Joan and Co.
Forsythe glanced toward the private office of Burnett senior. The door
was closed. He had never considered Burnett junior as of being of any
possible use in this crisis, but suddenly an idea came to him. It might
be that the easiest way to reach the father was through the son. Dicky
had moved to his desk and was carelessly poking about among the various
trade circulars which Forsythe always tossed over there after he read
them.
“Have you noticed any change in your father since you went away?” began
Forsythe.
“He’s lost weight,” nodded Dicky.
“It seemed so to me.”
“Been working too hard.”
“You think so?”
Dicky glanced up.
“What else?”
“He hasn’t had as much as usual to do here,” answered Forsythe.
“Eh?”
“I’ve tried to take as much as possible off his hands, but he’s been
out of the office a good deal for the last month.”
“Out of the office?”
“Leaves here sometimes at ten and doesn’t get back until three.”
Instead of looking surprised, as Forsythe expected, Dicky sat
down in the chair before his desk and appeared uninterested. The
reason for that was that he did not like the idea of discussing his
father’s affairs with his office manager. As a matter of fact, he was
considerably disturbed.
“Those are stock-brokers’ hours,” suggested Forsythe.
“So?”
“I’ve been wondering—”
Dicky looked up, and Forsythe paused.
“Of course, in a way it isn’t any of my business,” Forsythe explained.
Dicky nodded as though agreeing fully with that statement. Forsythe
flushed.
“But in another way it is,” he went on.
“How?”
“Your father was good enough to allow me to buy a small block of
capital stock.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“So we’re partners in a sense.”
Dicky frowned.
“In this particular business. But what has that to do with my father’s
personal affairs outside of this business?”
“This,” replied Forsythe with more spirit; “we’re up against a new kind
of competition that may call for a good deal of extra capital in the
next few months. If your father drops too much on the Street—”
“You know that he _has_ been dropping a good deal on the Street?”
interrupted Dicky.
“I know he has been putting in most of his time down there, and I know
he’s only a lamb at the game.”
“This competition you speak of?” inquired Dicky.
Forsythe reached into his desk drawer again and pulled out the sample
of enameled leather he had lately been examining.
“Look at that!”
Dicky took it in his hands and felt of it. “Well?”
“It’s the best thing that has come on the market in ten years, that’s
all,” explained Forsythe. “We’ve got to meet it or go out of business.”
“How do you propose to meet it?”
“Buy the process if possible. If we can’t do that—”
“Yes?”
“We’ll have to think up some other way.”
“What other way?”
“I’m not sure yet,” answered Forsythe, “but we’ve got to do something
pretty soon. And it’s going to take money.”
He handed Dicky the letter from the Doggett Shoe Company. Dicky read it
through.
“He was one of our best customers,” explained Forsythe.
“Has Mr. Burnett seen this yet?”
“Not yet. I was going to talk it over with him this morning.”
“Well, I wouldn’t,” said Dicky.
“The sooner he understands the situation, the better,” declared
Forsythe.
“I’m not so sure of that,” returned Dicky. “At any rate, I don’t want
him bothered with this for a day or two. In the meanwhile, can’t you
make some sort of a proposition to this crowd?”
“I’ve got something started already.”
“That’s the stuff. Let me know how it comes out.”
He rose.
“In the meanwhile,” he concluded, as he went toward his father’s
office, “keep your shirt on and don’t mention this to Mr. Burnett. I’ll
take over his share of this new responsibility.”
CHAPTER XXVI
A NEW STENOGRAPHER
The plant of the Devons Manufacturing Company was running to capacity,
such as that was. Devons was working twelve hours a day trying to fill
his orders—orders that came in unsolicited. And Joan was trying her
best to keep up her end of the work, though, as the correspondence
increased, this was becoming more difficult. She had rented a
typewriter, and, though by exceeding care and close application, she
could in the course of an hour pick out with fair, if wobbly, success
whole practice sentences, she still found it considerably easier to
write her letters in long hand. The result in a way was effective,
because there were few men who did not instinctively select first from
their mail envelopes addressed in her bold, feminine handwriting.
The bookkeeping, too, had become considerably more complicated since
she made her first entry, and not all the new customers were as eager
to pay cash as Forsythe had been. Then she had to keep another book
for the supplies purchased, and they developed daily into a longer and
longer list. Take it all in all, she had enough to do.
From Devons’s point of view she had too much to do. Whenever he had
a minute to glance in her direction he found her scowling over the
ledgers like a worried school-girl. Sometimes he had to speak two or
three times to call her attention to the fact that it was the lunch
hour. Had he not kept track of it himself, there would have been days
when she would not have lunched at all. Neither would he, had he only
himself to consider. It was an effort to stop, but, hang it all, he was
responsible for having got her down here and the least he could do now
was to take care of her.
Not that this was by any means an unpleasant duty. Rather was it a
disconcertingly agreeable task. When it is necessary to observe a
thermostat to the fraction of a degree, watch in hand, and keep in mind
at the same time sundry other details marking the difference between
success and failure, it may be pleasant enough to have in the rear
of the office quite the most beautiful and adorable and altogether
the most wonderful woman in the world; but not to be distracted by
that fact requires a degree of self-control that in time amounts to a
strain. Scientific laboratory processes are not supposed to be involved
with dark eyes and a pretty mouth unjustly disturbed by a set of books
concerned with figures. Whenever he saw her puzzling over a column, or
whenever he heard the timid click of the typewriter as she laboriously
strove to strike the right key, he kept saying to himself that she
did not belong there. She was not meant to be disturbed by anything.
Because she was, he felt guilty.
Even when his thoughts took a pleasanter course and ran ahead to what
the future promised, to keep track of the temperature of a kettle of
linseed oil at the same time got on his nerves. Whether the stuff
became too hot or not hot enough appeared an indifferent matter as soon
as he indulged in the pastime of multiplying the profit per gallon by
the number of gallons he was manufacturing at present, and multiplying
that again by the number he could legitimately look forward to, based
on the increase of orders this last week. And that was not touching the
wide market beyond this single city. It was enough to make a man dizzy
in and of itself. Translate that income into terms of what it meant to
him for her—she being at that very moment within calling distance of
his voice—and the wonder is that he succeeded in doing anything at all.
Yet he held himself amazingly steady. Day after day she came into the
office in the morning like some breath of spring, and though the man
within him leaped to meet her with eager, unsatisfied kisses,—there
were moments when he had to hold himself rigid not to venture after
not having seen her since the day before,—he merely nodded a curt
good-morning and went on with his work. It was not easy. Nor was it
easy, when at noon he went out to lunch with her, to remember that
after all she was only loaning herself to him for a little while.
Contingencies might arise at any time that would sweep her entirely
out of his life again. To be sure, he felt more and more secure as
the days went by, but he never allowed himself to be over-optimistic.
As his process bade fair to supersede the old, another process might
appear to supersede his. It was too soon to feel secure. But when that
time arrived, and he could look her fair in the eyes and bid her come
with him back into the world in which she belonged, then—it was a
heady dream. It sounded at times like an impossible dream. Yet if you
multiplied the profit per gallon with the number of gallons—
He had been looking around for the last few days. The doctor in the
next office had spoken to him about a very good stenographer and
bookkeeper whom he was afraid he must soon let go. If Devons could use
her, he would find her an exceptionally efficient girl. It was not the
nine dollars a week that made Devons hesitate—he would take that much
out of his hide if necessary to relieve Joan,—but it was the fear that
if she did not have something to do here she would not stay at all. His
ideal would be to have her come in during the forenoon of every day and
just stay around for an hour or two.
“Is the work getting too hard for you?” he asked her one day.
“No,” she answered unhesitatingly.
“I don’t want you to get all tired out,” he said solicitously.
She laughed at that. “Do I look tired?”
He was forced to admit that she did not. On the contrary, she seemed to
be vitalized by a new alertness. She entered the office in the morning
with a quicker step and a fresher glow in her cheeks. This was partly
explained by the fact that now she walked some of the way downtown,
generally leaving Charles at Third Avenue and Thirtieth Street, and
continuing the remainder of the distance on foot. This necessitated
arising a little earlier, but that was no hardship, because she found
herself waking at seven. With no evening engagements she retired
by ten, which gave her a longer rest than she had enjoyed for five
years—or at least a different sort of rest. She woke up refreshed in
body and soul. She sprang from bed with the zest of an athlete, and,
forgetting that such a person as Henriette existed, completed her own
toilet in half an hour. To be able to do this was in itself no small
luxury. It was good to be alone in the early morning with all the
world about her fresh and noiseless. It gave her a feeling of intimacy
with herself and her surroundings. This was her room and these were
her things in the daytime as before they had been only in the dark
at night. She felt herself a part of the day now—a part of the big,
stirring city which she knew was also awakening at this hour. She
was one of the hundred thousands that came to life like Nature with
the rising sun—that took their part in the day’s work, and so, in a
sense, became an integral part of the universe. It gave significance
to details which had been merely negative. Her little four-posted bed
became a positive factor in her life because it offered her rest after
the day’s work; the dimity curtains at the window, the paper on the
wall, the rugs on the floor, became associated with the personal side
of her because they were there when she came in with her mind still
active with the finished business of the day just gone, and greeted
her in the morning when she rose with all her thoughts of the work
which lay ahead. They did not mean anything when she came in listless
or merely physically tired. It is doubtful if before she could have
described minutely any of these exterior things. Now she could have
sketched with accuracy the pattern in the rugs.
It was to a less extent so downstairs. She had her breakfast alone in
the big dining-room, and she came to know that room—to feel at home in
that room just because it was helping to make her ready for the tasks