Читать книгу The Master of The Mill - Frederick Philip Grove - Страница 9

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The car came to a stop under the porte cochère.

Leaning on the extended arm of a footman, Lady Clark alighted.

It took the old man longer to follow her; but he, too, at last took the single step to the floor of the vestibule, the young butler holding the door for him.

This young butler, engaged a few years ago by Lady Clark, the senator still regarded as an intruder; for thirty years old Perkins had held his place: huge, Falstaffian Perkins, between whom and his master there had been a tacit understanding that the social distinctions were mere pretence; could not a duke and lord, in a play, consent to take the part of an underling? Perkins had been the lord; he, the senator, barely his equal. Maud, of course, his long-dead wife, had never known that; or she would have laughed and laughed. . . .

It did not matter. But the senator could not yet, when he met him, refrain from staring for a moment at this new butler, as if to make sure he was real; or as if he expected him to say something, to betray at least by a gesture what, in his heart, he thought of this world of his masters. No such gesture ever came; it was disconcerting.

This time the senator found it so disturbing that he stopped as if to say something; and the butler bent forward as if to catch a command like a ball which he expected the other to pitch to him. It was this attitude of submissive readiness which struck the senator dumb; for he had actually intended to say something.

As if on second thought, he did speak. "Make my excuses to the ladies. I want another drive."

"Very good, sir," said the butler. "Had I better call McAllister to take the wheel, sir?"

"McAllister?" the senator repeated. "Wasn't it McAllister. . . ."

"No, sir. Excuse me, sir. It was Waugh who was driving her ladyship."

This correction, in spite of its impeccable form, irritated the senator who seemed to scent in it the insolence of the young to the old. "Well," he said testily. "Call him. I'm waiting."

The young butler, letting go of the door, strode over to the telephone connecting house and drive-sheds. "McAllister wanted," he said. "To drive the senator." Then, half-turning, "Same car, sir?"

"Any car."

Since the matter was thus left to himself, the young butler, thinking of the fact that the Lincoln was dusty, said briefly into the transmitter, "The Rolls-Royce."

Which again the senator chose to take as an impertinence, for the Rolls-Royce was the oldest of the big cars available. But it was not worth while to object. Let it be the Rolls-Royce.

The reason for this scene which remained unnoticed by Lady Clark--for, out of consideration for the old man's mood, she had at once withdrawn--was simply the reluctance of the senator to return abruptly to the world of the living. He wanted to remain with his thoughts.

The car having been brought around, and the senator having taken his seat, he was in the past again.

But the butler had followed him. "We won't hold lunch, sir?"

The senator, disturbed, almost barked. "Didn't I tell you to make my excuses?" And, McAllister having pushed back the glass-slide between cab and tonneau, he added, still irately, "Around the loop."

The car shot forward; the senator was in the hall of the Flour Building on Main Street.

It was the morning after the funeral. The three days that had elapsed since the death had served to confirm him in all his old plans. He was the master now; he never doubted that, apart from minor bequests, the bulk of his father's estate, ensuring control, would fall into his hands as if the old man had died intestate. Now he must promptly carry out the dead man's instructions with regard to the safe, thereby winning his freedom, cutting himself loose from the past, breaking with a system which he hated.

While entering the elevator, he was conscious of a girl in a niche opposite the cage reaching for a telephone. No doubt she was signalizing his arrival to his subordinates upstairs; and so, reaching the top floor, he was not surprised to see Miss Albright coming out to meet him in the boardroom.

It had puzzled him how he was going to get into his father's office. Miss Albright solved that problem for him.

"Mr Clark," she said, sweeping towards him, "I have taken the liberty of moving you into the president's suite. Have I done right? The late Mr Clark had left nothing in his desk. The drawers were open."

"Quite," Sam replied without surprise at the last statement; the old man had always believed in working from memory.

"There wasn't time to move myself and the stenographers," Miss Albright went on, following him as he entered, through the anteroom, into his father's office to the left. "The telephone in the drawer connects with the one on my desk. I am within call. Pending arrangements, the late Mr Clark's staff and ours are doubling up for the day."

Sam had turned and was hanging overcoat and hat on the cloak-rack behind the door; so he stood revealed in morning coat and striped trousers. With a familiar gesture he raised one eyebrow and said, "Let's get through with the routine. I want to be undisturbed."

"There is only Miss Dolittle," Miss Albright said.

"Let her come." And he sat down at the desk in the centre of the room. A leather-covered armchair stood by its side, a straight-backed chair facing it. The floor was covered with a Persian rug.

Miss Albright withdrew; and he noticed her flowing dress of black satin; she was a large girl, too florid for his taste.

On the glass-topped mahogany desk stood two wire trays, one filled with opened letters; the other with daily papers from east and west.

Without touching either, he rose again when he was alone, going to the wide windows, four of them in a row. They gave on the lower end of the lake, with the wooded hills beyond, mill and dam in the foreground. Though only five stories high, the mill towered above the Flour Building, for each of its stories rose twenty-five feet. To the left or west he had a glimpse of the elevators, past a shoulder of the mill. Everything visible, even the dam, was dusted white with flour.

All which he knew. During his father's illness he had often gone here for that view. Somewhere he had read a phrase in the story of a medieval mystic which had stuck in his memory: Ecce animula tua!--"There stands your little soul!" He had been in the habit of repeating it to himself whenever he saw the mill. Through his father's death, his aesthetic appreciation of the buildings before him had, at a blow, become a moral one; the responsibility was his now--the responsibility for making the mill a blessing or a curse to mankind. And another thing became clear: the mill was not a man-made thing: it was an outgrowth of the soil, the rock, the earth, subject to laws of growth of its own, independently of himself. All the more. . . .

He turned back into the room with a feeling familiar to him, a feeling of the futility of human effort. What, in a moral sense, was this mill, this whole enterprise which the old man had called into being during the last short years of his life? What was this town which, for its very existence and subsistence, depended on the mill? His confidence, his far-reaching plans paled. Mill, dam, and town were the work of the man who was dead--who had supplied the driving power to call them into actual being. He, Sam, was nothing. He planned, he did not carry out. He was the engineer; his father had been the 'entrepreneur'.

That feeling he must overcome; it was still part of the effect which his father had had on him.

Idly turning to the desk, he opened one or two of the papers and folded and dropped them again. He had not thought of the publicity which would attach to the event of his father's death. Here it was: flaring headlines reported the end of the 'Flour King'. Inconspicuous little man he had been, his father was mourned as a 'national figure'. One obituary called him a 'Titan of Finance'.

Sam sat down again and stared at the pages. He was not reading; he was thinking. Who are we? What is the reality in us? That which we feel ourselves to be? Or that which others conceive us to be? The things that surround us are known to us by the way they affect us. Their inner reality is as mysterious to us as the universe itself, or as life and death. What was the reality? Was there a reality? The man whom he, his son, had known by that sympathy of the blood which, in spite of all their antagonisms, had united them: a man of fears, of doubts, of hesitations, scruples, forebodings? Or the bold buccaneering adventurer who had been successful; whom the world saw expressed in his work, in that dam out there, in this vast organization which he had created and held together? Nothing but the latter lived in the reports of the death at which Sam stared with unseeing eyes: he only would live on in his work and in legend. For the moment his father became even to Sam an august stranger.

Nobody ever knocked at a door on this sixth floor of the Flour Building; the theory was that nobody could enter unannounced.

Sam became conscious of the fact that Miss Dolittle was in the room. He rose and faced her from the windows.

As always, her mere presence cheered him; after all, he was not absolutely alone. It was to be the first-fruit of his power to give her a position nominally next in authority to his own.

The girl, medium-sized, extraordinarily good-looking--though, no doubt, she would get stout in later life--above all vital to her fingertips, greeted her chief with a half confidential smile and handed him a large sheet of stiff, squared paper exhibiting graphs in three colours.

Sam scanned it. "How," he asked after a while, "are we going to meet that demand?" With a pointing finger he traced a red line which soared over the blue line indicating production.

Miss Dolittle, still as if discussing personal rather than business matters, gave a shrug.

"How about Western Flour Mills?" Sam asked.

"Full up. Running to capacity, day and night. We have reserves for a month or two. Shall I send Mr Eckel up?"

"Not this morning. I am busy."

"Of course."

Western Flour Mills was a subsidiary concern operating four comparatively small mills in western centres. Mr Eckel was Chief Chemist, in charge of buying.

"But perhaps Mr Eckel will be able to advise. Consult him. Meanwhile draw on reserves. We shall have to build again."

"Very well."

"Sit down a moment," Sam said, his tone changing.

She obeyed.

"There is the problem of my signature," Sam went on, still standing.

"Of course." Again Miss Dolittle understood at a word.

"Suppose Mr Stevens' rubber stamp takes the place of mine?"

Miss Dolittle gave a slight laugh. "Mr Stevens!"

Sam also understood. Bob Stevens, very efficient in his sphere, was unpopular. "Too bad you were not born a man," he said, smiling.

"Is it? . . . Well, I don't like the idea of reporting to him."

"I didn't say you were to report to him. Suppose you were put entirely on your own feet?"

She looked up at him, anticipation suffusing her cheeks. "As a mere formality . . . If it is not presumption . . . Is Mr Stevens going to take your place?"

"No. Matters will, of course, have to be ratified by a directors' meeting. But since, most likely, I shall hold control. . . ."

Miss Dolittle squirmed a little, her fine mouth half open.

And Sam betrayed, as he rarely did, that he was human. "Mr Stevens is indispensable as secretary-treasurer," he said tantalizingly. Which could only mean that he was to rise no higher. "Of course, we shall need a new vice-president. The former arrangement worked well?"

"You mean the vice-president being nominally sales-manager also?"

"Exactly."

"Yes. But I don't see. . . ."

It was rare for Sam to play on a woman's feelings; but he enjoyed the experience. "Well," he said, "I can't be my own employee. How would it be if we made the real sales-manager the nominal vice-president?"

Miss Dolittle looked up sideways. Her smile would have given most men a thrill. "I am not a shareholder. . . ."

"Neither is Mr Stevens."

"You mean. . . ."

"You need one qualifying share. It is true, the stock stands at eight forty-five."

"Oh," Miss Dolittle cried. "If the ban is lifted. . . ."

"The ban will be lifted in the rarest cases. It is all predicated, of course, on my being my father's heir."

"There can't be a doubt about that, can there?"

"I don't think so; but I don't know. I am presuming on the fact. Such an arrangement would convince Mr Stevens, would it not, that his stamp under your letters is the merest formality?"

"It would settle all possible objections."

"Very well, then," Sam said in the tone of finality.

Miss Dolittle rose as if in confusion. "There is nothing else?"

"Nothing, thanks."

That, the senator reflected, had been the last time for many years that he had stood face to face with a woman unselfconscious.

But instantly he was back in the past.

He stood in that office, absent-mindedly fingering a key in his vest-pocket. Before him stood Miss Albright. "Take this correspondence away," he said. "I shall want it again. Just now I want to be undisturbed till noon."

"Very well, Mr Clark." And the secretary vanished.

Unreasonably, Sam felt annoyed with the girl as if she pursued him.

But the click of the door brought him face to face with his task. He took the key from his pocket; for the first time, in the execution of his father's instructions, he felt hesitation. In the light of the sudden death, those instructions had taken on the nature of the expression of a last will which must be obeyed. He was to open the private safe, to take what it contained in cash, as a gift inter vivos, to make himself familiar with the contents of an account book, and to destroy it. The task went against his inclination. Evasively he asked himself whether it was wise to undertake it in daytime, during office hours, with the vast hive of the building humming. But would it not cause even more damaging comment if he returned to the building after hours? What with three watchmen circling through it at night, he was as good as certain to be seen. He needed a light which would be exposed to full view from the mill. He would be suspected of trying to discover assets which he ought not to touch till the will was known.

As for surprise, he felt safe. The operator downstairs had by this time been told not to let anyone pass; a sign 'Private' was hung to the grilled and closed door of the express elevator below; its cage was on the top floor, the Negro drowsing on his stool. The whole staff, Miss Albright at its head, was on the lookout.

With a shrug he looked at the celluloid tag attached to the key and read the combination. Squatting down before the low door of the safe, in the wall faced by the desk, he twirled the button.

A moment later, the door of the safe gaped open.

To the right, two open compartments; to the left, two deep drawers.

Sam turned his attention to the latter. One held three bankbooks, a small envelope with a key in it, marked 'Safety Deposit Box', and a large number-ten manilla envelope marked 'Swann'; the other, a not inconsiderable sum of specie in small linen bags: gold of English coinage, silver dollars of historic dates. Apparently his father had collected numismatic rarities. The balances of the bankbooks totalled close to a hundred thousand. He returned them to their drawer and transferred the cash, including the manilla envelope, to the desk.

Then he examined the upright compartments. One contained three sheaves of papers dated 1899, 1905, 1920 respectively. Examination showed them to be plans and specifications for the expansion of the mill. That expansion his father had mapped out for over twenty years! Was he, Sam, after all, not going to be the undisputed master?

The other compartment held a single book of the type which, in small business houses, is used as a journal. It must be the account book referred to in his father's instructions. He took it to the desk and sat down.

A dull sort of excitement invaded him. What could this book contain which demanded its immediate destruction?

As far as a preliminary scrutiny revealed, it contained a record of the dead man's personal earnings and expenditures, beginning with October 1867 when Sam's grandfather Douglas had died of stroke.

The senator, in his corner of the tonneau of the car which was swiftly travelling over the road of 'The Loop', meeting a town car now and then, for the driveway was open to the public, felt reinvaded by that excitement of forty years ago. In pursuing his evocation of the past, he closed his eyes, one hand grasping the other.

Many things came back to the man at the desk as he turned the pages. For the nineteen years following the opening date the entries showed a multitude of small, often negligible sums drawn from the business for the most various purposes: household expenses, telegraph fees, postage, equipment for the mill. Up to 1880 the yearly totals were insignificant, now rising above, now falling below $400. Then they increased; there was a building account. All equipment for the expansion of the mill was apparently bought second-hand; there was one item, "Lower Grindstone, $75.00". There came another, a sum spent on the acquisition, from the Crown, of a large tract of land, several square miles of it: the land now covered by, and bordering on, the lake: it was bought at a nominal price.

In spite of the fact that business expenditure ceased to be entered, larger and larger sums appeared. There were increasing entries on the credit side, too, running into thousands of dollars; and each was balanced by a corresponding outgo. Many referred to safe investments; others were harder to understand. Till, with the effect of a sudden enlightenment, the fact stood revealed that the ageing man had been speculating in wheat, first on a small, then an ever larger scale. As he began to grind for the eastern market, he had used his growing knowledge and taken advantage of seasonal fluctuations; and he had done so shrewdly and successfully. There were entries of wheat purchased by "Rudyard Clark, Private", resold to "Rudyard Clark, Miller". This manoeuvre made Sam smile: it foreshadowed the Napoleonic skill with which the old man must have marshalled his assets in 1888 when, on the basis of his slender private holdings, he had launched a three-million-dollar concern in such a way as to retain control. Though, come to think, were his private holdings so small? Even the total of the profits made on wheat deals between "Rudyard Clark, Private" and "Rudyard Clark, Miller" ran into six figures.

Sam knew that the land covered by the lake stood on the books at a valuation of $100 an acre; whereas he could now verify that it had cost his father precisely ten cents. Without the land, the dam could not have been built; without the dam, the river could not have turned the turbines; without the turbines, the mill could not have been run.

Sam's admiration was mingled with a peculiar misgiving. The thing was magnificent; but in some indefinable way it was ruthless.

Besides, it was "Finance". Was that panegyrist right who had called his father a Titan of Finance? In practical things, in the working-out of the plan, the old man had relied on others: on engineers, on architects, on chemists: on Mr Eckel, Dick Carter, and, yes, on him, Sam, who, after all, had furnished every fruitful idea, often in a round about way, working through Dick Carter or the engineers. To what extent had his father known of the part his son had played in determining the structure of the mill? The pyramidal outline, for instance; the layout in units; the flood-lighting: ideas actually put forward by Dick Carter, though originated by Sam.

A line in red ink across the last page of this chapter of the record brought it to an abrupt close:

"Mill destroyed by fire, April 23-24, 1888."

As Sam went through the remainder of the record, he found ever larger items, culminating in an entry of $250,000, without comment, balanced by another, recording the sale of 1000 shares in Langholm Real Estate, yielding slightly more than that sum. That was the money spent on Clark House. Another entry, balanced by another sale of stock in the same concern, recorded, at the very end, that $200,000 had been placed to the credit of "Maud Clark, née Carter, wife of my beloved son Samuel, in trust, for the upkeep of said property".

In this part of the record there was one puzzling thing.

Seven entries, each of $2,000 or over, all on the credit or expenditure side, were made without comment, totalling $15,000. Nothing explained what they stood for; but each of them was marked, in pencil, with a figure enclosed in a circle:

267. Sam wondered.

He could not see a single reason why this account book should be destroyed; on the contrary, it was a valuable document throwing light on the genesis of the mill. Since the mill bade fair to become a great institution of national and even international importance, the document should be preserved in the archives at Ottawa.

At this moment the unexpected, the unheard-of happened: a caller slipped past the watchers and burst into the presidential room.

This was Dick Carter, Sam's brother-in-law, designer of mill, Flour Building, Clark House, Palace Hotel, and many other edifices in town.

Sam looked up, startled. Behind the intruder he saw three women, Miss Albright leading, trying to restrain him; but Dick, irrepressible, waved a happy hand at them, laughing a gold-flashing laugh, and closed the door behind his back.

Sam frowned. Behind the caller gaped the open safe; on the desk lay account book, money, and manilla envelope. The book he closed quickly.

"Hello," Dick sang out cheerfully. He was a medium-sized, gay-looking man of Sam's age; somehow, in spite of signs of dissipation in his face, he looked younger. "I've a hurry-call to Vancouver. I'm leaving by the noon train. May go on to Seattle." At this point the fact that he had to name the man whom they had buried but yesterday recalled the mournful occasion to him; and he subdued his exuberance which, Sam suspected, was partly due to his having had a bottle of wine. "You know," he went on, "the old gentleman"--had he been living, he would have called him 'the old codger'--"had asked for additional plans and an elevation. Any hurry about that? I'm off on the biggest job yet."

"Elevation?" Sam asked, puzzled.

"Hadn't he discussed the thing with you?"

"Not a word."

"Well, well . . . It's this way." And he reached for the pad on which Sam had been figuring. "This of any account?" And, Sam shaking his head, he tore the top sheet off and let it flutter to the desk. Then, with a gold pencil from his pocket, he sketched the outline of an elevation comprising thirty-five units, with an illegible legend running from side to side along the fifth tier. "Here," Dick added, "he wanted two lines of twenty-foot letters in black marble. See what I mean? That's what he was playing with in his mind."

Appalled, Sam asked, "And what was the legend?"

"Clark Flour Mills. The Home of Canada's Flour."

Sam fairly jumped in his seat. "No," he cried in distress. "No!"

"Well," Dick said doubtfully. "You're the boss now."

"The Home of . . ." Sam said with ineffable scorn in his voice.

Dick made a volte-face. "Ridiculous, isn't it? He probably knew you'd object . . ." He was on the point of adding, The sly old dog!' but changed it into "He was secretive, wasn't he?"

"Of course," Sam said, "we have to enlarge. You may be needed for the floor plans. But I don't think there's any immediate hurry."

"You won't want blue-prints within a week?"

"Not within a week. I shall let you know. Usual address?"

"Usual address. If I leave there, I shall give instructions to forward. So long, then." And, with a thrust of his arm, he threw the pad back on the desk.

Now, in this movement of his, a button of his cuff caught behind the stiff cover of the account book which had refused to lie flat; the book was brushed to the floor.

"Sorry," Dick said, bending down; but Sam had forestalled him.

Sam was alone again. Dick did not matter. Most likely he had not even noticed the open safe; if he had, he had given it no thought.

There was no reason to destroy the book. He would return it to its resting place in the safe.

But, having risen to do so, a peculiar circumstance struck him as he reached for the book. In being tossed back on the desk, it had fallen on its spine and opened at a point where a brief series of entries had so far escaped him. That series stood on a page near the end of the book; and the page bore the number 267.

Sam dropped back to his seat. He felt weak-kneed with foreboding; a new wave of excitement ran through him. A glance showed the page contained every entry from the front part of the book which had been marked with the encircled number. In his father's fine, flowing hand it bore the heading:

"Account of William Swann."

Beyond that, it made no disclosure. Sam compared the entries with those he had jotted down on the slip of paper. They tallied.

That the book had opened at this page was readily explained: it had been carefully flattened.

Sam was startled.

The senator, in recalling it, felt his hands tremble; for this had been the most decisive moment in his life; all else had flowed from it: Swann was raising his head again. What was his connection with his father? In his mind he saw him as he had seen him in the narrow hall of his father's house; broad-shouldered, heavy, middle-aged; as if he were built for manual labour, not for clerical work. Even as a bookkeeper Sam had disliked him: he was too oilily subservient, too much given to obsequious bowing.

He felt more profoundly disturbed than ever before in his life; vague misgivings flooded his mind. He turned back to the book.

The first payment had been made in the fall of 1888, shortly after the first units of the mill had been put into operation: $2,000; the last less than half a year ago; and in addition there was that manilla envelope. It being unsealed, he examined its contents which consisted of twenty one-hundred-dollar bills.

Worriedly he picked the account book up again and turned the pages, coming, almost at once, upon a list of receipts written in the dead man's hand and signed by Swann in a bold, calligraphic script:

"Received, from Mr Rudyard Clark, the sum of ............... in payment of blackmail."

Sam's first impulse was to press the button under his desk and to have the man summoned. But on second thought he refrained. He must ponder the matter. He would go home, to return after luncheon.

He trembled as he rose; but, controlling himself, he replaced all but the cash in the safe which he relocked. Sitting down once more, he made out a deposit slip for the money which he counted, stowed gold and silver in his pockets, and put on his coat.

In the boardroom, Miss Albright met him, flushed. "Shall I ring for the carriage, Mr Clark?"

He shook his head. "I'll walk."

"About Mr Carter, Mr Clark. He happened to be on the fifth floor and used the stairs. That's why we could not stop him."

Sam, with a nod, made for the waiting elevator cage.

On the way home he dropped in at the bank with the Grecian front, to deposit the cash he carried. It was the noon hour; and he had to tip his hat to a score of people. But the bank was deserted.

Art Selby, the manager, who, like the Clarks, had his lunch at a later hour, saw Sam through the open door of his office, and, pushing his glasses up on his capacious forehead, came to meet him.

"Anything I can do for you, Sam?"

"I have a certain amount of cash in my pockets; from my father's safe."

The manager chuckled. "Succession duties are the devil," he said.

Sam felt acutely that he was in a false position and resented the fact. His voice was icy when he said, "Let's go to your office."

Which acted as a sufficient check on the other's facetiousness to make him do what had to be done in silence and with despatch.

Within a few minutes Sam was back in the street, half wishing he had sent for the carriage after all. He was not used to moving in crowds; it interfered with his effort to clear his thought.