Читать книгу The Master of The Mill - Frederick Philip Grove - Страница 8

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And then, the senator reflected, as the car in which he sat with his daughter-in-law turned the last but one corner on the way home, there had followed that brief but shattering series of events which centered around his father's death in 1898.

As if to defy Dr Cruikshank, Rudyard Clark had recovered till he was able once more to walk without crutch or cane.

Clark House had been built; and, little Edmund having been born, it had been made over to Maud, together with a sum running into six figures, to be held in trust, the interest to be used for the upkeep of the place which was to go to the wife of every future eldest son.

The mill, its symmetry restored, consisted of twenty units, resting on a base of six, with one unit less for every storey, ending with a fifth storey of two units only; there was talk of further expansion to come shortly. The Flour Building was completed, the sixth or uppermost floor now holding the private offices of the president and the vice-president, their secretarial staffs, and the huge boardroom in the centre, lighted by a skylight of enormous dimensions. Opposite the Flour Building stood the great Palace Hotel, erected by an international syndicate, and holding such dining- and ball-rooms as would serve the rising plutocracy of Langholm for their social needs.

One evening, late in the year, Sam, his wife, just recovered from her difficult confinement, Mrs Carter, Maud's mother, Dick Carter, her brother, and Dr Cruikshank were sitting around the fireplace of the big hall at Clark House, humouring Maud who, in her newly recovered consciousness of health was reluctant to go to bed.

With a somewhat grim setting of his lips the senator remembered how he, in his former self, had still felt uncomfortable amid the luxuries of his surroundings which were so new to him. It seemed unnatural to step on that gold-coloured, hand-made Chinese rug sixty feet long by forty broad which covered the centre of the floor of the hall; it seemed wrong that, upstairs, in the sitting-room recess opposite the grand stairway abutting on the gallery, a portrait of Maud was hanging, painted, on his father's order, by Langereau, a Montreal artist who had charged two thousand dollars for it; it seemed incongruous that he, the son of a working miller, received, when he left the house, hat and cane from the hands of a liveried footman.

It had just struck eleven when Perkins, the butler, huge in girth and carefully balanced, entered the hall and, bending by his side, whispered to him.

"What's that?" Sam asked. "Swann? What's he want?" But he had already risen and was following the butler to the vestibule.

There, on the wide step leading down into the porte cochère, Swann, the ominous manager of Langholm Light and Power, stood broad, flesh-padded, the shining dome of his bald skull beaded with sweat, in spite of the cold wind blowing from the west and striking Sam in his evening clothes through the plate-glass door which a footman held open.

"Come on in, Swann," Sam said testily. "Come in and close the door."

Swann having entered, Sam started sharply at his first word. "What's that? My father? Wait. I'm coming." And, returning to the archway of the hall, "Cruikshank, come on. Something's happened to my father."

The little doctor promptly joined him in the cloak-room where a footman held his coat for him; he liked being waited on.

"Had I better come, too?" Dick Carter asked.

"Sam," Maud's voice rang out, "what is it?"

"I don't know. Nothing serious, I hope. Swann found my father lying on the ground, on Hill Road. Sounds like a stroke. Yes, better come, Dick. Lie down, Maud. Please do. Don't wait up for me. I'll ring for your maid."

Swann leading, a lantern swinging from his hand, the four men hurried up the winding driveway which rose south and southwest between two hills, close to the crest of the declivity which fell away to the Terrace. From the mill, two miles away, came a diffused radiance.

A few minutes later, having turned east on the road and jumped the ditch to its south, where he searched the ground by the light of his lantern, Swann said, "There he is."

The others followed him.

And there lay the old man in his worn but carefully brushed black suit, without an overcoat, staring with open eyes at the four men.

"Come on, dad," Sam said, bending down. "It seems you fell. Could you walk if we helped you to your feet?"

The old man did not answer, did not stir.

"Here, Dick, help me lift him."

He stood. But when they withdrew their support, he would have pitched forward.

They carried him down to the gardener's lodge just inside the park-gate which was never closed when the family was at home. Having wakened the inmates by a knock and a shout, they deposited the old man on a couch in the dining-room, the gardener and his wife helping to arrange things, both having hurriedly, if partially, dressed. From the kitchen wide-eyed children in their nightwear stared at the formidable little man, terrified and excited.

Sam ordered all doors closed, and he and Dr Cruikshank stripped the old man to the waist. By a black shoelace a key was hanging from his neck. The doctor, drawing up a chair, began his examination with stethoscope and thermometer, the only instruments he carried in the pockets of his overcoat. In their evening clothes, the three men formed a weird contrast to their surroundings.

The doctor looked up. "A cerebral haemorrhage is the only explanation."

An intensification of the stricken man's stare betrayed that his ears still heard, his mind understood. Sam touched the doctor on the shoulder, summoning him outside by a nod.

They ran into Swann whom Sam despatched to the stables of Clark House to fetch a carriage.

In the chill of the night, under the still, faintly rustling cotton-woods, there followed a brief exchange of words.

"Any idea of what may have caused it?"

"Overexertion or overexcitement; or both."

"Would the climb uphill explain it?"

"If it was hurried."

But why should the old man have climbed the hill? Since he had gone past the gate, Clarke House had not been his destination.

"Any sign of foul play?"

"Not the slightest. One thing is suspicious. There is sand on his clothes; he was lying on grass; that's not where he fell."

"I had noticed that," Sam said.

Shivering with the cold, they returned inside.

A few minutes later the wheels of a carriage were heard crunching over the gravel of the driveway. The doctor turned to Sam.

"Before we move him, I'd like to run down to the hospital to get a hypodermic and a bit of camphor. Wait for me here, will you?"

Sam nodded. "Take Dick and Swann along. No use keeping them here. You and I can handle him."

Left alone with his father, Sam turned back to the couch, with a sudden misgiving of something catastrophic taking place there. The eyes of the old man were straining, as if trying to convey a message.

At that moment Sam's eyes fell on the key hanging from the corrugated neck; and there recurred to him certain instructions which his father had given him years ago. Should sudden death overtake him, he had said in his gruff and at best forbidding manner, Sam was at once to possess himself of that key which would open the small private safe in his office. Thence, at the earliest possible moment, he was to remove a certain account book which, having studied its contents, he was to destroy. Money he found there he might consider as a gift.

Sam picked the key up and untied it.

At once the old man relaxed. Within ten minutes, before the doctor returned, he had quietly died on his couch.

The car was on the home stretch now, on the last of the four sides of a square described by the paved road through the woods south of Langholm which, in the household, was called 'The Loop'.

The old man who, in his revisualization of the nocturnal scene on the hill, had become tense, relaxed in his corner. The memory excited him more deeply than the reality had done in the past; a future having supervened, every trifle had revealed its hidden significance.

Thus, had he, on the morning after the funeral, not gone down to the Flour Building to obey the instructions of the dead man to the letter; had he ignored them and never opened the safe; had he, instead, walled it up, for with the old man's death it had become useless, then his whole life, and with it that of everybody connected with him, yes, the development of the mill would have taken a different course. The old man, being buried, would not have re-arisen; he would never have made him, his son, the slave of the mill. The will, which was read a day later, in the presence of the family, could not have done that, for the few relevant clauses would have remained meaningless.

He, Sam, having taken certain measures, would have left the administration of the vast concern, the vastness of which was still hidden from him, to others. Being a very rich man now, he would have done what his wife had wished him to do; he would have gone to Europe and become a dilettante in music, a collector of paintings and articles of virtu, a patron, perhaps, of the arts; and he would have been happy. Perhaps his wife would have ceased seeing in him a plodding mediocrity, well-meaning, faithful to a trust, but without imagination or creative force.

They were rapidly approaching the gate to the park; and only a few flashes of vision intervened before they turned in.

He saw himself sitting in his swift open landau, dressed in a black morning coat and stiff bowler hat, with his striped trousers hidden by the camel-hair rug thrown over his knees. He remembered how, turning into Main Street, he had reflected that, fifteen years ago, Langholm had been a village of wood; whereas now it was a city of limestone, new, showy, crude in its newness, but full of a surging life.

There had been no grief, no sense of bereavement; on the contrary, the feeling had been of relief. At last he would do what he had dreamt of. But first of all he must familiarize himself with the thousand-and-one details of administration. As soon as he had done so . . .

Within a night, within half a night, sitting by his father's body, he had matured by years. A sense of responsibility had settled on him; he was no longer the rebel; he was the master now, at forty-three; his turn had come; no longer was he going to allow himself to be used. . . .

To be used!

With that word, his carriage turning into Main Street, a sort of synopsis and condensation of an earlier scene had arisen in his mind, gone almost as soon as it had come.

The occasion was this. The mill was to be enlarged on a scale unheard-of even for this fast-growing concern: seven units were to be added; and in addition three grain-elevators were to be erected, with a storage capacity of 600,000 bushels. His father had called a special shareholders' meeting to discuss ways and means. It had been a year or two before his death; and he had tipped his son off in advance: certain statements would be needed, estimates of the growth of the market, especially overseas. He relied on Sam who would be present on that occasion by special invitation.

The scene was set in the huge boardroom of the Flour Building, around the long walnut table. Under the blinding light of many clusters of unshaded electric bulbs sat a strange assembly of men.

Next to Rudyard Clark who was in the chair sat Mat Tindal, the former insurance agent, now president of a million-dollar concern called Langholm Real Estate; then Rodney Ticknor, general merchant, whose one-roomed store had become a five-storey department store of imposing proportions; then Gaylord, once a blacksmith, now owner and editor of the local paper, the Langholm Lynx. Art Selby was there, manager of the leading bank in town, huge, square, slow to move; above all, there was Mr Cole from Winnipeg, a short, thick-set, choleric man without a neck who held proxies for a score of small shareholders. Besides, of course, there had been Charles Beatty, Q.C., solicitor for the mill, a medium-sized, slender man with a face resembling a death's head.

At the upper end of the table sat a whole staff of stenographers, lorded over by Mr McNally, the former secretary-treasurer recently replaced by Mr Stevens.

Sam, who had been told to be there at nine sharp, was at once called upon by his father to give his report.

"That'll convince ye," his father said when his son sat down. "The question is how best to finance. We can increase capital and sell stock; or we can borrow. If we needed less than a hundred thousand, the directors would have gone ahead on their own responsibility, according to by-law. But we need three-quarters of a million. If we borrow we shall have to repay; that means no dividends for a year."

"You've sold your stock on the understanding that there will be no break in dividends," Mr Cole objected.

"After a while dividends will rise to twice the old rate. The market value of the stock will double. That should be satisfactory."

"You can't borrow," Mr Cole insisted. "Who'd loan you that much?"

This question Rudyard Clark treated as negligible. "It's all arranged," he said. "Mr Selby's here. His bank has agreed."

"Gentlemen," Art Selby said, rolling his bulk around in his chair to face Mr Cole at his right. "Our Bank has a great faith in the future of the west. We are prepared to commit ourselves heavily. I am instructed to take any reasonable risk. If it were a question of an ordinary accommodation, we'd grant it unconditionally. But the demand is for a very large and indeterminate sum, for an undefined time. So the directorate has seen fit to tie a string to its consent. They will grant the loan if the present shareholders endorse all notes personally, pro rata of their holdings."

"Out of the question!" Mr Cole exploded. "Even if I were willing to agree for myself, which I am not, I could not commit those for whom I am acting."

Rudyard Clark did not reply. There was a long pause.

Then empty-headed Mat Tindal tried to pour oil on troubled waters. "Mr Clark, I'd be inclined to favour the issue of new stock. Any Langholm offer is readily snapped up by the investing public. Langholm Real Estate issued half a million three months ago. It was oversubscribed in a week. We could sell above par."

Rudyard Clark had nothing to say.

"That's sense," said Mr Cole. "Why in the world borrow when the capital is there, begging to be used?"

"Because I won't give my consent."

"Why not?"

"I owe no man a reason."

"Ah, ah!" cried Mr Cole, getting red in the face. "I'll tell you, Mr Clark. You hold a precarious control. If we issue new stock, that control might be in danger."

Rudyard Clark gave a grim laugh. "That's so. It's my perfect right to oppose any measure for any reason. You know that I can."

"Unfortunately," Mr Cole sighed. "On the other hand, no power on earth can force us to put our signatures on those notes. That's the one thing in which control doesn't help you. Even if those present agreed, you'd have to get the consent of the absent ones."

"The bank would waive the endorsement of minor shareholders--say those who own no more than ten shares," Art Selby said impartially.

Everybody realized that this placed the issue squarely between the two chief opponents. Mr Cole was the only western shareholder whose holdings ran into six figures.

Rudyard Clark gave another grim laugh. "Ye reproach me with scheming to retain control," he said. "I'll tell ye what's behind it all. Ye want to get that control out of my hands. Ye can't have any doubt, from what my son's told ye, that the loan will be repaid. But let me tell ye; this mill is going to run with me in control; or not at all."

This was a bombshell. Everybody in the room, except Charles Beatty, sat up. Sam divined that Mr Beatty had advised that procedure.

Mr Cole became very quiet. "How is that?" he asked.

"I'd cut the power off."

"I knew it!" Mr Cole cried, thumping the table. But he also knew, as did everybody else, that he was beaten.

This scene rose before the senator as it had arisen before Sam, forty years ago, not in any detail, but, as it were, in the form of a single fact.

And just as they were turning into the gate of the park, the senator closed his eyes in his corner.

He saw himself alighting in front of the Flour Building. A huge Negro in olive-green livery, with yellow trimmings, jumped forward to offer his arm; another, behind him, held the door to the hall. Opposite the Flour Buildings, of equal height, no less supercilious, stood the Palace Hotel, its face closed.

"Don't wait," Sam said curtly to the driver who saluted.

Then he entered the hall of the building, constructed, outside, of concrete over steel, inside, of coloured and highly polished marbles.

In this hall, crowded with comings and going, two Negroid attendants sprang up from a black-marble bench in the centre of the right-hand wall which was of plate glass, permitting a survey of the premises where Swann had his 'hangout'. Both, at Sam's sight, dived rearward where one of them entered the third elevator cage, while the other, saluting, stood ready to close its grilled slide-door the moment Sam had taken his stand inside. Both of them wore the same olive-green livery trimmed with yellow as the two at the outer door. This third elevator was the 'express', never used by those whose business was below the sixth floor.

Sam paid no attention to the commotion about him. Even to the saluting attendants he gave only the briefest nod in reply. But he took note of the proud, disdainful bearing they observed with regard to all but the highest executives; it was the bearing which Rudyard Clark had demanded from menials serving the business. He would change all that. . . .

His father, on the other hand, had never hesitated to talk to these men about their private and intimate affairs; or to correct them if their manner did not meet with his entire approval. How strange, the senator thought, that his father, the autocrat, the never-to-be-contradicted master, should have shown himself more affable, ready even to jest and to laugh with his subordinates; and that he should have commanded an all the more unquestioning obedience, yes, an affectionate anticipation of his desires. Did these men know that he, the son, sympathized with everyone in servitude? That he planned, and spent sleepless nights in planning, how to better their lot?

From the vantage point of his great age, the senator pitied the man he had been. For, though the magnificent Negroids of that day lay in their graves or nursed a decrepit old age as pensioners of the mill, they had been replaced by others: he had become used to them when his own great purpose had been broken as he might break a match.