Man's Country/Chapter 11
THE year that followed was so full of complications, so full of striving energies, that George hardly lifted his head when the twelve-months' business cleaned up and he knew that they had done a total of two million dollars' worth with profits above three hundred thousand dollars; but immediately began to lay out the program for the year to come and after that for still another. Steadily they were enlarging and enlarging; new machinery was going in, with new plans for enlargement of output. And they made profits too, year by year, larger and larger profits, but year by year they put them nearly all back to make more. The second year they doubled the capital stock and declared a stock dividend of one hundred per cent. Expansion continued to be the order of the day. They made two thousand, and then three thousand, cars in a year.
In 1907 the Morris-Judson Automobile Company was set to produce three thousand five hundred cars. But the panic of that year caught them in midair. Some things of which they had boasted became now their regret—almost their shame.
Those factory walls that never stopped rising had eaten up much money. Milton Morris, honest old builder that he was, had been dissatisfied with the turn-out of what he considered was practically an "assembled" car, and wanted to build every part himself to the last screw in a fender.
But this absorbed capital at an enormous rate. It swallowed their surplus, and when the plans for the new year's business were included, it left the concern needing eight hundred thousand dollars at a time when as many hundreds would have been hard to get. The young financier found himself stretched over a barrel. He had to have credit when credit was difficult to get, and two fatalities among his friends made the situation even worse than could be made to appear in any financial statement. Just as he entered the cloud of these business troubles Uncle Tommy Pence, his faithful and generous friend, slipped peacefully out of life. They laid him away when bees were droning in the clover and humming-birds were at the honeysuckle. George mourned him and paid his tribute, but staggered on till one day, when the clouds were darkest, he turned in to the offices of the St. Clair Trust Company, where they told him that Stephen Gilman was down, stricken with pneumonia.
To learn as George did next day that Stephen Gilman was dying—was dead—struck him through as with a poniard of Jove. He was big enough to forget that it withered his financial hopes. He cared only that it killed a man who had been like a father to him.
He sent flowers. He wrote a note of sympathy to Mrs. Gilman in which humbly and earnestly he told her what her husband had meant to him, a struggling young business man who despite one chance meeting was still to her a stranger. By a very early arrival he got himself into a pew at Christ Church near enough to the mourning family to be able to feed his eyes upon Fay, to notice that she was growing slightly taller and with more rounded curves, but that the proud head was bent today and that the shoulders trembled from time to time. His emotions were deeply touched. He longed to crowd out from his pew and go and sit beside her and offer his heart in consolation. So daring are the dreams of love!
At the cemetery he found himself standing nearer and nearer to the mourning circle of the relatives and immediate friends. Once, for an instant, Fay, as if all at once her sorrow had become too intimate to be shared even with her family, turned from the group, her eyes fixed far on distance.
In this moment, strangely, inexplicably, as if he might have floated there, George Judson found himself standing immediately before her.
"I am so—sorry," he stammered. "I loved your father almost as I love my own."
The girl recalled her streaming eyes from distance at first with a start as at a stranger; then recognition came, and with it she gave a glance of grateful appreciation.
"Th—thank you!" she said, with an aspirated sob, and turned from him quickly back to her mother, while George felt himself transported from her vicinity almost as miraculously as he had come to it.
The encounter had done him great good. She had remembered him this time, although she had immediately turned away as though recognizing that he was outside her circle. But to George, indomitable and heart afire, this was no serious damper. He was still outside that circle, but not much longer would he remain outside.
Yet his career was periled now by panic conditions.
But there were two redeeming elements in the situation. One was the changed attitude of the banks toward the automobile industry in the five years since he had made his first appeal to them for a loan.
The other element was the discovery that personal faith in him was now rather widely spread. It was not only isolated individuals like Stephen Gilman who believed in him, but the financial interests generally looked upon him as upon a business institution whose preservation was at least to be considered.
At times of supreme emergency like this, when the business failures were listed in each day's news like the casualties of a battle, a committee representing five important banks and trust companies was appointed to pass upon the condition of the Morris-Judson Automobile Company and determine its right to be assisted as a matter of public policy. When this committee's investigations were complete, George Judson was summoned before it. He went, outwardly calm, but trembling at the knees. Was he nominated for salvation or the scrap-heape Such solemnity argued the latter. The committee sat with grave, non-committal faces. George felt like a victim led out for slaughter. A sense of his helplessness brought a sweat of apprehension to his brow. This committee held the whole achievement of his past in their hands, from the first penny he had saved as a newsboy, to the last profit on the last car manufactured by the Morris-Judson Automobile Company.
A hand—he could not have told whose—motioned him to a chair at the long directors' table, and he sank into it.
"Mr. Judson," the bulbous-browed L. R. Blodgett, chairman of the committee and president of the Huron National, began—then cleared his throat with a cough as sepulchral as the tone in which he spoke—"I may tell you the result of our conference."
"If you please," said George quietly, but trying to conceal his anxiety.
"Then here it is," blurted Blodgett, as if he pronounced a doom. "This committee regards the success of the Morris-Judson Automobile Company as due to your personal efforts."
This was not a doom; it was a compliment. George wet an eager lip and leaned forward.
"If we, therefore, are to assume its financial responsibilities at this time," postulated Blodgett with a stubborn twist of the chin, "your control must be guaranteed in some way."
"Guaranteed?" George asked, almost resenting. "Why, Mr. Morris and I are the closest of friends. We strike hands before we go ahead on anything. The other directors are unanimous in supporting us."
"That is a very pleasant way to look at the world," broke in Blodgett, "but in our observation as bankers it is the unexpected which must be provided against. I have been delegated to tell you that if you will acquire stock control of the Morris-Judson Automobile Company, we will carry your loans through the year, because we believe your control is a guaranty of their soundness."
George leaned forward across the table. His throat was choking with sensations of relief, until his mind began to stagger at the cool cruelty of what seemed an impossible condition. "Acquire stock control," he murmured, dazed, and not thinking very rapidly. "How would I acquire stock control?"
Mr. Blodgett was prepared to be explicit. "Have Mr. Morris and the other stockholders sign an agreement to turn over to you stock enough to make your holdings fifty-one per cent. of the total; in other words, 255,000 shares instead of the 100,000 you now hold."
"But I—I couldn't ask it," protested George. "That would seem disloyal to Mr. Morris, the best friend I have ever had. Besides, how would I ever pay for it? All the money I have been making has been going back into the company, and to buy 155,000 shares at their real value would take three-quarters of a million dollars—more than that!"
"So far as that goes," responded Chairman Blodgett with his merciless willingness to be explicit, "if you do not get your loan, you crash, and the shares are then valueless or practically so."
George felt the futility of further argument on this point. "But where on earth am I going to get the money to pay for that stock?" he urged, bringing up the next question.
"Out of profits," declared another member of the committee. "You can pay for this stock and be the owner of it in one year's business."
Such computations seemed dizzy, and yet George saw that they were within reason. He perceived a huge, feelingless machine operating with sure precision to make him rich. He could not stay it—could not fend it off.
"Then there's one other thing," recalled Mr. Tompkins, "The name of the concern must be changed."
"Changed?" George's face was white and adamantine. This was something he would fight to the uttermost.
"Yes," insisted Chairman Blodgett. "You are the person who is known. It is you who have made the business what it is, and won it the standing it now has. The fact of your acquisition of permanent control must be advertised by a change in the name to the Judson-Morris Automobile Company."
George shook his head resolutely. "I'll never consent to that. The thing behind our success is the car we build; the thing behind the car is Milton Morris. Gentlemen," and George raised his voice and stood up as for one of those stump speeches of his, "I'll never consent—it would break Mr. Morris's heart!"
George looked so doleful that Banker Jones had to smile. The other bankers smiled also. The gravity of the meeting seemed to have been broken up, so far as the bankers were concerned, and George decided to wait until he could talk it all over with Milton Morris. There was some informal chat around the table about details of the loan, should no hitch occur, and the method of allocating it among the various financial interests represented. George listened to and participated in this, but not hopefully. He felt that relief was being offered to him at too high a price, and it was with an expression of defeat upon his face that eventually he drove out to the factory and sought for Milton Morris. He was not in his office, and Judson eventually found him wandering round the huge plant, with a face like a graven stone, looking lost and helpless.
"What's the outlook—hey? They won't lend us?"
"They will," said George, surprisingly and rather desperately. "Yes—they will: but upon the most absurd conditions. It seems like treachery to tell it to you."
"Treachery? What do you mean, George?" and the older man's voice was steady and brave if also anxious and puzzled. He looked searchingly into his young associate's face. "I never had a son, but if I did I couldn't trust him more than I trust you. What's the matter with you, boy? Let's go in and talk it out." It was noticeable that the older man had the greater amount of poise though his mind was filled with this darkness of uncertainty.
They walked rapidly into the administration wing of the plant, and up the broad staircase to the glass-walled room which held the president's office in these more ambitious days, and to a new quartered-oak desk of mammoth proportions where Milton Morris liked to sit with blueprints and drawings before and about him. Before this oaken plateau both men drew up: chairs.
"They want you and the other stockholders to sell me shares enough to make fifty-one per cent. so I will have majority control, before they'll make the loan," blurted George.
Milton Morris straightened his shoulders. "Is that all?" he laughed. "Shucks, I've stood ready to do that since the first year's business. It's you that's making us all rich, George."
But young Judson looked almost shocked that his associate and senior should consent thus readily to the treason, and even appear to glory in it.
"But they want to change the name around too," he further specified. "They want to make it Judson-Morris."
"They do, eh?" and old Milton frowned a bit grimly, while he considered. "Well, let them! That's fair enough. You're the big man of the concern, George; yours is the big name. Yes; I'm for that. Make you president, hey, and still general manager; and make me vice- and office-boy? That the idea?"
"I suppose so," confessed George sheepishly.
"And if we do that, they'll underwrite our loans?" The old man's face was eager, even excited, as he sought to gain a specific assurance on this point.
"That's what they say."
Milton Morris threw an arm around the absurdly dejected figure beside him. "George!" he husked gratefully. "You've saved us. Saved us! You made this business out of a shoestring, and now you've saved it for all of us."
But the younger man was still in a protesting mood
"Mr. Morris," he began to postulate, "if ever I get this business to the point where we're out of debt and independent of the whole world, the first thing I'll do is to sell your stock back to you at what I paid for it, and the same for every other stockholder who gives up prospective profits to me."
The older man looked at the younger queerly. "George," he observed, "you're a kind of a nut. Quit chewing your thumb now and set right there and dream next year's business, while I appoint old Milt Morris a committee of one to run round to these stockholders and get 'em to agree to what I'm willing to agree to."
Milton Morris put on his hat and went out. George remained at his desk pondering the turn of the wheel of business fate which, while it saved his company and his associates, would in one year make him its majority owner and a millionaire. A millionaire! A far-off goal of unthinking youthful ambition had suddenly moved near where he could reach out and touch it; and mentally he held back his hand.
There remained details of the loan and the stock transfers to be worked out, but that was swiftly done, and George, now that he was titularly and actually the chief in command, operated with a new sureness and a new sense of stability. Under the impulse of this new confidence, he left his high mark of 3500 cars far behind and built and sold 5000 in the new year. His profit from this operation not only paid for his newly acquired stock, but it left him more than one hundred thousand dollars besides. Neither was George Judson alone in doing things. Milton Morris capped this year of progress by producing a new and startling model which he called the Nemo. In it the acme of perfection in a medium-price car seemed to have been attained. The Nemos became instantly famous. Ten thousand of them were built in the second year after the conversion of Morris-Judson into Judson-Morris, and it was plain that they would all be sold. George's dividend that year, if he drew it out, would total more than one million dollars.
He proposed coolly to build the next year twenty thousand cars; and he proposed something else!