauguration over, he had gone home to what for the first time in his life appeared to him as his father's miserable little house on Fourth Street. But his father had not yet arrived. It being a great occasion for that father, he, the son, had been reluctant to sit down at the table. Yet, impatient at being delayed, he had paced the floor in dining-room and adjacent parlour. Every now and then Mrs Leffler, the slatternly housekeeper, had peered in from the kitchen.

At last, after an unconsciously long half hour, he went impulsively to the curtained bay-window of the parlour; and, drawing one curtain aside, he saw, to his vast surprise, his father standing on the wooden sidewalk, engaged in an angry exchange of words with his former part time bookkeeper, Bill Swann, dismissed after the fire. What in the world could the two have to say to each other?

Both moved. The old man did not dismiss the man at the gate. Swann followed him to the door of the house and into it.

To see what this meant, Sam stepped into the hall.

"Had yer supper?" his father asked grimly.

"I was waiting for you."

"I don't want to eat. I want the house to myself. Have a bite and get out."

Sam saw his father was dangerously excited: the Clarks had high blood pressure and were subject to strokes. But without a word he turned back into the dining-room, calling for his tea, taking with him the picture of Swann, of a man under stress, the bald dome of his head beaded with sweat; but also of a man who stood like a rock over which an angry sea was breaking. Like doom he stood: broad, high-chested, flesh-padded: powerful, flabby and shabby; silent, ominous, evil.

The father entered. "Finished?"

His appetite gone, Sam rose, wiping his mouth. "I'm going."

The old man who had not meant his single word as a question but as a command paid no attention, proceeded to the kitchen door, and spoke to the housekeeper who stood in the passage, dressed in a skirt that hung unevenly about her shanks, her none-too-clean apron tucked up diagonally by a corner. "I want ye to go home," he said.

"I've got to wash up," she objected shrilly.

"Ye'll wash up tomorrow." His tone forestalled contradiction.

Without a word she untied her apron strings.

"Are ye going?" the old man asked, turning to Sam.

Sam risked a question. "What does he want?"

"None of yer business. Don't come back inside the hour."

Sam, taking his hat, passed out through the door; and his father shot the bolt home.

Sam was profoundly disturbed. He suffered from a bad conscience. Decades ago, when he was a child, his father had never allowed him to forget that he had been the cause of his mother's death. Any encounter with his father renewed that memory; and in this unsettled state he went to stare at the girl who had stirred in him he knew not what.

For years Sam had not seen Swann again, for he himself had gone east as a salesman for the mill. He had made a success of his work; he had married and continued to live in the east; even when he had taken a holiday, he had not felt the urge to go home to Langholm, in spite of the fact that the mill had grown without a break. Unexpectedly a summons had come through Mr Stevens whom he did not yet know.

The accident which had laid his father low had dislocated certain vertebrae of the spine; Sam had to act as his father's deputy at the mill. At first he had gone alone, leaving Maud in the east; but, seeing that his father's disability would be slow to remedy, and having become moderately well-to-do himself meanwhile, by means of an overriding commission of one half per cent on all sales effected by his staff, he had built the house on Clark Street, a palace compared with any other house so far erected at Langholm.

He had returned into a town transformed. Langholm had become a city.

The first thing which, on alighting from the train, he had seen was the mill which, being in process of enlargement, made a lopsided, truncated impression. It consisted of eleven completed units instead of the four he had known, arranged in three tiers of six, three, and two units, the latter squatting at the north end like a hood. He calculated the present aim as being one of twenty units.

The second thing that struck him as, on foot, he made for the old Queen's Hotel on Main Street, before going to see his father, had been the new track vaulting the river: a curving viaduct standing on tapering steel trestles as on stilts. He knew it had been built: he had suggested its construction seven years ago; had made the drawing for it, but he had never seen it. Always, as an engineer, he had suggested; others had carried out.

And the third thing to amaze him had been the sight of Main Street itself, crowded with stores and office buildings, all of stone quarried nearby, grey, fossiliferous limestone which underlay the whole district. This change in the aspect of Main Street was due to the activities of a new firm called Langholm Real Estate of which Mat Tindal was president, the insurance agent who had handled the insurance of the old wooden mill. Dick Carter, Maud's brother, too, had had his hand in it all, having designed almost every one of these new buildings. Uncannily, Sam recognized in them his own influence; for the whole town had assumed a façade of steel-framed fenestration between pillars of concrete; only the chief bank was a Greek temple.

Among the buildings on Main Street, still uncompleted, were two which promised to rival the mill in impressiveness: one whose hoardings, on the south side of the street, proclaimed it to be the future Palace Hotel; the other, opposite, on the site of the old little wooden office, though occupying two lots in addition, was the 'Flour Building' in which all the administrative departments of the mill were to be housed. In passing, Sam noticed that the lower floor, still screened by the hoardings, was already in use and bore, in huge gold letters, above its plate-glass windows, the legend, 'Langholm Light and Power'. That, he said to himself, was of course part of the mill, for the power was produced in the vaults at the foot of the dam.

He had, that night, seen his father who was in a cast but perfectly clear in his mind; and he had received his instructions. It was only a week since the accident; but already there were hundreds of letters to be answered. Casually his father mentioned that a telegraph office had been installed on the ground floor of the Flour Building, behind the show-rooms of Langholm Light and Power.

Next morning, he was awakened in the dingy hotel room by the fearful din of pneumatic riveting machines which made the valley resound with their abomination of noise.

All which had been bewildering; but the most bewildering thing came when, around nine o'clock, going over to the Flour Building, he met, in the entrance between the hoardings, Bill Swann who stood there with a proprietorial air, hands in his pockets, a cigar hanging from his mouth.

Seeing him, Swann removed the cigar, smiled, and bowed obsequiously. "Mr Sam!" he said. "I've often wished to show you over the place." His voice was clear and distinct above the enveloping clangour.

Sam's eyes narrowed. "Are you employed here?" he asked.

"I am the manager of this concern"--with a wave of his hand towards the two small signs on the inward-slanting windows of the entrance. "Won't you come in?"

Mistrustfully Sam followed the man as he led the way into the display rooms crowded with such electrical appliances as were in use at the time. Behind, spacious offices were arranged like the cages in a bank: 'New Subscribers', 'Pay Clerk', 'Complaints and Adjustments'. Everything glittered with brass and plate-glass.

"So this is where you hang out?" Sam said.

"I am in charge here."

"Did you leave Ticknor's store?"

"Years ago."

"You bettered yourself?"

"Very much so," Swann replied with a jerky bow of his loose, heavy body--a motion which detached a bead of sweat from his shiny forehead.

Involuntarily Sam's eye followed that bead until it formed a star-shaped splash on the tiled floor of the place.

But even that Sam had come to accept without serious question. He had always disliked the man; but his necessities had been notorious. His wife was paralysed; he had a daughter ambitious to be a teacher but forced to stay at home because Mrs Swann could not be left alone; the expense of keeping a nurse had been prohibitive for a man earning less than fifty dollars a month even though he held down three part time jobs at once. One of these he had lost with the burning of the mill for which he used to post the ledger, once a week, besides making out the weekly stock-sheet required by the insurance company.

All this had been a matter of public knowledge; for the little two-roomed shack where the Swanns had lived had had to be exempted from taxation, so that his financial affairs had once a year to be raked over by the town council. Sam, with his humanitarian views and socialist leanings, had theoretically pitied the man; but his personal dislike had neutralized that feeling. Still, being himself at last a highly paid official of the mill, he tried to convince himself, without quite succeeding, that he was glad to see the man provided for. He heard that Swann had built a house of his own, on Argyle Street, next to the manorial town hall; that he kept a maid as well as a nurse; that his daughter attended high school.

Daily, henceforth, he passed the man's 'hangout'; often he met him in the great hall of the office building on the second floor of which he had his own temporary quarters. Ultimately all the executives of the mill were to be moved to the sixth floor now under construction.

A year went by. Maud had moved to Langholm, into the house on Clark Street which Sam had built for her. Strangely, Maud, the aristocrat, formed a close friendship with his father, the parvenu who, from obscure origins, had risen to a position of wealth and power, influencing legislation in Dominion and province.

Then, one night, his father lying in the parlour of his house, a strange thing happened. Two trim nurses were in charge there, though Mrs Leffler still looked after kitchen and dining-room, dressed in clean clothes now, forced to be so by an ultimatum from Maud.

It was Maud who, when Sam had come home for dinner, had given him a message from his father, to the effect that the old man wanted to see him. Dick Carter, her brother, was in England at the time, evolving plans for Clark House. Maud had already two saddle horses and a fine carriage-and-pair, gifts of the 'old gentleman' as he was now called. Sam and Maud had both urged him to let them take care of him in their house; he had refused.

When, after dinner, Sam, already the quiet, reserved, well-dressed man of his later years, had gone over to his father's, he had found him in a state of strange disquiet. While the night nurse remained in the room, nothing was said of the purpose of the summons. When she left, Sam, ascribing his father's condition to physical causes, followed her into the hall.

"No," the nurse said in reply to his question. "Dr Cruikshank was in this afternoon and said things were going famously at last; he promised to have Mr Clark on his feet inside two months, though he might never walk without crutches; and again he might. The cause of Mr Clark's condition is mental. He's been restless since Mr Swann's call."

"Mr Swann's call?" Sam echoed sharply.

"Every time he comes we have to use sleeping powders."

"Does he come frequently?"

"Every now and then."

Sam nodded and returned to the parlour where the bed had been set up by his own instruction. After a glance at his father he asked, much as his father had used to speak to him about the past, "What's Swann been bothering you about?"

His father gave him a mistrustful look and said, nagging, "Don't stand there. Sit down. I can't talk to you while ye're standing . . ." Then, Sam having obeyed, "Ye'll find my chequebook in the upper right-hand drawer over there. I want ye to make out a cheque. Make it payable to yerself. I want ye to bring me the cash in hundred-dollar bills, before eleven tomorrow morning."

Sam did as he was bidden. "What sum?" he asked.

"Two thousand."

"What's that for?"

"None of yer business," the old man replied with his favourite phrase, signing the cheque and promptly turning to the wall.