Held to Answer/Chapter 3
513
General Freight Department
RAILWAY COMPANY
Robert Mitchell,
General Freight Agent.
Walk in!
This was the sign on the door that John Hampstead had opened every morning for seven years. This morning he did not open it, and there was something like consternation when as late as nine-thirty the chair of the big, amiable, stenographic drudge was still vacant. Old Heitmuller, the chief clerk, after swearing his way helplessly from one point of the compass to another, was about to dispatch the office boy to Hampstead's residence.
Inside, and unaware of all this pother, sat the General Freight Agent. Big of body, with the topography of his father's heath upon his wide face, soft in the heart and hard in the head, Robert Mitchell was a man of no airs. His origin was probably shanty Irish, and he didn't care who suspected it. By painful labor, a ready smile, a hearty laugh, a square deal to his company and as square a deal to the public as he could give—"consistently"—he had got to his present modest eminence. He was going higher and was not particular who suspected that either; but was not boastful, had the respect of all men who knew him well, and the affection of those who knew him intimately.
He sat just now in a thoroughly characteristic pose, with the stubby fingers of one fat hand thoughtfully teasing a wisp of reddish brown hair, while his shrewd blue eyes were screwing at the exact significance of the top letter on a pile before him.
Over in a corner was Mitchell's guest and vast superior, Malden H. Hale, the president of the twelve thousand miles of shining steel which made up the Great Southwestern Railway System, in which Mitchell's little road nestled like a rabbit in the maw of a python. Mr. Hale was signing some letters dictated yesterday to John, finding them paragraphed and punctuated to his complete satisfaction, with here and there a word better than his own looming up in the context. For a time there was no sound save the scratching of his pen and the fillip of the sheets as he turned them over. Then he chuckled softly, and presently spoke.
"Bob," he said, "that's an odd genius, that stenographer out there."
"Yes," replied Mr. Mitchell absently, without looking up from his work, and then suddenly he stabbed the atmosphere with a significant rising inflection: "Genius?"
"Well, yes," affirmed Mr. Hale. "Genius! He impresses you first as absurdly incompetent, but his workmanship is really superior, and later you get a suggestion of something back of him, something buried that might come out, you know."
"I used to think so," the General Freight Agent replied, with a tone which indicated loss of interest in the subject, but being tardily overtaken in his reading by a sense that he had not quite done justice to the big stenographer, he broke the silence to add: "He is a fine character. He has very high thoughts,"—vacancy was in his eye for a moment,—"so high they're cloudy."
And that was all. Mr. Hale made no further comment. Mr. Mitchell, a just man, was satisfied that he had done justice. Thus in the minds of two arbiters of the destinies of many men, John Hampstead, loyal, laborious, who had served faithfully for seven years, was lifted for a moment until the sun of prospect flashed upon him,—lifted and then dropped. And they did not even know that nature, too, had dropped him,—that he was blind.
But just then a privileged person knocked and entered without waiting for an invitation. The newcomer was Doctor Gallagher, the "Company" oculist, his fine, dark eyes aglow with sympathy and importance.
"That boy Hampstead," he began abruptly, "is in bad shape."
"Hampstead!" ejaculated Mr. Mitchell antagonistically, as if it were impossible that lumbering mass of bone and muscle could ever be in bad shape.
"Yes," affirmed the physician, with the air of one who announces a sensation, "he's likely to go blind!"
"No!" ejaculated Mr. Mitchell, in still more emphatic tones of disbelief, though his blue eyes opened wide and grew round with shock and sympathetic apprehension.
"Yes," explained Doctor Gallagher volubly. "Continual transcription, the sweep of the eye from the notebook page to the machine and back, year in and year out, for so long, has broken down the muscular system of the eye. He had a blind spell last night. He can see all right this morning. But to let him go to work would be criminal. I have him in the Company Hospital for two weeks of absolute rest, and then he will be all right. But the typewriter, never again! You can put him on the outside to solicit freight, or something like that."
A broad grin overspread the features of the General Freight Agent. "You don't know John," he said. "That boy would die of nervousness the first day out. He's afraid of people. Besides," went on Mitchell, "we couldn't get along without him. He knows too much that nobody else knows."
"Well, anyway, never again the typewriter!" commanded the doctor from the door, getting out quickly and hurrying away with the consciousness of duty extremely well performed. He knew that he had exaggerated the extent of John's eye-trouble; but he believed that it was necessary to exaggerate it, both to Hampstead and to Mr. Mitchell.
In his darkened room at the hospital, John was feeling somehow suddenly honored of destiny. People were thinking, talking, caring about him. There was exaltation just in that. But also he was fuming. He wasn't ill. He was simply confined. He could not read. He could not write. He could do nothing but sit in a darkened room according to prescription, and wait. But on the third day Doctor Gallagher said:
"As soon as it is dusk, you may go out for a swift walk. That's to get exercise. Keep off the main streets; keep away from bright lights, do not try to read signs, to recognize people, or in fact to look at anything closely."
John leaped eagerly at this permission, but there was design in his devotion to the new prescription of which the doctor knew nothing. On the fifth day of his confinement, Tayna and Dick, who had been coming every afternoon to sit for an hour in the semi-darkness with their uncle, surprised the interned one doing odd contortions in the depths of his room: twisting his wrists; standing on one foot like a stork and twirling his great heel and toe from the knee in some eccentric imitation of a ballet dancer; then creeping to and fro across the room in a silly series of bowings and scrapings and salutings that threw Dick into irrepressible laughter. Caught shamefacedly in the very midst of these absurdities, John confessed to the two of them what he would at the moment have confessed to no other living being—last of all to Bessie.
"I am taking lessons," he said, "from an actor. He is going to make me easy and graceful, so people won't call me awkward any more—nor homely," and he looked significantly at Tayna.
"Oh," the children both gasped respectfully, and repeated with a kind of awe in their voices: "From an actor!"
"Yes. Every evening the doctor lets me go for a walk. On every other one of these walks I go to the actor's hotel, and he teaches me."
"Awh! An actor-r-r!" breathed Dick again, his features depicting profoundness both of impression and speculation.
"Say!" he proposed presently. "I would rather you would be an actor than a president, anyway."
John laughed. "I am not going to be an actor," he said, "I am only going to be polished till I shine like a human diamond." And then he devoted himself to the entertainment of his callers.
"Remember! Never again the typewriter!" the physician adjured sternly, when the fortnight of John's captivity was done. For although conveying this verdict immediately to Mitchell, the doctor had postponed its announcement to his patient till his discharge from the hospital. John was stunned. The typewriter was his bread. At first he rebelled, but with a rush like the swirl of waters over his head, the memory of that night when he was blind for an hour came to him and humbled him.
With the trembling courage of a coward, he opened the door of room 513; saw with sickening heart the strange face at his desk, shook the flabby hand of Heitmuller, and inwardly braced himself to enter for the last time between the double doors, where presently he confessed his plight as if it had been a crime.
"You don't imagine we would let you go, do you?" Mr. Mitchell asked, while an expression of amazement grew upon his face till it became a laugh. "Why, Jack"—Mr. Mitchell had never called him Jack before—"we should have to pay you a salary just to stick around and keep the rest of us straight."
The stenographer gulped. It was not the first note of praise he had ever received from this kindly railroad man, but it was the first time Mr. Mitchell or any one else in that whole office had ever acknowledged to John that he was valuable for what he knew as well as for what he beat out of his finger-tips.
"You are going to be my private secretary," explained Mr. Mitchell, still chuckling at the simplicity of John. "I have few letters to write, and you know enough to do most of them without dictation. You keep me reminded of things; handle my telephone calls and appointments. Gallagher says your eyes will probably give you no trouble whatever under these conditions. The salary will be fifteen dollars more a month."
The big awkward man was too confusedly grateful and overwhelmed even to attempt to murmur his thanks. Instead, he did a thing of unheard-of boldness. He reached over and touched the General Freight Agent on the arm,—just stabbed him in the upper, fleshy part of the arm with a thrust of his stiff fingers, accompanying the act with a monosyllabic croak. It was a clumsy touch, and it was presuming; but to a man of understanding, it was eloquent.
After one month in this new position, John found himself seeing the transportation business through new glasses. He had passed from details to principles, and the change stimulated his mind enormously.
One of his new duties now was to sit at the General Freight Agent's elbow in conferences, and later to make summaries of the arguments pro and con. In transcribing Mr. Mitchell's part of these talks, it interested John to elaborate a little. Soon he ventured to make the General Freight Agent's points stronger when he felt it could be done, and then waited, after laying the transcript on the big man's desk, for some word of reproof. Reproof did not come, and yet John thought the changes must be noticed.
But one day H. B. Anderson, Assistant General Freight Agent of the San Francisco and El Paso, a rival line, was in the office.
"Mitchell," Anderson began, "I am compelled to admit your argument reads a blamed sight stronger than it sounded to me the other day."
At this the General Freight Agent laughed complacently.
"The point about the demurrage especially," went on Anderson. "I didn't remember that somehow."
"Um," said the General Freight Agent in a puzzled way and picked up the transcript of the argument. As he scanned it, his face grew more puzzled; then light broke. "Yes," he replied emphatically, "that's the strongest point, in my judgment."
"Well," confessed Anderson, "it knocks me out. I am now agreeable to your construction."
The private secretary listened from his little cubby-hole with mingled exultation and apprehension. When the visitor had gone, the General Freight Agent walked in and tossed the transcript upon the secretary's table. John looked up timidly. The Mitchell brow was ridged and thoughtful.
"Hampstead," he declared with an air of grave reluctance, "I guess I'll have to lose you, after all."
"What, sir," gasped John, guilty terror shaking him somewhere inside.
At the change in John's face, Mitchell threw back his head and laughed; one of those huge, hearty, bellowing laughs at his own humor, from which he extracted so much enjoyment.
"Yes," he specified, "I am going to put you in the rate department. You have the making of a great railroad man in you. What you need now is the fundamentals. That's where you get 'em. Your brains are coming out, John. I always thought you had 'em,—but it certainly took you a long time to get any of them into the show window."
"It was seven years before you let me get to the window at all," suggested John, meaning to be a little bit vengeful.
"Nobody's fault but yours, my boy," said the G. F. A. brusquely, over his shoulder. "By the way," he remarked, turning back again, "you aren't afraid of people any more, either."
John flushed with pleasure. This was really the most desirable compliment Mitchell could bestow.
"I think I am getting a little more confidence in myself," the big man confessed, glowing modestly.
This was what three months of Kenton and "old Delsarte", as the actor called the great French apostle of intelligible anatomy, had done for John.
But Kenton and "old Delsarte" were doing something else to John that was vastly more serious, but of which Robert Mitchell received no hint until nearly a year later, when the knowledge came to him suddenly with a shock that jarred and almost disconcerted him. It was somewhere about noon of a day in February, and he had just touched the button for John Hampstead, rate clerk. Instead of John, Heitmuller answered the summons, laughing softly.
Now in the rate department John had made an amazing success. In six months gray-headed clerks were seeking his opinions earnestly. At the present moment he was in charge of all rates west of Ogden, Albuquerque, and El Paso, and half the department took orders from him.
"John's away at rehearsal," explained Heitmuller, still chuckling.
"At rehearsal?"
"Yes,—he's going to play Ursus, the giant, in Quo Vadis, with Mowrey's Stock Company at the Burbank next week."
"The hell!" ejaculated the General Freight Agent, while a look of blank astonishment came upon his usually placid features. "When did that bug bite him?"
"I can't tell yet whether it's a bite or only an itch," grinned Heitmuller. "For a while he was reciting at smokers and parties and things, and then I heard he was teaching elocution at home nights. Now he's got a small dramatic company and goes out around giving one-act plays and scenes from Shakespeare. Pretty good, too, they say!"
"Well, I be damned," Mitchell commented, when Heitmuller had finished.
"He's only away from eleven-thirty to one-thirty," explained Heitmuller. "He was so anxious and does so much more work than any two men that I couldn't refuse him."
"Of course not," assented Mitchell.
"Besides," added the chief clerk, "he might have gone, anyway. John's getting a little headstrong, I've noticed, since he's coming out so fast."
"Naturally," observed Mitchell drily, after which he dismissed Heitmuller and appeared to dismiss the subject by turning again to his desk.