The Wild Olive Part 11

It would be an incalculable advantage to Mr. Strange if he could enter on his Argentine life with some command of the vernacular. It might even be well to defer his search for permanent employment until he could have that accomplishment to his credit. If he possessed a little money--even a very little--Oh, he did? Then so much the better. He need not live on it entirely, but it would be something to fall back on while getting the rudiments of his education. In the mean time he could learn a little about wool if he picked up jobs--Oh, very humble ones!--they were always to be had by the young and able-bodied--at the Mercado Central, one of the great wool-markets of the world. He could earn a few pesetas, acquire practical experience, and fit himself out in Spanish, all at the same time.

And he could live with relative economy. Monsieur Durand could explain that too. In fact, he might get board and lodging in the same house as himself, with Mrs. Wilson who conducted a modest home for "gentlemen only." Mrs. Wilson was a Protestant--what they called a Methodist, he believed--but her house was clean, with a few flowers in the patio, very different from the frightful conventillos in which the poor were obliged to herd. If Mr. Strange thought it odd that he, Monsieur Durand, should be living beneath a Protestant roof--well, there were reasons which were difficult to explain.

Later on, perhaps, Mr. Strange might take a season on some great sheep estancia out in the Camp, where there were thousands of herds that were thousands strong. Monsieur Durand could help him in that too. He could introduce him to wealthy proprietors whose sons he had taught. It would be a hard life, but it need not be for long. He would live in a mud hut, dirty, isolated, with no companionship but that of the Italian laborers and their womenkind. But the outdoor existence would do him good; the air over the pampas was like wine; and the food would not be as bad as he might expect. There would be an abundance of excellent meat, chiefly mutton, it was true, which when cooked _a_ la guacho--_carne concuero_, they called it in the Camp--roasted in the skin so as to keep all the juices in the meat--! A gesture of the hands, accompanied by a succulent inspiration between the teeth, gave Strange to understand that there was one mitigation at least to life on an Argentine estancia.

To come into actual contact with the sheep, to know Oxfords, Cheviots, Leicesters, and Black-faced Downs, to a.s.sist at the feedings and washings and doctorings and shearings, to follow the crossings and recrossings and crossings again, that bred new varieties as if they were roses, to trace the processes by which the Argentine pampas supply novel resources to the European manufacturer, and the European manufacturer turns out the smart young man of London or New York, with his air of wearing "the very latest"--all this would not only give Strange a pleasing sense of being at the root of things, but form a sort of apprenticeship to his trade.

The men had not yet finished their hour of siesta, but Strange himself was at work. Ten minutes were sufficient for his own snack, and he never needed rest. Moreover, he was still too new to his position to do other than glory in the fact that he was a free being, doing a man's work, and earning a man's wage. Out in the Camp he had been too desolate to feel that, but here in Buenos Aires, at the very moment when the great city was waking to the knowledge of her queenship in the southern world--when the commercial hordes of the north were sweeping down in thousands of ships across the equator to outdo each other in her markets, it was an inspiring thing merely to be alive and busy. He was as proud of Stephens and Jarrott's long brick shed, where the sun beat pitilessly on the corrugated iron roof, and the smell of wool nearly sickened him, as if it had been a Rothschild's counting-house. His position there was just above the lowest; but his enthusiasm was independent of trivial things like that. How could he lounge about, taking siestas, when work was such a pleasure in itself?

The shed of which he had the oversight was a model of its kind, not so much because his ambition designed to make it so, as because his ardor could make it nothing else.

The roar of dock traffic through the open windows drowned everything but the loudest sounds, so that busily working, he heard nothing, and paid no attention, when some one stopped behind him. He had turned accidentally, humming to himself in the sheer joy of his task, when the presence of the stranger caused him to blush furiously beneath his tan. He drew himself up, like a soldier to attention. He had never seen the head of the firm that employed him, but he had heard a young Englishman describe him as "looking like a wooden man just coming into life," so that he was enabled to recognize him now. He did look something like a wooden man, in that the long, lean face, of the tone of parchment, was marked by the few, deep, almost perpendicular folds that give all the expression there is to a Swiss or German medieval statue of a saint or warrior in painted oak. One could see it was a face that rarely smiled, though there was plenty of life in the deep-set, gray-blue eyes, together with a force of cautious, reserved, and possibly timid, sympathy. Of the middle height and slender, with hair just turning from iron-gray to gray, immaculate in white duck, and wearing a dignified Panama, he stood looking at Strange--who, tall and stalwart in his greasy overalls, held his head high in conscious pride in his position in the shed--as Capital might look at Labor. It seemed a long time before Mr Jarrott spoke--the natural harshness of his voice softened by his quiet manner.

"You're in charge of this gang?"

"Yes, sir."

There was an embarra.s.sed pause. As though not knowing what to say next, Mr. Jarrott's gaze travelled down the length of the shed to where the Italians, rubbing their sleepy eyes, were preparing for work again.

"You're an American, I believe?"

"Yes, sir."

"How old are you?"

"Not quite twenty-six."

"What's your name?"

"Herbert Strange!"

"Ah? One of the Stranges of Virginia?"

"No, sir."

There was another long pause, during which the older man's eyes wandered once more over the shed and the piles of wool, coming back again to Strange.

"You should pick up a little Spanish."

"I've been studying it. Hablo Espanol, pero no muy bien."

Mr. Jarrott looked at him for a minute in surprise.

"So much the better--tanto mejor," he said, after a brief pause, and pa.s.sed on.

VIII

He was again thinking how easy it had been, as he stood, more than three years later, on the bluffs of Rosario, watching the sacks of wheat glide down the long chute--full seventy feet--into the hold of the _Walmer Castle_. The st.u.r.dy little Italians who carried the bags from the warehouse in long single file might have been those he had superintended in the wool-shed in Buenos Aires in the early stages of his rise. But he was not superintending these. He superintended the superintendents of those who superintended them. Tired with his long day in the office, he had come out toward the end of the afternoon not only to get a breath of the fresh air off the Parana, but to muse, as he often did, over the odd spectacle of the neglected, half-forgotten Spanish settlement, that had slumbered for two hundred years, waking to the sense of its destiny as a factor of importance in the modern world. Wheat had created Chicago and Winnipeg Adam-like from the ground; but it was rejuvenating Rosario de Santa Fe Faust-like, with its golden elixir. It interested the man who called himself Herbert Strange--resident manager of Stephens and Jarrott's great wheat business in this outlet of the great wheat provinces--to watch the impulse by which Decrepitude rose and shook itself into Youth. As yet the process had scarcely advanced beyond the early stages of surprise.

The dome of the seventeenth-century Renaissance cathedral accustomed for five or six generations to look down on low, one-storied Spanish dwellings surrounding patios almost Moorish in their privacy, seemed to lift itself in some astonishment over warehouses and flour-mills; while the mingling of its sweet old bells with the creaking of cranes and the shrieks of steam was like that chorus of the centuries in which there can be no blending of the tones.

Strange felt himself so much a part of the rejuvenescence that the incongruity gave him no mental nor aesthetic shock. If in his present position he took a less nave pride than in that of three years ago, he was conscious none the less of a deep satisfaction in having his part, however humble, in the exercise of the world's energies. It gave him a sense of oneness with the great primal forces--with the river flowing beneath him, two hundred miles to the Atlantic, with the wheat fields stretching behind him to the confines of Brazil and the foothills of the Andes--to be a moving element in this galvanizing of new life into the dormant town, in this finding of new riches in the waiting earth. There was, too, a kind of companionship in the steamers moored to the red buoys in the river, waiting their turns to come up to the insufficient quays and be loaded. They bore such names as _Devonshire_, _Ben Nevis_, and _Princess of Wales_. They would go back to the countries where the speech was English, and the ideals something like his own. They would go back, above all, to the north, to the north that he yearned for with a yearning to which time brought no mitigation, to the north which was coming to mean for him what heaven means to a soul outside the scope of redemption.

It was only on occasions that this sentiment got possession of him strongly. He was generally able to keep it down. Hard work, a.s.sisted by his natural faculty for singleness of purpose and concentration of attention, kept him from lifting the eyes of his heart toward the unattainable. Moreover, he had developed an enthusiasm, genuine in its way, for the land of his adoption. The elemental hugeness of its characteristics--its rivers fifty to a hundred miles in width, its farms a hundred thousand acres in extent, its sheep herds and cattle herds thousands to the count--were of the kind to appeal to an ardent, strenuous nature. There was an exhilarating sense of discovery in coming thus early to one of the world's richest sources of supply at a minute when it was only beginning to be tapped. Out in the Camp there was an impression of fecundity, of earth and animal alike, that seem to relegate poverty and its kindred ills to a past that would never return; while down in the Port the growth of the city went on like the bursting of some magic, monstrous flower. It was impossible not to share in some degree the pride of the braggart Argentine.

It was difficult, too, not to love a country in which the way had been made so smooth for him. While he knew that he brought to his work those qualities most highly prized by men of business, he was astonished nevertheless at the rapidity with which he climbed. Men of long experience in the country had been more than once pa.s.sed over, while he got the promotion for which they had waited ten and fifteen years. He admired the way in which for the most part they concealed their chagrin, but now and then some one would give it utterance.

"h.e.l.lo, grafter!" a little man had said to him, on the day when his present appointment had become known among his colleagues.

The speaker was coming down the stairs of the head office in the Avenida de Mayo as Strange was going up. His name was Green, and though he had been twenty years in Argentine, he haled from Boston. Short and stout, with gray hair, a gray complexion, a gray mustache, and wearing gray flannels, with a gray felt hat, he produced a general impression of neutrality. Strange would have gone on his way unheeding had not the snarling tone arrested him. He had ignored this sort of insult more than once; but he thought the time had come for ending it. He turned on an upper step, looking down on the ashy-faced little man, to whom he had once been subordinate and who was now subordinate to him.

"h.e.l.lo--what?" he asked, with an air of quiet curiosity.

"I said, h.e.l.lo, grafter," Green repeated, with bravado.

"Why?"

"I guess you know that as well as I do."

"I don't. What is it? Out with it. Fire away."

His tranquil air of strength had its effect in overawing the little man, though the latter stood firm and began to explain.

"A grafter is a fellow with an underground pull for getting hold of what belongs to some one else. At least that's what I understand by it--"

"It's very much what I understand by it, too. But have I ever got hold of anything of yours?"

"Yes, confound you! You've taken my job--the job I've waited for ever since 1885."

"Did waiting for it make it yours? If so, you would have come by it more easily than I did. I worked for it."

"Worked for it? Haven't I worked for it, too? Haven't I been in this office for going on seventeen years? Haven't I done what they've paid me for--?"

"I dare say. But I've done twice what they've paid me for. That's the secret of my pull, and I don't mind giving it away. You mayn't like it--some fellows don't; but you'll admit it it's a pull you could have had, as well as I. Look here, Green," he continued, in the same quiet tone, "I'm sorry for you. If I were in your place, I dare say I should feel as you do. But if I _were_ in your place, I'll be hanged if I shouldn't make myself fit to get out of it. You're not fit--and that's the only reason why you aren't going as resident manager to Rosario. You're labelled with the year '1885,' as if you were a bottle of champagne--and you've forgotten that champagne is a wine that gets out of date. You're a good chap--quite as good as your position--but you're not better than your position--and when you are you won't be left in it any longer."

In speaking in this way the man who had been Norrie Ford was consciously doing violence to himself. His natural tendency was to be on friendly terms with those around him, and he had no prompting stronger than the liking to be liked. In normal conditions he was always glad to do a kindness; and when he hurt any one's feelings he hurt his own still more.

Even now, though he felt justified in giving little Green to understand his intoleration of impertinence, he was obliged to fortify himself by appealing to his creed that he owed no consideration to any one. Little Green was protected by a whole world organized in his defence; Norrie Ford had been ruined by that world, while Herbert Strange had been born outside it. With a temperament like that of a quiet mastiff, he was forced to turn himself into something like a wolf.

In spite of the fact that little Green's account of the brief meeting on the stairs presented it in the light of the castigation he had administered to "that confounded upstart from n.o.body knows where," Strange noticed that it made the clerks in the office, most of whom had been his superiors as Green had been, less inclined to bark at his heels. He got respect from them, even if he could not win popularity--and from popularity, in any case, he had been shut out from the first. No man can be popular who works harder than anybody else, shuns companionship, and takes his rare amus.e.m.e.nts alone. He had been obliged to do all three, knowing in advance that it would create for him a reputation of an "ugly brute" in quarters whence he would have been glad to get good-will.

Finding the lack of popularity a safeguard not only against prying curiosity, but against inadvertent self-betrayal, it was with some misgiving that he saw his hermit-like seclusion threatened, as he rose higher in the business and consequently in the social--scale. In the English-speaking colony of Buenos Aires the one advance is likely to bring about the other--especially in the case of a good-looking young man, evidently bound to make his mark, and apparently of respectable antecedents. The first menace of danger had come from Mr. Jarrott himself, who had unexpectedly invited his intelligent employee to lunch with him at a club, in order to talk over a commission with which Strange was to be intrusted. On this occasion he was able to stammer his way out of the invitation; but when later, Mr. Skinner, the second partner, made a like proposal, he was caught without an excuse, being obliged, with some confusion, to eat his meal in a fashionable restaurant in the Calle Florida. Oddly enough, both his refusal on the one occasion and his acceptance on the other obtained him credit with his elders and superiors, as a modest young fellow, too shy to seize an honor, and embarra.s.sed when it was thrust upon him.

To Strange both occurrences were so alarming that he put himself into a daily att.i.tude of defence, fearing similar attack from Mr. Martin, the third member of the firm. He, however, made no sign; and the bomb was thrown by his wife. It came in the shape of a card informing Mr. Strange that on a certain evening, a few weeks hence, Mrs. Martin would be at home, at her residence in Hurlingham. It was briefly indicated that there would be dancing, and he was requested to answer if he pleased. The general information being engraved, his particular name was written in a free bold hand, which he took to be that of one of the daughters of the family.