Over the Pass Part 32

"All to me what the desert is to other folks!" he mused; "desert, without any cacti or mesquite! All the trails cross one another in a maze. A boxed-up desert--boxes and boxes piled on top of one another! Everybody in harness and attached by an invisible, unbreakable, inelastic leash to a box, whither he bears his honey or goes to nurse his broken wings!--so it seems to me and very headachy!"

At Madison Square he was at the base of the range itself; and halting on the corner of Twenty-third Street and the Avenue he was a statue as aloof as the statue of Farragut from his surroundings. Salt sea spray ever whispers in the atmosphere around the old sailor. How St. Gaudens created it and keeps it there in the heart of New York is his secret.

Possibly the sculptor put some of his soul into it as young Michael Angelo did into his young David.

It is a great thing to put some of your soul into a thing, whether it is driving a nail or moulding a piece of clay into life. There are men who pause before the old Admiral and see the cut.w.a.ter of men-of-war's bows and hear the singing of the signal halyards as they rise with the command to close in. Perhaps the Eternal Painter had put a little of his soul into the heart of Jack; for some busy marchers of the Avenue trail as they glanced at him saw the free desert and heard hoof-beats in the sand.

Others seeing a tanned Westerner kissing his hand to Diana of Madison Square Garden probably thought him mad. Next, performing another sentimental errand for the Doge of Little Rivers, his gaze rose along the column of the Metropolitan tower. Its heights were half shrouded in mist, through which glowed the gold of the lantern.

"Oh, bully! bully!" he thought. "The only sun in sight a manufactured one, shining on top of a manufactured mountain! It is a big business building a mountain; only, when G.o.d Almighty scattered so many ready-made ones about, why take the trouble?" he concluded. "Or so it seems to me,"

he added, sadly, in due appreciation of the utterly reactionary mood of a man who has been boxed up for a week.

Now he turned toward a quarter which he had, thus far, kept out of the compa.s.s of observation. He looked up the jagged range of Broadway where, over a terra-cotta pile, floated a crimson flag with "John Wingfield" in big, white letters.

"My mountain! My box! My millions!" he breathed half audibly.

How the people whom he pa.s.sed, their faces speaking city keenness of ambition, must envy his position! How little reason they had to envy him, he thought, as he walked around the great building and saw his name glaring at him in gilt letters over the plate-gla.s.s windows and on all the delivery wagons, open-mouthed for the packages being wheeled out under the long gla.s.s awning.

"A whole block now! Yes, the doctor was right. It must be thirty instead of twenty millions!" he concluded, as his vision swept the straight-line, window-checkered ma.s.s of the twelve stories. "And I do wish we had a tower! If one could go up on top of a tower and look out over the range now and then and breathe deep, it would help."

When he entered the main door he paused in a maze, gazing at the acreage of counters manned by clerks and the aisles swarming with shoppers under the glare of the big, electric globes, and listening to the babble of shrill talk, the calls of the elevator boys, the coughing of the pneumatic tubes and the clang of the elevator doors. It was all like some devilishly complicated dream from which he would never awake. He must have a little time in order to orient himself before he could think rationally. The roar of the train still obsessed him; the air in the store seemed more stifling than that of the sleeper.

So he decided that, rather than be shot up into The Presence by the elevator, he would gradually scale the heights. Ascending stairway after stairway, he ranged back and forth over the floors, a stranger in his own wonderland. When he reached the eleventh floor, with only one more to the offices, the whole atmosphere seemed suddenly to turn rare with expectancy; a rustle to run through all the goods on the counters; the very Paris gowns among which he was standing to be called to martial attention.

"The boss!" he heard one of the model girls say.

Turning to follow her nod toward the stairway, Jack saw, two-thirds of the way up the broad flight, a man past middle age, in dark gray suit and neutral tie, rubbing his palms together as he surveyed a stratum of his princ.i.p.ality. The sight of him to Jack was like the touch of a myriad electric needles that p.r.i.c.ked sharply, without exhilaration.

"The boss is likely to run up that way any time of the day," said the model girl to a customer; "and what he don't see don't count!"

"Not much older; not much changed!" thought Jack; and his realization of the disinterestedness of his observation tipped the needles with acid.

In the sharpness of the master's b.u.t.ton-counting survey there was swift finality; and his impressions completed, a.n.a.lyzed, docketed for reference, he ran on up the flight with light step, still rubbing the palms of his hands in the unctuously well-contained and appreciative sense of his power. To Jack he was a fascinating, grand, distant figure, this of his own father, yet mortally near.

If the model girl had had the same keenness of observation for what is borne in the face as for what is worn on the back, she could not have failed to note the strong family resemblance between the young man standing near her and the man who had paused on the stairway. This glimpse of his father's mastery of every detail of that organization which he had built, this glimpse of cool, self-centered authority, only reminded Jack of his own ignorance and flightiness in view of all that would be expected of him. He knew less than one of the cash girls about how to run the store. A duel with Leddy was a simple matter beside this battle he had to wage.

He mounted the last flight of stairs into an area of gla.s.s-paneled doors, behind which the creative business of the great concern was conducted.

Out of one marked "Private," closing it softly and stepping softly, came a round-shouldered, stooping man of middle age, with the apprehensive and palliating manner of a long-service private secretary who has many things to remember and many persons to appease with explanations. It was evident that Peter Mortimer had just come from The Presence. At sight of Jack he drew back in a surprise that broke into a beaming delight which played over his tired and wrinkled features in ecstasy.

"Jack! Jack! You did it! You did it!" he cried.

"Peter!" Jack seized the secretary's hands and swung them back and forth.

"You've got a grip of iron! And tanned--my, how you're tanned! You did it, Jack, you did it! It hardly seems credible, when I think of the last time I saw you."

It was then that the secretary had seen a Jack with his eyes moist; a Jack pasty-faced, hollow-cheeked; and, in what was a revolutionary outburst for a unit in the offices, Peter Mortimer had put his arm around the boy in a cry for the success of the Odyssey for health which the heir was about to begin. And Mortimer's words were sweet, while the words of the farewell from the other side of the gla.s.s-paneled door marked "Private" were acrid with the disappointed hopes of the speaker.

"You have always been a weakling, Jack, and I have had little to say about your rearing. Go out to the desert and stay--stay till you are strong!" declared the voice of strength, as if glad to be freed of the sight of weakness in its own image.

"Father did not come to meet me?" Jack observed questioningly now to Mortimer.

"He was very busy--he did not feel certain about the nature of your telegram--he--" and Mortimer's impulses withdrew into the sh.e.l.l of the professional private secretary.

"I wired that he should see for himself if I were well. So he shall!"

said Jack, turning toward the door.

"Yes--that will be all right--yes, there is no one with him!"

Mortimer, in the very instinct of long practice, was about to go in to announce the visitor, but paused. As Jack entered, whatever else may have been in his eyes, there was no moisture.

XXIV

IN THE CITADEL OF THE MILLIONS

John Wingfield, Sr. sat at a mahogany table without a single drawer, in the centre of a large room with bare, green-tinted walls. His oculist had said that green was the best color for the eyes. Beside the green blotting-pad in front of him was a pile of papers. These would either be disposed of in the course of the day or, if any waited on the morrow's decision, would be taken away by Peter Mortimer overnight. When he rose to go home it was always with a clear desk; a habit, a belief of his singularly well-ordered mind in the mastery of the teeming detail that throbbed under the thin soles of his soft kid shoes. On the other side of the pad was the telephone, and beyond it the supreme implements of his will, a row of pearl-topped push-b.u.t.tons.

The story of John Wingfield, Sr.'s rise and career, as the lieutenants of the offices and the battalions of the shopping floors knew it, was not the story, perhaps, as Dr. Bennington or Peter Mortimer knew it; but, then, doctors and private secretaries are supposed to hold their secrets.

There was little out of the commonplace in the world's accepted version.

You may hear its like from the moneyed host at his dinner table in New York or as he shows you over the acres of his country estate, enthusing with a personal narrative of conquest which is to him unique. John Wingfield, Sr. makes history for us in the type of woman whom he married and the type of son she bore him.

He was the son of a New England country clergyman, to whom working his way through college in order to practise a profession made no appeal.

Birth and boyhood in poverty had taught him, from want of money, the power of money. He sought the centre of the market-place. At sixteen he was a clerk, marked by his industry not less than by his engaging manners, on six dollars a week in the little store that was the site of his present triumph. Of course he became a partner and then owner. It was his frequent remark, when he turned reminiscent, that if he could only get as good clerks as he was in his day he would soon have a monopoly of supplying New York and its environs with all it ate and wore and needed to furnish its houses; which raises the point that possibly such an equality of high standards in efficiency might make all clerks employers.

The steady flame of his egoism was fanned with his Successes. Without real intimates or friends, he had an effective magnetism in making others do his bidding. It had hardly occurred to him that his discovery of the principle of never doing anything yourself that you can win others to do for you and never failing, when you have a minute to spare, to do a thing yourself when you can do it better than any a.s.sistant, was already a practice with leaders in trade and industry before the Pharaohs.

Life had been to him a ladder which he ascended without any glances to right or left or at the rung that he had left behind. The adaptable processes of his mind kept pace with his rise. He made himself at home in each higher stratum of atmosphere. His marriage, delayed until he was forty and already a man of power, was still another upward step. Alice Jamison brought him capital and position. The world was puzzled why she should have accepted him; but this stroke of success he now considered as the vital error of a career which, otherwise, had been flawlessly planned. Yet he could flatter his egoism with the thought that it was less a fault of judgment than of the uncertainty of feminine temperament, which could not be measured by logic.

New York saw little of Mrs. Wingfield after Jack's birth. Her friends knew her as a creature all life and light before her marriage; they realized that the life and light had pa.s.sed out of her soon after the boy came; and thenceforth they saw and heard little of her. She had given herself up to the insistent possessorship and company of her son. Those who met her when travelling reported how frail she was and how constrained.

Jack was fourteen when his mother died. He was brought home and sent to school in America; and two-years later Dr. Bennington announced that the slender youngster, who had been so completely estranged from the affairs of the store, must matriculate in the ozone of high alt.i.tudes instead of in college, if his life were to be saved. Whether Jack were riding over the _mesas_ of Arizona or playing in a villa garden in Florence, John Wingfield, Sr.'s outlook on life was the same. It was the obsession of self in his affairs. After the eclipse of his egoism the deluge. The very thought that anyone should succeed him was a shock reminding him of growing age in the midst of the full possession of his faculties, while he felt no diminution of his ambition.

"I am getting better," came the occasional message from that stranger son. And the father kept on playing the tune of accruing millions on the push-b.u.t.tons. His decision to send Dr. Bennington to Arizona came suddenly, just after he had turned sixty-three. He had had an attack of grip at the same time that his attention had been acutely called to the demoralization of another great business inst.i.tution whose head had died without issue, leaving his affairs in the hands of trustees.

Two days of confinement in his room with a high pulse had brought reflection and the development of atavism. What if the inst.i.tution built as a monument to himself should also pa.s.s! What if the name of Wingfield, his name, should no longer float twelve stories high over his building!

He foresaw the promise of companionship of a restless and ghastly apparition in the future.

But he recovered rapidly from his illness and his mental processes were as keen and prehensile as ever. Checking off one against the other, with customary shrewdness, he had a number of doctors go over him, and all agreed that he was good for twenty years yet. Twenty years! Why, Jack would be middle-aged by that time! Twenty years was the difference between forty-three and sixty-three. Since he was forty-three he had quintupled his fortune. He would at least double it again. He was not old; he was young; he was an exceptional man who had taken good care of himself. The threescore and ten heresy could not apply to him.

Bennington's telegram irritated him with its lack of precision. Fifteen hundred dollars and expenses to send an expert to Arizona and in return this unbusinesslike report: "You will see Jack for yourself. He is coming."

In the full enjoyment of health, observing every nice rule for longevity, his slumber sweet, his appet.i.te good, John Wingfield, Sr.

had less interest in John Wingfield, Jr. than he had when his bones were aching with the grip. Jack's telegram from Chicago announcing the train by which he would arrive aroused an old resentment, which dated far back to Jack's childhood and to a frail woman who had been proof against her husband's will.

Did this home-coming mean a son who could learn the business; a strong, shrewd, cool-headed son? A son who could be such an adjutant as only one who is of your own flesh and blood can be in the full pursuit of the same family interest as yourself? If Jack were well, would not Bennington have said so? Would he not have emphasized it? This was human nature as John Wingfield, Sr. knew it; human nature which never missed a chance to ingratiate itself by announcing success in the service of a man of power.

The spirit of his farewell message to Jack, which said that strength might return but bade weakness to remain away, and the injured pride of seeing a presentment of wounded egoism in the features of a sickly boy, which had kept him from going to Arizona, were again dominant. Yet that morning he had a pressing sense of distraction. Even Mortimer noticed it as something unusual and amazing. He kept reverting to Jack's history between flashes of apprehension and he was angry with himself over his inability to concentrate his mind. Concentration was his G.o.d. He could turn from lace-buyer to floor-walker with the quickness of the swing of an electric switch. Concentrate and he was oblivious to everything but the subject in hand. He was in one of the moments of apprehension, half staring at the b.u.t.tons on the desk rather than at the papers, when he heard the door open without warning and looked up to see a lean, st.u.r.dy height filling the doorway and the light from the window full on a bronzed and serene face.