text:
Page:Man's Country (1923).pdf/147

 Fay made no reply.

A day or two later she met George Judson formally at one of Miss Browning's affairs and, as she danced with him, felt something strange and indefinable proceeding from his embrace. It was not the step and rhythm. It was something that proceeded from himself and rather defied analysis. Fay was piqued that he did not ask her for another dance immediately, that she might sample the experience again and continue its study empirically, as it were. After that the tide of the evening seemed to bear him away from her.

From the time of that first dance, Fay Gilman encountered George Judson rather frequently at one social affair or another; and always he intrigued her interest; always there was some mysterious but thrilling sense of an interplay of currents between them. What piqued her still was that he seemed to be unconscious of this. Certainly he was not especially attentive to her; but showered his favors on many girls alike. This was a trifle irritating to her pride. He was the first man she had ever wanted to see around her more frequently than he was willing to exhibit himself.

Put out for a time with him, she began contrarily to make deliberate but artful attempts to attract him. To her great joy he proved instantly responsive to these. The mo-

title: Page:Man's Country (1923).pdf/147


text:
Page:Man's Country (1923).pdf/148

 ment she began to show an especial pleasure in his society he began to confess by his manner an especial pleasure in hers. Being a wilful and resourceful young person with entirely too much leisure on her hands, she set out deliberately to test the lengths of this responsiveness. She proposed horseback rides at what would prove unusual and perhaps difficult hours for a man in business life; and smilingly he accepted their challenge. She proposed foursomes on the golf course with breakfast after at the Country Club and cruelly forced Dean Galt to be one of the quartet—but always herself paired off with George. She made him one of a party off for a three days' cruise on the lake in her steam yacht Gray Gull.

And George Judson took no banters. He lost all shyness; his clear eyes had laughter and the joy of living and frank admiration and—something else in them when they rested on her; but she could not quite fathom what.

She said to herself that she got an unusual thrill out of him because he was so unlike the other men of her acquaintance. He seemed in some ways so much older and in others so much younger than other men who were obviously of his own age.

He charmed her physically, and he ravished her imagination by the solid things which he had done and by those which he proposed to

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Page:Man's Country (1923).pdf/148


text: Page:Man's Country (1923).pdf/149

title: Page:Man's Country (1923).pdf/149


text: Page:Man's Country (1923).pdf/150

title: Page:Man's Country (1923).pdf/150


text:
Page:Man's Country (1923).pdf/151

 do, of which he made no secret to her. She used to look at the walls of that great and ever-growing factory with his name upon it in letters so long and tall, and marvel to think that the man who had produced it was this so charming playfellow of hers—who now wooed her ardently with his eyes, but never with his lips.

He told her one day the story of that factory's creation out of an ideal formed suddenly in boyhood, told it with certain notable omissions and a certain lightness of manner that was assumed to mask the fact that he was talking so much about himself.

"Oh, I think that is wonderful," she cried at its conclusion. "Won-der-ful!"

"How'd you like to go through the plant?" he asked.

"Oh, I'd love it!" cried the girl enraptured. "I never had any use for an old factory before—but one that you built!" and she paused to drop coquettish eyes and let a fringe of dark lashes caress a pair of cheeks that to George Judson looked good enough to eat right then.

With his usual directness of action George set the visit for that very afternoon. To make the thing properly climactic, he drove Fay first through Franklin Street and halted before the shack-like structure in which he had found Milton Morris seven years before. The old wire-mesh sign was yet about it. "MILTON

title: Page:Man's Country (1923).pdf/151


text:
Page:Man's Country (1923).pdf/152

 MORRIS—GAS ENGINES," it still proclaimed, though rather drunkenly, and the paint was nearly weathered from that wooden insert which had borne once in sharp black letters the single word: "Automobiles."

"That's where we began," he said; and could not altogether keep a strain of emotion out of his voice.

"Imagine!" commented Fay; and then they started out to the Judson-Morris Motor Works. She stood before its long fagade in reverence. To her it became a magic—the creation of an schoolboy.

In her heart was awe of the achievement and awe of the man, as they stepped through the open portal into this clanging, screeching, cavernous jungle of wheels and belts and pulleys and strange shapes of roaring machines that somehow suggested gnashing, prehistoric monsters. And to think that this dynamic, steaming crater was the real den of the lion whom she had been using so freely and satisfactorily as a riding, dancing, golfing-partner! She was suddenly conscience-stricken and ashamed of her wilful vanity that had been mean enough to glory in compelling his attendance at her side when perhaps he should have been here.

From that hour she saw George Judson no longer as a mere romantic figure of business. She saw him instead as a sort of vulcan at the

title: Page:Man's Country (1923).pdf/152


text:
Page:Man's Country (1923).pdf/153

 forge—always framed by the vast dramatic environment of that huge, thundering factory. From that day forward her respect for the young man deepened, as did her appreciation of his devotion. It seemed so much more of a compliment when George Judson came to idle with her. She was doubly grateful for it. Sometimes she had the absurd wish to reciprocate—she indulged the speculation that as George came to play with her, so she might go to work with him. The girl was a good deal mixed. Was she in love with George Judson or was she enamored by his achievements? The spell of his dominance was surely overshadowing her; and the strength of it was witnessed to by the fact that the Gilmans failed to go away for the summer.

September and late September came and the Gilmans were still at home, with, one particular day, George Judson on Montrose Boy and Fay on Princess May, cantering along a Grosse Pointe road. The zest and tang of autumn was in the air; the glory of it was painted on the trees. As they galloped, a rustic summer-house upon the lake shore came into sight, looking bleak and lonesome—so lonesome that it appealed to something in the breasts of the young people who by this time found nothing so unendurable, so worthy of sympathy as loneliness.

title: Page:Man's Country (1923).pdf/153


text:
Page:Man's Country (1923).pdf/154

 They halted their horses as by a common instinct and gazed at it with a mutual interest.

"Let's go over there and sit in that summer-house," proposed George.

"Let's!" agreed Fay, eagerly as if she too found something especially desirable in the anachronistic trysting place.

They swung from saddles and George tied the horses securely. Once gained, the summer-house seemed cordially hospitable. A clump of trees, still leaved but no longer verdant, fended off the chill lake breeze and filled all the air with a tuneful rustling. A late September sun looked in through the space that had been left unscreened of vine to form a door. Upon a rough-hewn bench in this beam of warming sunshine the young adventurers sat and must have felt their souls glow warm as well.

"Remember my telling you about that talk with Charlie King and my deciding the same day to be a horseless wagon builder?" he asked, trying to be casual.

"Why, of course I do, George," she said and smiled on him, encouragingly if not fondly. "I remember everything you ever told me."

"Well, there was something I left out that happened that day—something more important."

"More important? Why, what could that have been? And why did you leave it out?"

title: Page:Man's Country (1923).pdf/154


text:
Page:Man's Country (1923).pdf/155

 "Because . . . The Goat Girl!" he answered enigmatically.

"The Goat Girl?" Fay queried, not associating readily, as the psychologists say.

"Yes—you remember, don't you, one day when you and your little white goats ran away from home and an old, brindled tin-can-eater hopped on them, but a boy in a cabbage patch jumped over the fence and—"

"And were you that boy?" Fay almost screamed at him in her joy and amazement, clutching both his hands for an instant.

"Yes," he said, and held her hand playfully, "I'm the boy."

"You were an awfully nice boy, I remember that, but—rather—rather soiled—as I recall."

"No doubt," said George, but he didn't want to be either complimented or teased. He wanted to be seriously and sentimentally reminiscent; and as she was perfectly willing, he told her—or tried to tell her—the story of the place the little red velvet queen had occupied in his life, and that she—not the mere manufacture of horseless wagons—had been his real inspiration.

"And to think that you never told me before?" the girl remembered suddenly to reproach. "George! It almost frightens me. You can keep things so deep in you—and keep after what you want so forever and ever till you get it."

title: Page:Man's Country (1923).pdf/155


text:
Page:Man's Country (1923).pdf/156

 "But I didn't want to tell you I was the cabbage-patch boy until you understood me well enough to know what the red velvet queen could have meant to me. And now I can. Now I guess you do."

Her eyes widened with slow wonder. "For me?" she murmured, with breath coming quickly, with lifted brows and searching, humbled eyes. "Ever since that absurd goat episode, you have been building a life for me? And you knew that I would be kept for you? Would be ready for you when you were ready for me. You believed that?" There was a note of superstitious credulity in her tones.

"Yes, Fay," George's voice was low and almost religious. "It was just like a faith in the universe. Just as I believed in the goodness of God, so, little woman, I believed in you." He was looking levelly into her eyes.

The girl felt first a sense of being vastly complimented as if she had been selected for some signal honor. Then she felt humbled, unworthy of such steadfast devotion through those long, and to her, careless, unmindful years.

She rose up to fly, with quick, startled eyes. But there could be no flying. She was rooted to the spot. A nebulous rainbow cloud of delicious intimacy seemed to envelop them graciously. She was in his arms without an effort—on her part or his. Her hands were on

title: Page:Man's Country (1923).pdf/156


text:
Page:Man's Country (1923).pdf/157

 his breast and she was looking up into his face trustfully, expectantly even, when suddenly—the thing happened. All at once he was crushing her to him madly, and she was wanting to be crushed, her lips fused to his lips. His proposal, so carefully thought out, had been short-circuited. Love like a spark had leaped from heart to heart before the tardy words could utter themselves.

George Judson had planned it a thousand times—how reverently and how tenderly he would hold her in his arms and whisper his love to her enraptured ears—but something—the touch of her, the warmth of her, the infectious, intimate nearness of her—the long, long want of a dozen years—

After a time, rather breathless, they stared and each saw in the other's eyes a fleeting look of fright. There followed another kiss, more tender, less passionate, than the first, full of reassurance and the sweet promise of a sincere and mutual love. Almost immediately they were sitting again on the rustic bench, he reproaching himself, and she poking at some locks of hair which she felt rather than saw were disarranged; both were laughing nervously.

"I—I didn't finish—" he remembered—with obvious embarrassment.

"What is it, George?" she asked softly, with

title: Page:Man's Country (1923).pdf/157


text:
Page:Man's Country (1923).pdf/158

 her hands clasped upon his breast again and a look of devotion in her eyes.

"Just this, Fay," he answered gravely. "I love you with all my heart and with all of my life, and I want you to love me. . . . Do you?"

"Do I?" she reflected aloud. "Why, yes, George, I—" She hesitated a moment, then gazed at him with a shy but enlarging smile. "Why, of course, I love you," she admitted naïvely, "now—now that you ask me," and the long lashes were lowered to her blushing cheeks. "Who could help loving you?"

"You darling!" he murmured, and gave her the slow, reverent kiss he had meant to give at first; then stood regarding her with a kind of holy contemplation. He thrilled with the greatest happiness he had ever known. It was like—like what he had thought it would be. He had won her—and he was panting from the effort as a man might be expected to pant after a twelve-year chase.

In another instant he was exulting, male-like, over his conquest. He had made this wonderful girl love him. His head straightened, a very proud feeling came into his breast, and he glanced about him over her shoulder like a man who had conquered the world—the richest, widest, most wonderful world—the world of a woman's heart; and that heart was now pulsing against his own with a steady rhythm that was

title: Page:Man's Country (1923).pdf/158


text:
Page:Man's Country (1923).pdf/159

 the most inspiring drum beat to which he had ever listened. It made him somehow eager to be up and out and doing.

In his present mood there was one resemblance to that which came over him on the day when the committee from the banks had insisted that he should acquire the stock-control and the presidency of Judson-Morris. That thing was over when his mind had accepted the fact; the rest was mere detail. So now his wooing seemed over. Hehad won Fay Gilman. He had added her unto his life. All that remained to complete the addition were forms and ceremonies. Details. They belonged to her. He would leave them to her, for his own mind was rushing on—turning back rather from this romantic excursion.

The lovers rode side by side to the porte cochère of the new home Stephen Gilman had built, and together they broke to his widow, with mutual blushes and mutual assistance, the news of their engagement.

Mrs. Gilman heard them gravely and sensibly, betrayed no surprise, and offered no objections.

"I think it's a good match," she conceded frankly—"if Fay had to marry! I think it is one her father would approve of—knowing what Mr. Judson has come to."

"What he will come to," corrected Fay with proud loyalty. "George is hardly started yet."

title: Page:Man's Country (1923).pdf/159


text:
Page:Man's Country (1923).pdf/160

 But Mrs. Gilman, at first so cool, threatened now to become emotional; she fixed sober eyes on George and lifting both her hands to his shoulders, held him at arm's length, looking as levelly into his eyes as she could manage.

"George Judson! Do you realize what it means when a mother gives her daughter into a man's keeping?" she demanded soberly, while dark, piercing eyes searched his significantly.

"I suppose not," stammered George, breaking under that gaze; "but I can try to."

"You will have to tame Fay," she conceded rather surprisingly, and remarked it with some conviction.

"Mamma!" reproved that young lady laughingly.

"But see that you do it gently," the mother urged with the mists of maternal love in her eyes. "Don't hurt her. Don't break her spirit."

It was on this same great day that George drove Fay out to call upon his father and mother. Malachi Judson, sitting in his invalid chair with stubby gray hair sticking straight up and stubby old-fashioned beard bristling straight down, with the elevated eyebrows which gave him a habitually alert expression, gazed with solemn, assaying glance upon the sparkling beauty of Fay Gilman, whose first presence had brightened the house like the entry of a flood of sunshine, and unhesitatingly approved her.

title: Page:Man's Country (1923).pdf/160


text:
Page:Man's Country (1923).pdf/161

 "She's a pippin, George," he croaked solemnly, whereupon Fay laughed with joy and relief at finding herself, after such critical appraising, so accepted by this funny, doom-stricken old man.

Mary Judson's manner was, of course, different. She adjusted her spectacles, took the girl's hands timidly but surely in hers and gazed for some time into her engaging countenance, with Fay blushing, smiling and even giggling in her embarrassment.

"Fay, you're a good girl," decided George's mother. "I can see that; and not highty-tighty; but you've got a job on your hands. George has always been a little bit undisciplined. He's spoiled father and me, and of course we've spoiled him. I've known some woman would have to take George in hand and break him to harness like. He's been too successful, George has, and he's stiff in the neck, but he's a well-meaning boy. Don't break his heart when you're domesticating him, so to speak, will you, Fay?"

"Mother! Mother!" protested George laughing, and Fay was laughing also at the coincidence, and wondering if this was the sort of thing that mothers always said to prospective sons-in-law and daughters-in-law. Yet she could not seem to scoff.

"I won't, Mother Judson," she declared and gravely kissed the trembling, wistful lips, but

title: Page:Man's Country (1923).pdf/161


text:
Page:Man's Country (1923).pdf/162

 immediately turned to point a gleeful, mocking finger at George. "Oh, I'll bend him," she cried exultantly, "but I'll bend him gently, so gently that you won't even hear him crack."

George, proud, happy, laughing at his mother's misgivings as he had always laughed at them, flashed a wink to his father.

When the lovers got outside, they laughed again. Fay knew that it was mostly a joke, this talk about taming a husband. Why, to curb and guide George Judson would be a task so delightful that she looked forward to it with the happiest anticipations. Never had there been a man come near her who was so easily amenable. As for George, he knew that Fay, sweetest, most reasonable, most pliant of human companions, was tamed already. How foolish mothers were about some things anyway!

title: Page:Man's Country (1923).pdf/162


text:
Page:Man's Country (1923).pdf/163

EORGE thought it was an early wedding which Fay and her mother had agreed upon; but his notion of an early wedding was, say, about a week from next Friday, so they could make a week-end honeymoon of it at Niagara Falls. To his complete astonishment, consultation revealed that the two ladies considered next June as an early wedding.

Next June? Nine months away! Utterly impossible. Why, a whole new season's business would have been created and most of it pushed over the hill by that time; and it was a season's business that would require President Judson's undivided, undistracted mind. George had no more intention of conceding a nine months' engagement than he had of surrendering to any one of the big business obstacles which his bustling young career had already encountered. Indeed, such a prolongation of his unmarried state resolved itself into just that—a business obstacle.

"You see, Fay, that's a big job of mine out there at the works and it's my job alone because I made its difficulties myself," he began to reason

title: Page:Man's Country (1923).pdf/163


text:
Page:Man's Country (1923).pdf/164

 in self-assured tones. "Judson-Morris is a going concern—but it's only that. It's like a top that holds its balance as long as you keep it spinning. And that isn't all. The Judson-Morris Motor Company has to keep going in a bigger and bigger way each year. I've got to keep pushing it—keep pouring myself into it more and more—or it will collapse on me, and instead of being a great success I shall be an enormous fizzle."

Fay's doting, amused eyes looked total incredulity, plus reproach that her lover should so malign himself.

"George! As if you could ever be a fizzle!"

But George was perfectly serious. "That's just what I could be," he assured her. "And so, Fay," he concluded, putting his will into plain, blunt words, "I want to get married just as soon as possible. It's necessary, in fact."

"You old dear!" Fay beamed, seizing his coat lapels and pretending playfully to shake him by them. "I know what you mean and you're just as complimentary as you can be to put it that way, but—you're only seeing the man's side of it. See my side for a minute. Getting married is the social climax of a girl's life. It is her great moment. Being engaged—with a splendid ceremony to look forward to—the selecting of bridesmaids and their presents and the wedding colors, the gathering and the making of the trousseau—the dreaming of the

title: Page:Man's Country (1923).pdf/164


text:
Page:Man's Country (1923).pdf/165

 golden dreams—why that's the most exalted time in a girl's life. I'm not going to give it up, George; not one second of it."

Her eyes had half-closed as in some blissful ecstasy of contemplation out of which she roused to fling arms upon his shoulders with admiring raptures in her glance.

George Judson gasped dumbly in an atmosphere too rare for him to breathe.

"All right," he said, "oh, all right," and threw up his hands in token of surrender.

"You dear! Oh, you dear!" she exclaimed, and soft arms drew him down to her and soft lips touched him with a warm, electric thrill that was melting in its effect. "You are the most reasonable human being in all the world," she purred vivaciously, immensely pleased with him and with herself.

And George was pleased, too. At first he counted that quick capitulation of his a victory over himself; but away from her radiance, back once more in the cold world of business endeavor, and totalling up results, he felt somehow defeated. He saw that practically what had happened was a clash of wills, and it was his will that had been broken. He was gallant enough, however, to tell himself that he was glad that it was so; and he threw himself into his work at the factory.

Never before had his mind been so keen, his

title: Page:Man's Country (1923).pdf/165


text:
Page:Man's Country (1923).pdf/166

 decisions so quick and sure, his mastery of business detail so complete. The steady forward march of Judson-Morris showed it. Money, money, money! flowed from his touch—for himself and for all allied with him. Such absorption in such productive labor helped the days to pass. Fay's personality, too, was so infinitely rich and varied and delightful, that it spread a spell over the whole nine months of the engagement.

True, with all this prolonged intimacy of association with Fay Gilman before marriage, with its constant revelation of new and charming witcheries, came the discovery that sometimes they had misunderstood each other completely—that words did not mean the same to her that they meant to him because of the different back-groundings of their lives—but his magnificent self-assurance kept him going with never a doubt that the most fundamental difference in character and aim would prove easily soluble in the tropic sea of matrimony.

But Fay Gilman was also becoming aware of differences, though her attitude toward them was equally superior and self-assuring. That was why she planned a long honeymoon, entirely by themselves, away from everybody they had known, and especially away from the works—a nice, blissful six months in Europe, where one by one those vague but profound differences of

title: Page:Man's Country (1923).pdf/166


text:
Page:Man's Country (1923).pdf/167

 which she was conscious, might come to the surface and be worked out.

But upon this rock of a half-year's honeymoon the frail, yet heavily-freighted, bark of love threatened to capsize.

"Six months in Europe?" George's voice sank to a hoarse whisper. "Why, Fay, dear, I couldn't do it! I couldn't leave the business. I couldn't." His tone—his look of almost fright made it clear to the girl that what she had so fondly planned was indeed impossible.

He saw her disappointment, followed by an expression that was like despair. "Why, how—how then are we ever going to get on? To get things—things settled between us? Compose our differences, I mean."

"It would be better, wouldn't it?" he conceded quickly, "besides being so wonderful—just like six months of heaven. But . . . Fay, darling! It simply isn't possible. I cannot get farther away from the factory than the end of a telephone wire," and his face assumed that expression of fright again and his tone was graveyard hollow. "Nor that for longer than a week or so—three weeks at the most."

Fay's logic—even her wilfulness—was turned aside by such candor and sincerity. George had conceded her point, yet confessed that the long honeymoon was impossible to him. There was nothing therefore for her to do but yield. She

title: Page:Man's Country (1923).pdf/167


text:
Page:Man's Country (1923).pdf/168

 did so, but all at once felt herself chilled by a shadow falling into the brightness of her bridal day. It was the shadow of the business!

He felt that he knew this time that all his intuitions had been right: their differences were none of them vital. Dealt with in sweet and patient reasonableness they could all be settled in compromise—as this one had been.

But the compromise this time had been a triumph for him. It served to reassure a nature that needed small reassurance. It was a victory to a man growing now accustomed to victory. Heady with the wine of it, he went next morning bustling to his work at the factory. After a glance at his desk, he went on his usual morning tour of inspection—a swift, hurried walk through the plant.

As he came back into his office he slanted an eye expectantly through the glass frame to where he usually found Milton Morris sitting at this hour. The chair was empty. But even while he was gazing and noting this with inquiring eye, he saw Stella, Mr. Morris's little secretary, come in quickly, stare round her in a startled way as if to make sure of something, and then walk straight through the door into his own office without stopping to knock. She had a tiny white ball of a handkerchief pressed nervously against her lips.

"Mr. Judson!" she stammered excitedly:

title: Page:Man's Country (1923).pdf/168


text:
Page:Man's Country (1923).pdf/169

 "Mr. Morris has—has had a stroke or something. The housekeeper 'phoned."

"Mr. Morris! A stroke?"

"The housekeeper wants you to go right out there, please."

George Judson leaped to his feet and went rushing out of the office and three steps at a time downward to his car. As he went there came over him with a rush a sense of all that he owed to this man.

"Quick! to Mr. Morris's!" he called to his chauffeur; and in an incredibly short time, as if he had plunged in a straight arrow flight, was being admitted by the housekeeper—for Milton Morris would never come to butlers. She was a tall, angular Scandinavian type, with the natural gloom upon her countenance considerably heightened.

"He is upstairs in his room, sir—you know where," said the woman solemnly, waving George on before her and following laggingly.

He bounded up the steps, but on the floor above halted, breathless. No servants were in sight. The bedchamber of Milton Morris stood at the far end in the corner over-looking Fort Street from a broad expanse of window. This door was ajar and George approached with trepidation and entered noiselessly, expecting to find a roomful of doctors and nurses.

Instead the chamber was empty save for Mil-

title: Page:Man's Country (1923).pdf/169


text:
Page:Man's Country (1923).pdf/170

 ton Morris. He lay upon the bed in which he had slept, a little on one side, his cheek denting the pillow, his finely etched features in repose, his iron-gray hair but slightly rumpled.

"Mr. Morris!" George called in a tone that trembled despite the manly quality of its appeal. "Mr. Morris!" Humbly this second time, he pleaded to be heard, and there was in his voice something of that gratitude he owed and always had been ready to acknowledge.

But there was no answer to the call; no response to the plea in it.

Stilled and awed by the silence, George touched the strong hand of Morris as it lay upon his breast. The cold of it chilled and startled him afresh; but he braced himself and still held it—tenderly, while the realization sank into his mind of what this was before him. It was Death!

Milton Morris was dead! At fifty-six he had quietly lain down to a night of rest under a burden of weariness so great that it took the sleep of death to provide repose. Such men, in modern industry, wear themselves out so soon.

Inarticulate and broken by so sudden a blow, George dropped upon his knees, his face buried in the bedclothes that formed the shroud, his body shaken by sobs.

George passed a reverent hand over the icy brow and smoothed back the locks of iron gray

title: Page:Man's Country (1923).pdf/170


text:
Page:Man's Country (1923).pdf/171

 hair from it—a finely moulded forehead that, which had housed a finely organized brain. But as the young man gazed, a flood of recollections swept over him, and with it a welling up of that deep affection which he felt for this kindly, able man who had been to him half father, half elder-brother, loyal, unassuming friend, partner and fellow-creator of a great enterprise.

Dead! Milton Morris dead! His friend and associate! George Judson was appalled and staggered. Despite his vibrant young strength he felt himself suddenly bereft of all, even of his audacity.

"God! What'll I do without him?" he cried humbly. "What'll I do without him?"

title: Page:Man's Country (1923).pdf/171


text:
Page:Man's Country (1923).pdf/172

RESENTLY the young man was standing again, but looking down through tears, and realizing how very much his every plan for the future and every responsibility he had assumed rested on this figure that now was still and this brain that now was numb. He perceived that under every share of stock, under every bond, under every plan and hope for the future of his work, rested the inventive and constructive brain of Milton Morris. It was that which had underwritten all—all; and now that was substracted from him.

Yet, as George Judson stood thus with weeping eyes, he felt oddly a sort of new strength being built into him like the steel reënforcement in setting concrete—felt his shoulders lifting and squaring under the added responsibilities—heard a voice saying to him: "You can go on. You can carry the double load. You can build somebody into the place of Milton Morris. You can and you will!"

George Judson heard this voice and believed it. He looked down upon these marble features on the pillow as at something past and gone.

title: Page:Man's Country (1923).pdf/172


text:
Page:Man's Country (1923).pdf/173

 "Poor old chap! He wore out too soon!" he found himself murmuring through his tears, and it never for a moment occurred to George that he might have been to blame for this wearing out too soon; that Milton Morris, linked up with him, was like a piece of machinery coupled to an engine that was geared too high for it and that by superior speed would literally run it to pieces.

George arranged everything. As Mr. Morris had trusted him in life, so George was faithful to the last detail in death. After the last sad office was concluded, the young man had himself driven, not home, but to the works. They were empty—only watchmen were about. The great factory, unit on unit, arch on arch, space beyond space, seemed huge and void, itself some vast and lonely tomb. The office seemed most empty of all. Not a typewriter clicked, not an adding machine; not a telephone bell rang.

George made his way into Milton Morris's office. His desk was clear, save for a single, graceful spray of some white flowers; and those few, simple draughting instruments so often in the man's hands as his fingers transferred the designs of his devising brain to paper. Mute but eloquent, they testified of him who had been their master. The swivel chair was pushed up close as emphasizing its emptiness.

George Judson sat down beside this chair, as

title: Page:Man's Country (1923).pdf/173


text:
Page:Man's Country (1923).pdf/174

 often he had sat when Milton Morris was in it. His eyes were on the floor. He was thinking, thinking of the character of Milton Morris and the thing that he had built—thinking that today, in every country in the world, men and women were riding about in comfort, enjoying life and the world as they never could have enjoyed it but for this man's work. And this carried the young man's thought into the future—into tomorrow.

As George pondered, there came to him one of those flashes which seem akin to genius. Give him one year of personal attention to engineering problems, and he would develop or discover the designer in his organization who could be trusted to take Milton Morris's place. But in the meantime—well, in the meantime, what was the matter with the Nemo model? Nothing! With a gasp George realized that Milton Morris had lived at least long enough. The Nemo was his masterpiece for another year. It was more than a year ahead of other cars; in some respects car design was attaining standardization, and the Nemo represented standards of which the rest of the motor world was yet to come abreast.

The more George pondered this idea, the more brilliant the conception appeared to him. He saw an opportunity for a master-stroke. He was building ten thousand Nemos this year; he

title: Page:Man's Country (1923).pdf/174


text:
Page:Man's Country (1923).pdf/175

 had meant to build twenty thousand of a newer model next year. He saw this suddenly as one vast manufacturing order—thirty thousand Nemos instead of ten; but with production spread over twenty-four months instead of twelve, with expense of manufacture markedly reduced and with profits correspondingly enlarged. It took a daring courage to seize upon the opportunity in the face of certain doubts that assailed any practical mind, but George had never lacked for courage; nor did he now, although objections cropped up immediately from his own staff.

Wyckoff, of the engineering department, and John Williams, sales manager, had reservations. Norton, production manager, of course, was for it. An unchanged design was easy for him. George overswayed the objectors. When rumors of these divided councils got into the Board of Directors, he overswayed them.

One feature of the plan involved an immediate resumption of factory building. George, in a way, had begun to weary of these continual enterprises of enlargement. They entailed an enormous amount of adjusting and readjusting, balancing and rebalancing of the departments of manufacture; to say nothing of the financial burden they imposed. He resolved now upon one final enlargement. He determined to double his floor areas and establish a twenty-four-hour

title: Page:Man's Country (1923).pdf/175


text:
Page:Man's Country (1923).pdf/176

 system of production that would make one set of equipment do the work of two or three.

To do all this, he stretched the borrowing capacity of the Judson-Morris plant as he had never stretched it before. His credit was better than it had ever been, and he piled a peak load upon it. This was the biggest, the most thrilling operation George Judson had yet entered upon, and never did a general plan a battle more carefully, nor, after his plans were complete, mass every reserve more skillfully for the employment of the last ounce of his strength in the final arbitrament of combat.

In the early days of this huge task, came his wedding day.

title: Page:Man's Country (1923).pdf/176


text:
Page:Man's Country (1923).pdf/177

HE wedding of George Judson and Fay Gilman was permitted to lack no circumstance of all that was signified when the beautiful and accomplished daughter of one of the wealthiest families in Detroit society was united with a young man who, rising swiftly in the empire of business to a position of shining eminence, added to his own wealth, present and prospective, the riches of a good appearance and a pleasing personality.

The organ pealed Lohengrin. Fay came down the aisle to meet her lover with the unpainted rose of her cheeks and the sparkle of her eyes proclaiming through the veil that it was no marble bride George Judson took to wife. No sense of awe oppressed her. Audacious as youth itself, she stepped smiling into place beside the groom with not one hint of misgiving, and solemnly the service was intoned.

George Judson was transported, thrilling in all his nerves. Earnestly he listened to the minister's words. Devoutly he sought to realize their import, and believed that he did; believed that God made himself and Fay Gilman into

title: Page:Man's Country (1923).pdf/177


text:
Page:Man's Country (1923).pdf/178

 one in that hour and that he and she were henceforth a solemnized and consummated union.

Two hours later the wedding breakfast had been eaten and the gay reception was over. The guests, whose numbers had overflowed Strong House and sprinkled its lawns with picturesque color, were trying to congregate en masse upon the tiny dock which made connection between the Gilman gardens and lake transportation. A steam whistle had sounded, and the Gray Gull, Fay's private yacht, brave in new paint and with bright-work gleaming, was backing into the stream. While the breach between craft and dock slowly widened, the bride and groom appeared upon the deck, waving handkerchiefs and laughing happy derision at the showers of rice and the barrage of old shoes hurled so hilariously and so futilely after them.

In ten minutes the Gray Gull was far out on the lake. The last flutter of the bride's handkerchief had become indiscernible, and the last hoarse shout of the revelers on the dock had died away. For George and Fay the cruise of matrimony had begun—seemingly under the most favorable auspices in the world. The lake was calm, and the steady vibration of the engines sent a tremor through the Gray Gull's decks, a pulsing that to the happy young couple was like the blissful throb of life itself. There was

title: Page:Man's Country (1923).pdf/178


text:
Page:Man's Country (1923).pdf/179

 not a ripple on the wide lake—not a fleck of cloud in the sky.

Three days later the Gray Gull slipped into a berth at Buffalo, where bride and groom took the train. That same afternoon they were at Wilton Springs—a bit of wood, a bit of stream, and a bit of Adirondacks, with a golf course within easy motoring distance of the hotel. Fay, playful as a kitten, was all effervescent joy over the place and went into fresh raptures on discovering that their suite was not in the hotel, but comprised an entire rustic cottage on the hillside above, with every appointment complete. Great rag rugs covered the floor, and though it was June, there was a chill in the evening air that made the blaze in the cavernous, rough stone fireplace a thing to be lingered by, while the burning pine knots spiced the air with an aromatic quality that was indescribably exhilarating.

Meals came up from the hotel. Servants came with them and with their serving disappeared. The dinner that first night was perfect in every detail, and when they looked up from sipping their coffee, lo, they were alone.

"Alone!" cooed Fay. "Alone!" She seemed to lay so much stress on their being alone. "It was simply wonderful of you, George, to have found this dear, little, homey nest for our honeymoon!" she bubbled, and waltzing round the

title: Page:Man's Country (1923).pdf/179


text:
Page:Man's Country (1923).pdf/180

 room, broke into gay little trills of song, George followed her every movement with laughing, admiring eyes.

The new day began with a breakfast served in an atmosphere made doubly appetizing by the aroma of the living pines without and the burning logs within. And again the servants retired expeditiously, again leaving the lovers to a delightful sense of solitude that sent Fay once more into trills of happy song, and out on the porch to fill her lungs afresh with the outer air and to stare upward at a pine-covered hillside that challenged youth to climb it.

"Look, George! It's daring us!" Fay cried. "I accept the challenge. Let's get on our hiking clothes and go to it. You can kiss me next upon the very top."

George, bare of head, hands in pockets, unlighted cigar in teeth, stood eyeing her eager enthusiasm with ardent approval, yet he did not move to follow her inside.

"Well, not just yet, dear," he objected. "Here comes Blakeley."

"Blakeley!" Fay exclaimed in a puzzled voice. "What is he doing here?" she asked anxiously. "Does it mean that anything has—has gone wrong?"

"No! Oh, no, dear!" responded George, touched by her quick anxiety and glad to be able to reassure her. "He is just bringing the mail

title: Page:Man's Country (1923).pdf/180


text:
Page:Man's Country (1923).pdf/181

 so I can sort of keep in touch with things at the factory."

Fay Judson went icy cold. For a moment she was white and motionless. George, his eye on the man with the mail, was suddenly made aware that something was wrong, decidedly wrong, by the quick, hurt tones in which she demanded: "Do you mean that you arranged for him to come here? That Blakeley is a part of your plan for our—our honeymoon?"

George turned to find the blue eyes burning with reproach and threatening any moment to fill with tears. He was struck dumb with bewilderment. He had been a little proud of himself for this idea of having Blakeley join him here. It meant ease of mind and hourly assurance, if need be, that all was well at the works, so he could give himself up the more unreservedly to his love-making. Now he did not know what to say except to confess the truth rather sheepishly.

"Why, why—yes, dear!"

"Oh, George!" his wife moaned, as if he had struck her. "A secretary? On our honeymoon!"

She turned on her heel and flew past him. He did not need to follow her in order to know that she had flung herself face down upon the bed and was muffling the sound of sobs in pillows.

title: Page:Man's Country (1923).pdf/181


text:
Page:Man's Country (1923).pdf/182

 He was shocked and distressed, besides being vastly and stupidly perplexed.

What should he do? One impulse was to rush upon that innocent interloper and kick him clear down the hillside to the hotel, him and his confounded trouble-making letters with him. But the sight of the unsuspecting secretary's earnest face, added to the lure of mail in his hand, smothered that impulse. Besides, there was a principle at stake, and as he recognized this, George's face grew grim. He would resolutely settle one thing now.

Upon the porch was a table of hewn slabs. Beside it were two rustic chairs.

Upon the table Blakeley opened out his briefcase and handed to the president of Judson-Morris Motor Company a stack of letters and telegrams.

"I brought those from the office, sir. This is the morning mail."

While President Judson glanced swiftly through this first assortment of letters and telegrams, disposing of many with a glance and a pencil-mark, concentrating upon others with a frown, Blakeley began slitting the flaps of envelopes. That was the scene without upon the porch.

Within, upon the bed, was quite another. There, face down upon the pillows, swathed in the pale blue silk of one of her trousseau morn-

title: Page:Man's Country (1923).pdf/182


text:
Page:Man's Country (1923).pdf/183

 ing gowns, was the willowy figure of Fay Judson, utterly crushed and confidently expecting to be followed. She was at this instant waiting for a knock on the door. When the knock came, it was her purpose to answer with silence, but she expected thereafter that the knocker would recklessly intrude. She expected her tears to be kissed away and herself to be shaken tenderly, imploringly, until she would consent to see contrite eyes staring into hers from a distance of a few inches, while a humble voice demanded frantically to know what was the matter. She expected that and checked herself suddenly in the middle of a sob to realize that no such thing was happening.

She sat bolt upright and watched the door for the first sign of vibration when he should lay a feeble hand upon it.

And then, all at once, in this alert position, she heard his voice, not near, but away out on the porch, not trembling, but crisp, matter-offact, monotonous. Dictating! He was dictating, calmly reading letters and answering them, criticizing advertising copy and approving sales plans.

With her clenched hand she struck the pillow, once, twice, three times; then, with a swift, proud movement, swung her feet to the floor and began to stanch her tears—indignant tears they were

title: Page:Man's Country (1923).pdf/183


text:
Page:Man's Country (1923).pdf/184

 now—and her lip was curling with a fine, hot scorn.

So she sat for a long time, disdainful—listening to her husband's voice. Not that she meant to listen or cared to listen, but as she would have listened to any sound whatsoever that was there to drone into her ears.

But presently, thus taking in the sound of that voice, she became aware that George's manner was getting nervous and his sentences jerky; that some were vague and ill-formed; that others were tactless and ill-natured; that his utterance grew more and more staccato. At length he stopped. George's voice had indicated that he was disturbed about something.

Her foolish sympathies were instantly aroused. Had there been anything in the mail to cause him worry? She felt a sudden wave of concern for him and a sense of shame and disappointment with herself.

It was at this moment that the door flew open. She turned as in flight, but too late. Her husband was beside her, his arm about her, and she was snatched violently to his breast.

"Darling! Darling!" he cried remorsefully, "I couldn't get to you quickly enough. It broke my heart to have you take Blakeley's coming the way you did. All the while I was crazy to get to you. But—but, you see, there was a principle at stake."

title: Page:Man's Country (1923).pdf/184


text:
Page:Man's Country (1923).pdf/185

 She became instantly stiff and unresponsive in his arms. "What principle?" she demanded.

He explained it to her with earnest but humble and, he hoped, convincing elaboration—the principle of business before pleasure. Fay received this explanation, which was also an admonition. She was, she told herself, a sensible married woman. She saw the reasonableness of such a position, taking his business circumstances into account; yet her pride resented such reasonableness utterly.

"You see," she said, with a conclusive gesture, "that's what I meant about needing a long honeymoon. That's the kind of adjustment we have to make."

George, however, was still of the opinion that their every difference could be laughed and kissed away.

But she would not let him kiss her. "Do you know, George," she warned him soberly, "that you have a way sometimes of thinking things are settled when they aren't?"

"Why, how's that, sweetheart?" He was innocently bland.

"Because you out-argue me. Because you oversway me with the rush of your personality, and I'm sympathetic and weak and defenseless and love you so much that I haven't the heart to say anything back. You think I am convinced, and sometimes I think I am too, because

title: Page:Man's Country (1923).pdf/185


text:
Page:Man's Country (1923).pdf/186

 everything you say seems so everlastingly right. But then I find afterward that my mind hasn't really surrendered at all. My opinions are just bottled up in me, and then something, something like this wretched appearance of Blakeley here, knocks the top off, and I erupt like Vesuvius on a rampage. The trouble is in part that in your large way you take no account of little things, while a woman's life is mostly made of little things."

"You're one little thing that I take account of, Fay," he teased, eyeing her fondly, coaxingly. "But you see how it is. Business has to go on, and I have to give the wheel a kick once in a while. Most natural thing in the world for you to take Blakeley the way you did. It was my fault entirely for not breaking it to you. Stood it like a thoroughbred is what you did, too. I was proud of you, every minute you were breaking your heart in here while I was breaking mine out there by concentrating on the job. Besides, it's all over now for the day."

"Let's say it is," proposed Fay, unwilling to spoil the day. Hopeful, forgiving, and impulsive, she put up her lips sweetly.

He snatched her in his arms and tried his own special treatment for tear-stains, but in the end it was found that cold water did the work better. Soon they were in their hiking clothes,

title: Page:Man's Country (1923).pdf/186


text:
Page:The Celestial Omnibus and Other Stories - Forster (1912).djvu/178

LE GENTLEMAN: An Idyll of the Quarter. By, author of "Promise." Crown 8vo. 6s.

JACOB STAHL. By. Crown 8vo. 6s.

THE STORY OF ROSALIND, re-told from her Diary. By. Square 8vo. Cloth, 3s. net; paper, 2s. 6d. net.

PROMISE. By. Crown 8vo. 6s. [Second Impression.

PEACE ALLEY. By. Crown 8vo. 6s.

THE LEADING NOTE. By. Crown 8vo. 3s. 6d.

indent=1|

THE WHIRLPOOL.

THE UNCLASSED.

THE ODD WOMAN.

THE EMANCIPATED.

EVE'S RANSOM.

IN THE YEAR OF JUBILEE.

DENZIL QUARRIER.

HUMAN ODDS AND ENDS.

Library edition. Crown 8vo, cloth extra, 6s. each.

New re-issue. Crown 8vo, cloth, 2s. net each.


text:
Page:Man's Country (1923).pdf/187

 and they left their first quarrel well behind them as they raced each other up the mountain side. Two hours later they looked serenely out upon a placid world from the bald peak itself.

But coming down the mountain, they found, was ever so much swifter and more exciting than going up, and hand in hand, like two children, laughing, shrieking, gamboling, they came—spent and utterly unconscious of the presence of other beings in their world—to where the path branched off and up to their cottage steps. Here they flung themselves panting on the sod, exhausted but still in playful mood. When this playfulness did not subside, there came from above them an embarrassed cough, and Fay, flushing, started up.

Her indignant eyes encountered, on the porch of the cottage, Blakeley, waiting to get his letters signed.

George went up to sign them while Fay remained on the sod, frowning, fuming, kicking an occasional disgusted heel in air. How she hated Blakeley! In him she saw the first personalization of an impersonal rival—a monstrous thing that would take her husband from her if it could.

"Now that's done with!" called George at length to Fay, still sulking on the sod. "Business hours are over."

"Well, I should hope so," responded Fay

title: Page:Man's Country (1923).pdf/187


text:
Page:Man's Country (1923).pdf/188

 sarcastically, but deciding once more not to let the day be spoiled, grimaced at the secretary behind his back and wrinkled her nose in mock disgust at her husband.

But George's opinion and Fay's hopes were alike in vain, for that afternoon upon the golf links, when they were only at the seventh hole, appeared again this tall, round-shouldered Blakeley, doggedly clambering over a hazard and coming down to them, bearing a telegram which he seemed to think demanded immediate attention.

Fay cut the air viciously with a practice swing of her mashie and waited impatiently while George read the message. For some seconds after, he stood silent, then dictated an answer. But for the remainder of the afternoon his manner was absorbed; he seemed no more than half-conscious of the charming woman at his side. Fay was by turns resigned, mirthful, sympathetic, miffed. When the mood persisted, she grew sarcastic.

"I suppose it is my humble duty not to intrude upon great thoughts," she taunted.

"Fay!" exclaimed George, coming out of his trance with a start. "Forgive me! Intrude whenever you want to. You're a full partner, not a silent one."

"You're the silent one," she complained. "You know, George, I can't help being fear-

title: Page:Man's Country (1923).pdf/188


text:
Page:Man's Country (1923).pdf/189

 fully disappointed. It shows you have no—no proper sense of the finer values in our association, to bring that man along on our honeymoon."

George did not like being accused baldly of a lack of finer perception. Few men do. You may accuse most of them of gross crimes, and they will not resent it half so much.

"And you!" he retorted. "It shows, dear girl, that you have no—no proper appreciation of the delicacies of my business situation, or you wouldn't make such a mountain of it. Do you think I'd do it if it wasn't necessary? Why, Fay," and he flung his club over his shoulder and drew her close to him; "you could make it hard for me by making too much of this. You could—you could spoil our honeymoon."

"Could spoil it? Indeed!" Her voice expressed an infinite scorn. "You have spoiled it already," she accused, and coldly waltzed herself out of his embrace.

Instantly he was conscious of extreme untactfulness. "Fay! Don't say that!" he pleaded contritely, catching her hand, and the girl-wife, with his dark eyes looking so appealingly into hers, could not resist him long. She could not be commonly irritable and quarrelsome—not now—she could not. A slow, amused smile grew upon her face as her sense of proportions was restored.

title: Page:Man's Country (1923).pdf/189


text:
Page:Man's Country (1923).pdf/190

 "Very well then, dear, I won't say it," she declared. "Forgive me. What did you make that hole in, seven or eleven?"

"Eleven!" and he smiled at the stab. "As well call it eleven. I'm off even my duffer's game today."

Again the coolness between them had passed as if it had been the shade of a drifting cloud.

But each morning of their stay here, as Fay woke to the ecstasies and delights of a new day, there came always jarring into her mind the thought of Blakeley. His long, gangling form was forever coming in between them—a telegram to read, a letter to sign, a duty to remind her husband of. It was maddening. She had not married Blakeley. Was her life to be forever filled with Blakeleys?

And so from day to day, with hours of rapturous bliss and occasional moments of disillusionment or disappointment, they passed through the allotted period of their honeymoon. In retrospect, from her Detroit home, the trifling discords were forgotten. Fay looked back upon it as a perfect thing.

title: Page:Man's Country (1923).pdf/190


text:
Page:Man's Country (1923).pdf/191

ND yet, contrarily, Fay found in this perfect retrospect ground for forebodings. George, on the other hand, was unreservedly optimistic. His wife and his business were both together now, he could devote himself to each without robbing either.

Feeling this way about carrying his wife into his business, George felt not the slightest compunction about carrying his business into his home. As he sank deep in a luxuriously cushioned chair, lulled by Fay's low, strumming reveries at the piano, as he sat opposite her at meals, as he went with her complaisantly to golf or dinners or the theater, his business went always with him. He went into abstractions over it and came out to tell her enthusiastically at length, or monosyllabically in brief, jerky sentences, things that he had thought, ideas that had come to him; and then relapsed into others.

But Fay soon ceased to regard these as forgivable eccentricities. She found in them signs that business was absorbing him more and more completely, and began to feel the worm of resentment gnawing. In some ways she saw less

title: Page:Man's Country (1923).pdf/191


text:
Page:Man's Country (1923).pdf/192

 of her husband than she had of her lover. It was never so easy for him to arrange a morning canter. It was, never so certain that she could get him out to the links or away on the yacht exactly when she wanted him. A point was presently reached where her dissatisfaction broke out in petulant protest.

"But, my dear!" he reminded her with wide, surprised eyes. "My dear! We're married now."

"That's exactly it, I suppose," she retorted bitterly.

"But my job—" he began to argue, and she cut him off to demand satirically.

"Did I marry a man, or did I marry a business?"

He was hurt and perplexed and afraid to try to carry forward the argument. Besides, there was a reason now why he must not argue with her or get her excited. But he still had ideas that refused to stay battened below decks in his mind.

"Fay," he began one day, with a tender light in his eye, "I want my son born in my own house."

"Our son, I suppose you mean," corrected Fay with a soft, averted glance and a blush, for the idea, in vital and inevitable form, was still new to her.

"Our son," he smiled, acknowledging the cor-

title: Page:Man's Country (1923).pdf/192


text:
Page:Man's Country (1923).pdf/193

 rection, "in our own home. One that I've paid for with money I made myself; a house that you and I have planned with our own minds, just to express ourselves and: our own ideas for us—and for him."

"Why," chirruped Fay with a little cry of delight, "why—that's a lovely thought, George! Perfectly lovely."

"Let's make a house that isn't Romanesque and isn't Gothic or Georgian or anything but just modern and attractive and comfortable and cheery and cosy," elaborated George. "It couldn't be so big as this, not near, for I haven't got the money to build one—and it couldn't be on as fine a site as this, for I haven't the money for acreage on the Grosse Pointe front. It could be down nearer to the Indian Village, say."

"But when I have so much money, George," she intervened, "when he is to be ours, wouldn't you think it would be fair to let me at least buy the land our house would stand on?"

George paused a moment. He wanted to do it all himself—he really did; but in such a moment and over a project like this he could not be ungenerous. "Why, certainly: that would be fair, Fay—only I'd ask you to make it a modest lot—in a modest location. You see, dear, I figure that about a hundred thousand is all I can spare for house and decorations—decorations, of course, including furnishings—and you

title: Page:Man's Country (1923).pdf/193


text:
Page:Man's Country (1923).pdf/194

 can't get much of a house in your set for that."

"We could do very nicely with it though," admitted Fay, feeling a luxurious sense of self-satisfaction in thus committing herself to a program of enforced frugality. "It would be such fun being modest and economical for our boy's father's pride's sake. But only a hundred thousand! George—aren't you a millionaire?"

"Of course," assented George. "Several of 'em another year; several more of 'em when the Judson-Morris Motor Works stops expanding and strikes a normal gait where I can get my money to stand still and let me count it. This year alone my dividends would be seven hundred thousand if I could take 'em out, but I can't. I'll have to put back every bit over this hundred thousand. We must live on my salary."

"While my money goes right on piling up, with never a thing to do with it, except to use a little of the interest for pin money," his wife pouted. "It's a continual temptation to extravagance, and it makes me feel so useless, so superfluous, George! Sometimes, with all this everlasting expansion out at the Judson-Morris show, you're skimping for money, I gather, and sometimes scrambling madly for it. Why don't you take my money and put it out there?"

"Your money?" George jerked out the query. The idea seemed to come like a shock to him. "Your inheritance in the Judson-Morris hop-

title: Page:Man's Country (1923).pdf/194


text:
Page:Man's Country (1923).pdf/195

 per?" Then he shook his head quickly with just the faintest suggestion of the air of a man who hastens to put away temptation. "No; I wouldn't feel comfortable—not in investing your money there."

But why wouldn't he feel comfortable? he asked himself, the instant he had made this kind of response, and Fay, not so much because of her husband's decision as because of the manner of it, was questioning also, but aloud:

"Sound—it's sound—the Judson-Morris Company, isn't it?" she asked. "The money would be safe, wouldn't it?"

"Sound? Safe?" George jeered at himself, and he laughed at her. "Secure as the future of the automobile," he declared.

Again his manner was and his confidence as firm as Gibraltar. The wife was as convinced as her husband.

But while this fond project of nest-building swelled George Judson's heart in moments when he could think of it, the sum total of his business energies was being absorbed by that most audacious and hazardous enterprise of a bold and daring career, the attempt to carry the Nemo model unimproved through a second year and double its total sale at the same time. It was understood by all that he staked not alone his reputation, but his fortune and the future of the Judson-Morris Motor Works. And who

title: Page:Man's Country (1923).pdf/195


text:
Page:Man's Country (1923).pdf/196

 was there to hold back when their leader dashed so far out in front?

But abruptly this air of confidence began to be vitiated. This devitalizing appeared to be directly traceable to the January automobile shows, where the Nemo model of a year past found itself now set up in comparison with the showings of up-to-the-minute models and designs of other manufacturers. To some Judson-Morris men the Nemo model appeared not so far ahead of the others as they had thought; there were, indeed, those who felt that the Nemo was not even abreast. Such men recalled their earlier doubts and remembered their first misgivings. Brooding these a while, some were moved to write in to John Williams, General Sales Manager, about them. Some of these letters complained of the "old style planetary transmission," and some talked about the "old-style lines of the car."

John Williams, with faith in his president quite undaunted, showed a judicious few of these letters to George.

"Croakers!" the president denounced fiercely. "Fire 'em. They don't believe in us. Fire 'em. Get new agents."

But John Williams was getting more letters every day, and he could not fire a whole distribution system. Near-by agents did not trust to mails but came in and talked to John. The more

title: Page:Man's Country (1923).pdf/196


text:
Page:Man's Country (1923).pdf/197

 important of these the General Sales Manager passed on to the President.

But George, more politic when he met these doubters face to face than when he only read their letters, was nevertheless quite unyielding. He laughed at them, he taunted them, he challenged them, and it was a tribute to his own ability as a salesman that he actually resold the project to these men over their doubts and in spite of their fears. He made them doubt themselves instead of doubting him and his enterprise. Not a man of them but went out pinning his faith once more to the Nemo model and with a half-chagrined smile at himself for ever having wavered.

Fay was surprised, one night, while sitting on her husband's lap, to notice lines of care etching themselves into his forehead.

"You stick too close to that old shop," she warned. "You must come with me for a long drive tomorrow."

"All right, sweetheart," he said with an agreeableness and a smile that gave utter denial to the idea that he was or worried.

And he kissed her every fear away—until one day Maidie Huffler thought to brighten her period of enforced seclusion by a little well-meant sympathy.

"Isn't it just too bad about George over-staying his market that way?" she began.

title: Page:Man's Country (1923).pdf/197


text:
Page:Man's Country (1923).pdf/198

 Fay, though startled by her tone and quick to discern that Maidie thought she had hold of some sort of bad news, was quicker even in her pride and loyalty. She laughed aloud and merrily.

"Overstayed his market?" she derided. "Say, Maidie! Any time George Judson overstays his market, you just tell me, will you?"

The challenge in Fay's voice and manner was thoroughly dislodging to Maidie's assumed position.

"Oh, then," she inquired, a good deal less certain of herself, "then it isn't as bad as they say?"

But by this inquiry she carried a quick flutter to Fay's heart, for it assured the wife that "they" must have been saying something very bad indeed. Of course this connected instantly with the sleepless nights and the care lines in his face, but she would no more allow Maidie Huffler to know that she was ignorant of the details of her husband's business than she would permit her to suppose the slightest shadow hung over the bright prospects of Judson-Morris.

"Serious? Maidie! You always were credulous!" Fay laughed satirically as well as convincingly. "Tell me, child," she urged teasingly, "who has been spoofing you now?"

Maidie crimsoned slightly. "Oh, nobody in particular," she insisted apologetically. "I just sort of heard jt whispered round that he had a

title: Page:Man's Country (1923).pdf/198


text:
Page:Man's Country (1923).pdf/199

 big sales campaign on and that it—it wasn't working out quite."

This gave Fay something to take hold of, and her rejoinder was quick, stout, and cunning. "Is that it?" she responded with a superior smile. "Well, Maidie, perhaps you don't happen to remember—of course you wouldn't know it as we do—but every time in the past when George was putting over one of his coups there was always a flock of croakers sitting round and saying it couldn't be done. And while they were saying it couldn't be done, George was going right ahead and doing the thing. That's why he's—why he's George Judson," she concluded, radiantly triumphant.

Maidie felt fairly deflated, and conceding the case against herself, could only be mildly waspish with, "That's why you're Fay Judson, too."

Fay flushed, but preserved her sang-froid.

"You can't see me the wife of a business failure, can you?" she inquired coolly.

The two girls kissed, and Maidie went her way—wondering. Fay remained behind—also wondering, although her argument had quite convinced herself, and it was really more than ninety-eight per cent curiosity and an opportunity to be playfully subtle that made her inquire that night,

title: Page:Man's Country (1923).pdf/199


text:
Page:Man's Country (1923).pdf/200

 "George, what does it mean to overstay one's market?"

George looked puzzled. "Why, uh—why?" and he hesitated, frowning—frowning as if he were going to shunt her off, but she would not be shunted.

"That's what they're saying about you, dear!" she accused him sweetly. "That you've overstayed your market."

The frown blew up in a quick burst of laughter. "They are, are they? Ha, ha, ha!" And George roared long and loudly—long enough to get plenty of time to think. Then he explained volubly. "It means, my dear, that some people are getting envious—that the wish is father to the thought—that I saw something before they did, and that I'm about to clean up on it—two years' profits in one twelve months and a little better. Overstayed my market. Ha, ha, ha!"

An expression of glorified relief sunned itself on his wife's face.

title: Page:Man's Country (1923).pdf/200


text:
Page:Man's Country (1923).pdf/201

N the morning after that query of his wife's about the overstayed markets, President Judson sat alone in his office, to brood, to ponder, to read disquieting telegrams, and to digest irritating typewritten pages.

John Williams came in. "Chief," said he, putting a good deal of affection into one of his favorite forms of address for his president. "Chief! Hadn't we better turn back? Now, honestly, hadn't we?"

"Turn back?" snorted George contemptuously. "There's nothing in it in this world for the turn-backs. Suppose Columbus had turned back. Think a minute, John," and George laid a hand cordially upon the shoulder of his general sales manager. "Study the history of every successful enterprise in the world, and you'l! find there came a time when everybody wanted to turn back—everybody saw failure ahead but the leader. Turn back? Not on your life. We're going on, John. We're going on to victory!"

George lifted his hand high as he lifted his voice high, and then he stnote John Williams resoundingly with that uplifted palm, and thereafter waved him out of the room.

title: Page:Man's Country (1923).pdf/201


text:
Page:Man's Country (1923).pdf/202

 In the midst of this crisis, the shadow of pain fell upon his darling wife. Gallant little Fay, triumphing over agony, looked forward exultantly almost, but George, clinging to her soft hand, felt the warmth of it grow less, felt it plucked at mysteriously as by the tuggings of an unseen current, and was chilled to the heart with fear that she was gone from him forever—chilled and rebellious until at last, as in quiet after storm, he saw her drift back to him across an eddy of unconsciousness, paler but more divine, resting exhausted amid her pillows.

"Our son," she murmured, with an ecstatic, crooning note in her voice, "Our son, George Junior!"

But at this time George Judson knew himself in his heart for an unnatural father. He clung softly to the hand of Fay and kissed it, but had a grudge against this tiny, breathing bundle, for he felt that it had very nearly deprived his life of the dearest thing in it. With passing hours, however, this feeling began to wear off. It went away entirely on that day when four small, lace-work fingers fastened with a clinging grip about the exploring forefinger of George Senior, and refused stubbornly to let go—held him as if thereby he adopted him.

"By jingo!" crowed George. "He knows me. He knows who he's got hold of, and he just isn't going to let go."

title: Page:Man's Country (1923).pdf/202


text:
Page:Man's Country (1923).pdf/203

 This was an enormous moment for George Judson. He never did forget its sensation.

For weeks thereafter he was liable to break off his task at any moment and go rushing out home to see little George and insist on having him hold his father's finger. "Great, isn't it? Great!" he would grin at his wife, at the nurse, the doctor, the pictures on the wall, at anybody who happened to be round, and especially at George Junior.

And yet for all his happiness through the child, motherhood had not quite resolved itself in Fay as he had expected. Within three weeks of Junior's birth Fay had disillusioned her husband by a sort of return to girlhood at a time when he had expected her to take on more matronly ways.

"You old dear!" she laughed at George's first hint of mild dismay. "Mothering comes first, of course, but it isn't all of life. I'm going to go and go and go, George, after four or five months in prison. It seems as if I could never catch up with bridge, and teas, and dinners, and the whole social whirl. Just as soon as the doctor will let me, I am going back to riding and golf."

George, though disappointed, found himself too generous, too fondly indulgent, to protest at anything which gave pleasure to his pretty wife, who to him was charming even in her wilful-

title: Page:Man's Country (1923).pdf/203


text:
Page:Man's Country (1923).pdf/204

 ness. It only hurt when she made importunate demands upon his time which he could not by any means grant, but even then he reproached himself—never her; it was only when, with a saucy pout and an impish toss of her pretty head, she intimated that she always found at the club plenty of men perfectly willing to act as her escort, companion, or partner, in case her husband did not find time to do this, that George lost his temper.

"Confound those loafers," he complained. "A job is what they need, I tell you. Fay, every man ought to be compelled to do a certain amount of productive work every day of his life—ought to have some job that claims him. These fellows wear good clothes, and they have good manners, and they're darned fine fellows, but I tell you they're nothing more than hoboes."

Fay, admiring George always when he was flaming—and not directly at her—was greatly amused by this outburst. With a savage growl and then a quick, penitent kiss he turned from his wife and her after-breakfast chatter, and, as he set out for the works, all thought of her drifted from his mind, for just now the mad project of the Nemo model in its second year hung like a millstone about his neck.

That it was mad, an array of figures compiled by Percy Mock succeeded this very day in convincing him. And yet George took it so

title: Page:Man's Country (1923).pdf/204


text:
Page:Man's Country (1923).pdf/205

 calmly, when the supreme moment to confess defeat arrived, that he did not seem to confess it at all.

"Ah-hum!" he said, as if clearing his throat of something—swallowing a lump, perhaps—and passed the sheet back to Percy, and got up and went out alone into the works.

But while "Ah-hum," an inarticulate grunt, was all that he said, yet Percy, having known George Judson well for now nearing eight years, was sure that he interpreted the grunt aright. He rushed in and told John. John Williams let out a cry and came hurrying—to see the empty desk. He went back to tell somebody else, and Percy Mock was already telling other somebodies else. Within ten minutes at the outside, every chief of a department, every responsible employee in the business offices, knew that George Judson had admitted his colossal blunder.

George meanwhile was emphasizing his situation to himself by a swift tour through the works. He was saturating his mind with the conditions he had to meet, and asking himself bruskly, "What'll I do first?" His warehouses were filled to bursting by completed cars. His shipping sheds were congested with them. Even his assembling floors were so overcrowded that the men could hardly work. And every day the switch engines pushed long trains of material

title: Page:Man's Country (1923).pdf/205


text:
Page:Man's Country (1923).pdf/206

 into his plant. Axles, axles, forever axles! Transmissions, transmissions, forever transmissions; those accursed transmissions which, because of a fatal difference between the old planetary form and the new device of the sliding gears, were declared to be hopelessly out of date. Milton Morris would have had that sliding gear in his model of 1910, but Milton Morris was dead.

The president of Judson-Morris walked back into his office with a quick, alert step. Grim, but without a quaver in his voice, he issued terse orders, knowing well that the edifice of hope must fall and fall quickly to avert a worse disaster. Atone slash of the pen $200 was cut from the price of the Nemo model. Within five minutes the telegraph was ticking this message out to every agency, and before the agent in San Diego had received his, the advertising copy announcing the cut was being flashed out, also by telegraph, to a selected list of newspapers at strategic points throughout the country.

George Judson sat, with sweat upon his brow, in the midst of all this vibrant energy which had suddenly been turned loose in an effort to save what might be saved from the wreck of his plans. He knew that by the stroke of that pen he had cut the profits from his twelve thousand unsold Nemos and that only events could decide whether this cut would be sufficient to move the

title: Page:Man's Country (1923).pdf/206


text:
Page:Man's Country (1923).pdf/207

 goods and forestall catastrophe. If it failed, not merely the writing off of prospective profits, but the writing in of a loss, was inevitable.

It was only when all that could be done that day had been done, and he turned away from his office homeward bound, that the great, crushing sensation of defeat seemed to come down upon him with full force. He felt a yearning for his beautiful wife that was different from any he had ever felt before, a yearning for her because he was weak and she was strong.

So George felt that he wanted to weaken into the arms of Fay tonight. His pride was willing to forego itself; to permit her to see him sapped and humbled; if only he might know the luxury of her outpouring sympathy and listen to a thousand crooning terms of endearment sprinkled into his mind as she sprinkled kisses upon his face. He told himself that he would never know how noble his wife might be until he flung some of his burdens upon her. This night he was resolved to jettison his pride and tell her all. He urged his chauffeur to faster and faster speed, but when he got to the house and rushed within doors, they told him his wife was not yet back from a tea at the country club.

A tea at a country club!

George shut his teeth together hard—indeed, he hardened all over into something as stiff as a post. Disconsolate, he went upstairs to Junior,

title: Page:Man's Country (1923).pdf/207


text:
Page:Man's Country (1923).pdf/208

 yet it was not a baby to hold his finger—it was a woman to hold his heart—that George Judson was wanting. He touched the soft cheek tenderly and turned restlessly into his wife's room. It was redolent of her; it breathed, it cried out of her; it was a sacred place to him. For a moment he stood and did it reverence.

But his devotion was brought to an end by the whir of a motor below, and he went down the stairs three steps at a time and out on the front porch. Fay was just being helped out of a strange car by a strange young man wearing a cap and an air of indolent grace—a foreign looking person, George decided instantly from his knowledge of local types. The stranger's manner was particularly attentive to the lady, which seemed natural enough, for Mrs. Judson in white, plaited skirt and striped blazer jacket, with a white, soft hat having a piquant dash to the brim, looked particularly vivid and fascinating.

"Oh, George," she cried as her husband appeared. "Come here and meet Sir Brian Hook."

"Sir Brian!—Oh—ah!" stammered George, who had come running down the steps to find himself confronting a pair of gray-blue eyes, a close-cropped mustache, and an agreeable if tentative smile, all on a good-looking face of apparently about thirty years of life's experience.

title: Page:Man's Country (1923).pdf/208


text:
Page:Man's Country (1923).pdf/209

 "Awfully kind of you to bring my wife home!" the husband said.

"Pleasure, I assure you," murmured Sir Brian, surveying Mr. Judson with unhurried self-possession.

"Won't you come in?" proposed George, cordially.

"Thank you!" said Sir Brian, but he moved toward his car as indicating that his time was limited. From the side of it he turned his blue eyes upon Fay with a smile of entire approval.

"My word, but you're a jolly good partner!" he said. "I should like nothing better than a rubber with you tomorrow if you are going to be at the club."

"Which is just what I am," beamed Fay with hearty assurance. "My husband failed me today, but he'll be out tomorrow, and we'll make it an international sweepstakes."

"Can't make it, sweetheart," confessed George ruefully.

For a moment Fay's face expressed a sweet petulance, then with the air of swift reconciliation to such disappointments she declared: "That's too bad, Sir Brian, for my husband has a wonderful mind for bridge—such concentration as you never saw; but," and her face brightened, "I'm certain to be there. Substitutes for husbands are plentiful these days!"

She laughed, and Sir Brian laughed. George

title: Page:Man's Country (1923).pdf/209


text:
Page:Man's Country (1923).pdf/210

 also laughed, after which Sir Brian stepped on his gas and went roaring away from a standing start with the eyes of Fay Judson following him out of sight.

"I do believe Sir Brian likes you, George!" enthused Fay, pulling her husband down to give him a kiss in plain view of any passer-by. "Come onl" she added. "I'm crazy to see Junior; always am when I've been out."

George bounded after her.

"How did everything go at the office today?" Fay asked, when after a time she gave the baby back to its nurse and another sort of consciousness came over her—a sort of husband and sweetheart consciousness. It was her stock query always to his home-coming.

"Well, a rather—" he began, feeling his words, when suddenly there came before his mind that picture of the man from whom his wife had just parted—the agreeable young Englishman, with his air of indolent grace and his manner of such impregnable self-assurance. Should he, George Judson, invite unfavorable comparison with that? Should his wife turn from the glamour of a titled and socially accomplished expert to be disillusioned for the first time concerning her husband—to look upon a harried, sagging, ignoble figure of a man in need of understanding and seeking consolation? She should not—decidedly, she should not! In an

title: Page:Man's Country (1923).pdf/210


text:
Page:Man's Country (1923).pdf/211

 instant pride had roused every drooping feather of the spirit of the motor magnate.

"Oh, at the office?" he broke in upon himself, with an affected frown of annoyance, as if it was with difficulty that he brought his mind back to plain thoughts of business. "Oh, you know how it is—a big organization like ours, with a big enterprise on hand like the Nemo—trouble of some kind is always sticking up its head somewhere along the line."

It was skillful acting. His tone rather than his words had permitted his wife to discern that this had been a day of fairly heavy responsibilities, a day of business battle with surprise attacks and hard-pressed drives, but that he had casually and powerfully resisted all and remained calmly in possession of the field.

"Come," she invited, leading the way to her own room. "You sit in the alcove there and look out the window and talk to yourself while I take a splash and slip into something cool. I want you near me."

That was in itself a fine and soothing compliment, the effect of which was not entirely dulled even when it appeared that she wanted him near especially so that she could prattle about Sir Brian Hook.

George was by this time willing to concede that Sir Brian must be quite a fellow, but silence came on abruptly without his opinion being so-

title: Page:Man's Country (1923).pdf/211


text:
Page:Man's Country (1923).pdf/212

 licited. Nor was it as though the stream of information about the Englishman had gone dry. It was merely that Fay's bath was ready; she had gone, and George was left alone to stare musingly out the window while a maid was in the room laying out garments, with sounds of splashing water and then the patter of a shower issuing from around the corner. The husband's mind was at once inevitably back upon his business. He was reviewing the situation, analyzing his recent response to his wife's inquiry, and reasoning that he really must break the news of real conditions to her—in justice to her he must, and now was the time.

But it was with a start of fear that he realized her presence in the room once more. She was darting to and fro between the laid-out garments on her dressing table and the cheval glass, uttering the while those little bursts and trills of song that marked her more ecstatic moods. Once or twice she burst out whistling. How he did like to hear her whistle!

"Pretty mean kind of runt, a man is," he decided, "if he's got to come home and spoil his wife's happiness by babbling about his business troubles. You bet I won't tell her."

Yet he hurried to the office the next morning with a consciousness of having missed something—a boon which his wife might have supplied to him and had not. Unreasonably, unknown to

title: Page:Man's Country (1923).pdf/212


text:
Page:Man's Country (1923).pdf/213

 himself almost, a feeling of resentment against Fay for that failure was taking substance in his breast. She was still sleeping calmly as he left his home feeling neglected, forlorn, and slightly touched with self-pity.

News! News of the campaign was what he thirsted for. There should already be a stack of telegrams on his desk from the eastern agencies—from them first because of an hour of difference in time. But the office had an empty look. Round him one sweeping glance through the glass partitions revealed only unoccupied desks. In irritation and amazement, the president of Judson-Morris looked at his watch; and then he understood. The time was but half-past seven. His anxiety had got him here ahead of all the staff. Naturally, therefore, there were no telegrams awaiting him.

But very soon he became aware that the offices were coming to life around him; doors opened and closed; stenographers, clerks, accountants, principals, began to arrive; roll tops shot up, drawers were opened, and filing cases. This showed to the lonely watcher that like himself others were anxious and eager and slipping in ahead of time; he was grateful for their solicitude. Blakeley appeared, looking abashed to find his employer down before him, and a few minutes later telegrams, unenveloped, just as they came from the factory wire, began settling

title: Page:Man's Country (1923).pdf/213


text:
Page:Man's Country (1923).pdf/214

 one after another, like large, yellow snow-flakes down upon the president's desk.

The chief executive of Judson-Morris scanned these, first with eagerness and then with satisfaction. They carried orders for Nemos at the new price—a dozen here, twenty there, a hundred yonder, and George was eagerly penciling the totals, as men total election returns.

Big orders began to come in—great, ringing, hopeful messages from the Atlantic seaboard. One thousand Nemos at the new price were accepted by Philadelphia, eight hundred by Boston, four hundred by Baltimore, two thousand by New York.

But from the Middle West, that great absorber of medium and low-priced automobiles, and from the wide Pacific coast, there was only silence—except in isolated instances. Telephone calls and flash messages of inquiry plunged impatiently into this silent territory brought only Pessimistic response with pleas for more time to let the trade express itself and plain intimation that the cut had come too late.

But the waiting, the watching, and the hoping continued all day in the office of President Judson and on into the night. It was resumed upon the second and the third day, but upon the fourth even George Judson himself had to confess that the first-day voice out of the Middle West was right. The cut had come too late;

title: Page:Man's Country (1923).pdf/214


text:
Page:Man's Country (1923).pdf/215

 the season was too far advanced; the finished cars might all move, but the unfinished cars—the ones for which parts had been contracted—engines, wheels, axles, and bodies—the carloads of which were pushed daily into the factory yard and checks for which went gayly out from the cashier's desk in a constantly fluttering and dreadfully draining stream—these built but unassembled cars could not be sold.

It was not merely an operation without profits which George Judson faced now. It was a loss—and the only question was, How great a loss? Pale, perspiring, feeling a little touch of dizziness for a moment, George acknowledged to himself the truth. He had been beaten. Actually beaten!

But again he was quick and resolute to act. He had now to confess defeat in the least disguisable way for a manufacturer. He shut down the shop!

This was done so suddenly it was dramatic. He did not shut down next Saturday night. He did not shut down tonight at six o'clock. He shut down now, at 3.40 o'clock in the afternoon. He did not want another piece of material wasted—not another ounce of steel or rubber or aluminum or brass turned into a thing on four wheels that could not be sold at a profit. So he ordered the fires drawn and the power turned off.

title: Page:Man's Country (1923).pdf/215


text:
Page:Man's Country (1923).pdf/216

 Seven thousand men were out of work.

Out of work! George Judson, staring moodily out the window of his private office in a corner of the administration ell, had a chance to read something of what that meant in the faces of the procession filing out with lunch-boxes or dinner-buckets on their arms. He had often taken pride in watching these well-fed, well-paid workmen of his pass under that window; taken pleasure in their contented looks and admired the air of businesslike independence with which they bought their evening paper and then fought for places on street cars or cranked up their own automobiles and drove away.

Now he might have spared himself, yet some morbid fascination urged him to watch this gloomy picture.

Once in a while a face was lifted to stare at the windows of the administration wing, and perhaps some of these saw George gazing down at them so glumly and knew who he was. Whether they saw him or not, he fancied a look of accusation upon these occasional upturned faces. It was as if they complained because they had had no voice in that control which had brought calamity upon them. Workingmen were concerned in the results; they ought to be consulted in the planning: that was what George read in these upturned faces; or perhaps it was in the air and he caught it like a radio message;

title: Page:Man's Country (1923).pdf/216


text:
Page:Man's Country (1923).pdf/217

 or possibly it was merely on the outside of his own mind.

"God! What a mess I've made of things, haven't I now? Haven't I?" So the president of Judson-Morris accused himself bitterly.

But he had made other messes elsewhere. In the same minutes when he had been shutting down the shop he had been also flashing out messages to every concern that was manufacturing parts for his old model Nemos, ordering instant cessation and canceling his buying orders with the present deliveries. These telegrams would mean within a day or two at most other lines of men like this marching out of other factories, and George had that picture before his mind also as, an hour or so later, he passed disconsolately out of the factory door.

As he turned his car toward the Indian Village, sickening sensations of awful failure bore down within him, and that yearning to indulge himself for once in delicious depression of spirit before the woman he loved came upon him as it had a few nights before. He took a melancholy pleasure in the planning of an evening in which, he fondly dreamed, a sympathetic and beautiful woman would rise to heights of consolation that should make his hurts seem priceless treasures.

title: Page:Man's Country (1923).pdf/217


text:
Page:Man's Country (1923).pdf/218

UT Fay met him at the door in her jauntiest riding costume—the linen one with white boots—and wearing a flat-crowned panama hat with a blue-and-white striped band and a dashing roll to the narrow brim.

"Oh, George!" she effervesced. "I've just prevailed upon Sir Brian to stay and dine with us tonight, riding togs and all. We've had such a jolly afternoon that I simply couldn't give him up."

Although the thought of a stranger at his hearth-side tonight was as the thought of salt in an open and sensitive wound, what could the husband do? His was not the heart to damp such beautiful, glowing ardor as his wife's, and besides—Sir Brian! What was there about that man to make George Judson instantly brace and preen himself like a fighting cock?

"Perfectly fine of you to accept, Sir Brian." Stepping forward, he offered a hearty hand.

"Awfully kind of you and all that sort of thing," smiled Sir Brian.

Now it was perfectly true that Judson was glad to see more of Sir Brian. But tonight! It

title: Page:Man's Country (1923).pdf/218


text:
Page:Man's Country (1923).pdf/219

 was enough to make him hate the man forever. Yet George rallied astonishingly. Youth can often do that.

"This fellow is a thoroughbred," George meditated. "I can imagine just how his inherited pride, with all that ancestor stuff in his mind, would get away with a situation like mine. You'd never know he was sitting on a red-hot stove. Well, I'm a thoroughbred, too. Watch me!"

The dinner was from every point of view a triumph. It was a triumph for Sir Brian, because he retold his tiger story and added many other exciting events of a very active and widely traveled life. It was a triumph for Fay, for she was never more beautiful, more vivacious, or more capable of stimulating the admiration of mankind. And it was a triumph for George Judson because, despite the hollow feeling in his chest, he arched it stoutly against terrible external pressure from most unhappy circumstances. He was witty, entertaining, cordial. Fay was especially proud of him. She had never heard him talk better. He manifested a perfect breeding at all points.

As for the woman, she sparkled and scintillated with brilliance unusual even for her. The fact that her husband was present to witness the effect upon this presumably seasoned appraiser of beauty seemed like a challenge to her to exert

title: Page:Man's Country (1923).pdf/219


text:
Page:The Celestial Omnibus and Other Stories - Forster (1912).djvu/179

GRANVILLE BARKER.

indent=1|

. (1899).

. (1903-5).

. (1906-7).

. (1909).

Crown 8vo, cloth, 2s. net each; wrappers, 1s. 6d. net each. The first three in one volume, "Three Plays," 5s. net.

JOHN MASEFIELD.

. Crown 8vo, cloth, 3s. 6d. net.

SCHNITZLER-BARKER.

. A Sequence of Dialogues, by Author:Arthur Schnitzler; paraphrased for the English Stage by. Crown 8vo, cloth, 2s. net; wrappers, 1s. 6d. net.

HOUSMAN-BARKER.

. By and. Pott 4to, with a frontispiece, cloth, 3s. 6d. net; wrappers, 2s. net. Also Theatre Edition, crown 8vo, 1s. net.

LAURENCE HOUSMAN.

. The Defence of Queen Caroline. Crown 8vo, cloth, 3s. 6d. net.

. Pott 4to, 3s. 6d. net.

LADY BELL.

. Crown 8vo, cloth, 1s. 6d. net; wrappers, 1s. net.

ELIZABETH BAKER.

. Crown 8vo, cloth, 1s. 6d. net; wrappers, 1s. net.


text:
Page:Man's Country (1923).pdf/220

 her every charm. Colorful as a tiger lily, soft as ermine, warm as vital life is warm, she cast her glowing spell, and George Judson was proud—excessively proud—that he possessed her and that she was proud of him and flaunted that pride before their guest.

He had already made up his mind that, Sir Brian or no Sir Brian, he would not tell her about his business situation. Her faith in him as a superman was too fine, too enjoyable, too necessary to his influence over her, to spoil it by confession of unpleasant facts. He would have to tell her something, of course, but not that. Reflecting upon just what he should tell her, he fell out of the conversation without exactly being aware that he had done so.

Fay and Sir Brian continued to talk animatedly—not privately, not confidentially, and yet a conversation in which only themselves were interested. But suddenly Fay roused her husband from reverie by breaking out vivaciously like a child with a new plan!

"Oh, Sir Brian hasn't been out yet on our beautiful Lake St. Clair. Suppose we take him for a run tomorrow. We could, couldn't we?" Her note of cheery proposal was the very essence of partnerly pride and loyalty; yet to George the proposal was painful—if for no other reason than that it reminded him that there must be a tomorrow.

title: Page:Man's Country (1923).pdf/220


text:
Page:Man's Country (1923).pdf/221

 "Couldn't make it tomorrow, dearie," he regretted to have to confess to that bright, hopeful, appealing face. "I've got something on the fire that's liable to boil over. But you go," insisted George generously. "Make up a party. Make a day of it. Better, make two or three days of it. Go on up to Huron or over to see your mother at Birch Cottage. It will do you good to get on the water for a few days. Do the Gray Gull and her crew good, too."

Fay knew generosity when she encountered it. This was perfectly noble of George, and she forgave him her first disappointment, her face brightening by a few additional beams in consequence.

"That would be a lovely plan, wouldn't it?" she agreed instantly. "Only there isn't time, because we have to be back for the Newcomb dinner on Friday night."

"Easy enough," insisted George. "Start tomorrow. Start at ten o'clock, and you can get round all right for Friday. Use the telephone—catch-as-catch-can. In half an hour you can make up a party."

Within ten seconds Fay was on her way to the telephone, and George Judson was experiencing another sickening hollow feeling in his breast. To think that she was actually willing to go away with his affairs at such a crisis. With man-like unreasonableness he again failed to take account

title: Page:Man's Country (1923).pdf/221


text:
Page:Man's Country (1923).pdf/222

 of the fact that she did not know his affairs were at a crisis—and that he did not intend her to know it.

"Oh, by the way, Fay," her husband remarked quite casually, when at last they were alone; "you might hear some talk tomorrow about shutting down our works temporarily. Don't let it disturb you. We always do begin laying men off this time of year, and this is part of our sales campaign on the Nemos. One of our quick, market-startling turns."

If Fay's mind had not been full of a thousand details about her lake-going party tomorrow, she might have lifted her brows and steadied her blue eyes upon her husband's face, she might have asked questions, casual, blundering, woman questions, that would have torn the thin tissue of dissimulation from before his face, but her mind was full of those details. Would Herbie McRae go, she wondered, and the Austins? The Irwins had already promised.

"George," she said sweetly, and threw her arms upon his shoulders for a moment, "you're a wonderful man, and when you get your business far enough along so you can devote all your time to me, you're going to be a wonderful husband!"

"Going to be? Well, I like that!" protested George, pretending playfully to be ruffled, but careful to let her see that it was only pretense

title: Page:Man's Country (1923).pdf/222


text:
Page:On the education of the people of India (IA oneducationofpeo00trevrich).pdf/64

50

resolution of the 7th of March 1835 was passed in the face of the most keen and determined opposition on the part of several distinguished persons whose influence had not been usually exerted in vain; and their representations were seconded by a petition got up by the numerous class of persons whose subsistence was dependent on the oriental colleges, and on the printing and other operations of the committee connected with them. The Asiatic Society also took up the cause with great vehemence, and memorialised the local government, while the Court of Directors and the Board of Control were pressed by strong remonstrances from the Royal Asiatic Society. The spirit of orientalism was stirred up to its inmost depths,


text:
Page:Man's Country (1923).pdf/223

 and that he was complaisant over the compliment.

So they went to bed. Fay was up betimes next morning, because of the cruise for Sir Brian, and so had breakfast with her husband. When she kissed him, it was with a caress that was tender and affectionate, and yet it was not the kiss that he wanted—that he needed to brace him for the grilling day that lay ahead.

title: Page:Man's Country (1923).pdf/223