Man's Country/Chapter 27
THE day after his discharge Colonel George Judson was in Paris seeking a nae in the records of the Polish Relief Committee. It was not there, but he was told more complete records would be found in the London office. He rushed to London. At the Hotel Savoy a cablegram from John Williams overtook him. It read:
"Templeton presents stock certificates bearing your endorsement for transfer on books amount fifteen thousand shares. Is this all right?"
George had received this cablegram in his room. He read it and wavered in his tracks as he stood staring at its words a second time. It meant that Templeton was breaking away. He had caved—he had sold—he—No; it was not all right!
"The traitor!" Judson raved. "After I've made him more than a million dollars in dividends, besides giving him the stock!"
But rage gave way to sickness at heart and bitter self-reproaches. At last that of which he had been so long apprehensive had come to pass. Templeton had yielded inevitably to the great temptation. The mysterious group whom George had suspected of working insidiously to buy control of Judson-Morris had broken the veteran banker down.
Still, there was a chance that they had not actually got his stock yet—a chance that Templeton was only getting in position to trade if he decided to do so. If George were there and on the ground, he would rally his every source and fight as he had never fought before.
But suddenly he was listless and lackadaisical. What was the use of fighting for that when the thing he most wanted in the world—? He drew from his wallet a letter broken at the creases and almost worn out with handling. He pondered this letter. After all, did it alter matters? Its author had in no wise committed herself. She had then and since studiously concealed herself from him. There was no hope in the letter. There was, rather, a clear intimation that she was about to find her Eden without him.
With whom? He speculated bitterly. For Eden was not a lonely place. God had seen that it was not good to be alone in Eden. There were two in Eden always.
The man sat with his head in his hands, weighing, weighing. He was a man of action. This fight that might be made for the Templeton stock—it was a concrete thing to do. Judson-Morris was his creation. It was all that was left to him of what he had aimed his life at. Besides: "Do the immediate duty. Stick to your job! The only job you've got left." And this was his job now—to be resolute—to be a man—to go back and save the Judson-Morris Motor Works to that great program of democratization which he had planned for it.
He rose up and took command of himself and entered upon the action. June 30th was the annual election, the earliest date at which control could be wrested from his hands and this was—this was—what day was this anyway? He had lost count of the days, but a newspaper on the table beside his bed proclaimed that this was the 12th of June.
Twelfth of June! Anniversary of his wedding. Pitiful reminder! With the ache of that thought in his heart he studied steamship sailing and learned that the Lapland would leave Liverpool on the 16th, but that she would go by way of Brest. She was his only chance.
All the way over radiograms gave the anxious passengers news flashes of what was going on. A thing called Diamond Motors, a thing with no existence except upon paper, was opening its bill like a huge cormorant and engorging one automobile factory after another and the copy of the paper, which George bought eagerly as the boat was warping to her pier, reported that at tomorrow's annual meeting Diamond Motors would swallow the Judson-Morris Motor Works.
"I'll be damned if they will," declared George, biting savagely through his cigar as a taxicab whirled him across town to the Grand Central station, and his mind was busy with planning for tomorrow's sharp and decisive action. He did not know yet what he would do, but he was determined to do something and do it vigorously. His staff knew that he was coming, and they would have been doing their utmost already.
At nine o'clock next morning George Judson was in his own office in Detroit. Chilton, John Williams, and Percy Mock all greeted him in succession, wringing his hand, telling him he looked like a two-year-old and all that sort of blarney; but immediately dropped their voices into graveyard whispers to confer upon the momentous issue which they faced in the stockholders' meeting set for 10:30 o'clock.
"It's Diamond Motors without a doubt, that's after us," declared John Williams, confirming the newspapers.
"It doesn't help us much to know who it is, when this is all we've been able to rally," said George disappointedly, as he contemplated the few hundred shares that, after all his standing orders and all his recent frantic cabling, were the sum total of what his brokers had been able to gather—and added to them in his mind the one thousand and odd hundreds which the faithful Chilton, Williams, and Mock had been able to rally in proxies and otherwise.
"Looks tough!" admitted Chilton with a solemn shake of his head.
"It looks worse than tough," mumbled George. "Our only hope is that we're going to have some friends in that meeting that we don't know about."
An hour passed. George did some frenzied telephoning. He sent Chilton, Williams, and Mock out to make short personal appeals where it was thought that personal appeals for stock or proxies might yet be effective, but each came back empty-handed.
"Let them show us what they've got," George Judson proclaimed stoutly, "and then we'll show 'em what we've got."
This was a bold speech, but empty. His associates knew it was empty, but they admired him for making it—and they did not know that his knees trembled as he arose at last and led the way into the directors' room.
The long, polished mahogany table would seat ten persons. Chairs around the room and massed beyond it would seat twenty-five more. Not all the chairs were taken. Stockholders' meetings are not usually largely attended. There was a woman or two. The men ranged from the country merchant and the small businessman class, through a sprinkling of professional men, to one particular person who looked like "big business." He was carefully groomed, from the Panama hat which reposed before him upon the table, at the far end of which he had presumed to take a seat, to the expensive tan oxfords upon his feet and the figured silk socks which they encased. This man was tall and spare and sandy, with a hawk-like nose, a spike-like chin, a cold, blue eye, and a shrewd and self-composed air.
The president sat down in the president's chair at the opposite end of the table from this stranger whose features had such an unmistakably wolfish aspect.
"That's the guy," said John Williams, nudging George. "That's Jason Weems, Trustee. He is Diamond Motors and a hard-boiled bird if ever I saw one."
As the roll-call proceeded, George was surprised to notice what changes had taken place in the holdings. The name of S. R. Peattie had gone, the Pence Estate was gone; the name of Morris was gone; it gave George a feeling of shivery loneliness. As the answers came back with holdings of shares or proxies, President Judson noted these figures upon his desk blotter with a small gold pencil and kept a running total in his mind, but the totals were small. Aside from his own 36,000 shares and those which his brokers and associates had turned up for him—2215 altogether—there was nothing but driblets represented—fifty shares here, thirty-two there, two hundred yonder, until eventually was called the name of Jason Weems, Trustee.
Jason Weems smiled casually and reported that he held as owner 29,000 shares of the common stock of the Judson-Morris Motor Works, and as proxy 14,625 more, a total of 43,625.
George dropped his little gold pencil.
The roll-call came to an end.
President Judson appointed the usual committee to examine proxies—which would include, of course, the proxies of Jason Weems, Trustee. Percy Mock was on the committee, and he would look for technical errors in the proxies of this Weems person, yet George Judson had never a doubt but that they of all the proxies would be found most entirely correct in form. Jason Weems did not look like a person who would take anything for granted. There was, to the most penetrating eye, nothing of the hell-paver about him.
"Seventeen thousand four hundred and twelve shares not answering," reported Williams to the meeting, and George Judson started.
Seventeen thousand! Control was in them—if they could be produced; but without them control was under the thumb of Jason Weems at the other end of the table.
George bent low and held a whispered consultation with John Williams on his right, but John dashed his hopes. "Mainly it's the 15,000 Templeton transferred on the books to Ellery Anderson, Trustee. The dope I get is that Ellery Anderson, Trustee, is a little brother to Jason Weems, Trustee. Ellery is Jason's ace in the hole. Ellery lays off, and Jason votes a majority of the shares represented without entirely tipping his hand."
George saw in this but another manifestation of that inclination to trickery, to dark and evil and mysterious methods by which he had been beaten. It confirmed his fears. "Well, he doesn't need to tip it," he said hollowly. "I guess we're done."
"It looks that way," admitted John.
The committee on proxies was performing its duties. It would report presently.
Then the annual report would be read. Then the chair would announce, "Nominations are in order for the election of officers of the Judson-Morris Motor Company for the ensuing year."
Then this tall person, with a reddish cast of countenance and a face like a cross between a fox and a wolf, would slip a list of names to John Williams. That would be the names of the new board of directors, an entirely new board, and Jason Weems would announce that he voted for the election of these names 43,625 shares. The rest was mere form. George Judson's automobile works would be gone.
"You take the chair, Chilton!" said President Judson, and arose and went out, not into his executive office, but into the private office.
The formal examination of proxies would take a few minutes longer; the reading of the annual report would take half an hour. For that few minutes and that half-hour George would still be president, and he wanted to be alone to reflect.
His private office was in the corner of the administration ell, and its windows afforded a sweeping view of the main plant. He was surprisingly calm. He stood biting his lip and gazing out the window upon the whole wide area of the shops, then slanting his eyes down to the busy come and go of traffic through the gates quite as he had seven years ago when the works had stopped so suddenly and the men had come streaming out with wonder or despair or sullen hate written on their features.
He had been sick with disappointment with himself then. Today his reflections were far more bitter. Then the business was in danger. Now it was himself. True, he was a rich man. There were somewhere between twelve and twenty millions of value in this property today, with all its ramifications and its good-will, and one-third of it all was his beyond anybody's power to take away. But what were millions, what was the machine, if he lost his power to drive it?
"The business is sound, but I am unsound," he accused himself hollowly, with a feeling of awful chagrin, then gazed again at that stretching canopy of steel and concrete with a wide and wistful eye.
He thought of his dream of making this a vast industrial brotherhood, a workman-owned plant, a happy shop, the happiest and most efficient shop in America, and reproached himself bitterly for having loosely lost the oppor tunity to serve his workmen as he had meant to serve them. He called himself their betrayer. He called himself a blindly optimistic, weakwilled fool.
But there came just now a tapping at the door followed by the entry of Blakeley, faithful and watchful to the last.
"Mr. Mumford to see you, sir," he said.
Mumford! George started angrily at the name. It was bland old Mumford who had advised him to put his faith in Templeton & Co., instead of in Blodgett, Tompkins, and Haley. But could the three have thrown him down any more completely than Simon? George doubted it. Why, they might even have had gratitude enough, on account of the money he would have made them, to stand by him now against the overshadowing figure of the trust.
But there was Mumford entering—an old man, much older than he had looked seven years ago, and he was sixty then—and George could not but be polite to an old man. He arose and turned to greet him, though he could not help shooting a hard look, a look that was almost accusation.
But Mumford's contenance, pink under white hair, bore no trace of guilt upon it. In fact, he smiled and seemed rather pleased with himself, whereat George, inevitably yielding to that amiable, self-satisfied radiance, hailed him by name and extended a cordial hand. But what Mr. Mumford proffered was not a hand to be shaken; it was a hand that submitted to the gaze of George Judson an oblong piece of paper with both printing and writing upon it. George inclined his head forward slightly and let his glance rest upon it with that indifference with which any man who had just lost a vast pile of concrete and steel, filled with throbbing machinery and potential with a mighty manufacturing volume, might be expected to look upon a mere slip of paper.
But suddenly his listless glance lighted; he snatched at the slip and read it. "Mumford!" he exclaimed with a startled, questioning eye.
The slip of paper was a proxy for 15,000 shares of the common stock of the Judson-Morris Motor Company. It was made out to George Judson, and it was signed Ellery Anderson, Trustee.
Simon Mumford's answer to that frantically shouted query was a reassuring nod and a most beatific smile.
"Control!" George shouted in a voice that was breaking with excitement. "Control!"
He seized the frail Simon by the shoulder and shook him with fierce gratitude, then put him aside like something inanimate, and with the light of savage exultation on his face started toward the conference room, but halted and stared again at the slip of paper which quivered in his unsteady hand while he manipulated it between his fingers to make sure it was real and not an hallucination created by his own gloomy imaginings. To make sure also that his eyes had not deceived him, word by word, and almost painfully, with twisting, constricted lips, he read it through aloud to the signature, Ellery Anderson, Trustee.
"Trustee for whom?" he suddenly boomed so forcefully that old Simon Mumford, waiting for this query, was struck momentarily speechless. He opened his mouth, but no sound came out of it.
"Trustee for whom?" roared George Judson again, relentlessly, suspiciously, as fearing some ghastly trick.
Simon found his tongue. "For Mrs. George Judson."
Mr. George Judson turned deathly white, and for one staring moment his mouth was wide and motionless. "My wife?" he whispered, faint with emotion.
Simon put a steadying hand upon his shoulder. "It's genuine, George," he said, "and your wife owns that stock. She always has owned it since you gave itup. It was she who took your three million dollars' worth of bonds and saved you from those bloodsuckers. Templeton, another old friend of her father like myself, consented to act, merely as a dummy. Ellery Anderson was a legal fiction invented to relieve Templeton of the importunities of this Diamond Motors crowd."
George had weakly gripped the old man's arm for support, and for a time was silent, struggling with a new and violent current in his emotions.
"And she—it was she who saved the works for me that time," he remarked at last in low, breathless tones full of a gratitude that was almost worship.
"Yes," smiled Simon.
"Even while she hated them, she saved them for me," he murmured as if talking to himself; and then he suddenly turned an accusing glance upon the old man. "And why was I not permitted to know?" he reproached.
"Because you had shown that knowingly you would not allow it," replied the old financier. "It was your wife's aspiration to be at least as noble and generous as you were."
"Noble! Me? Pah!" said George Judson, with a gesture of bitterness. He leaned now against the desk, and his external eye was gazing at the proxy, but his mind was busy with a sequence of awful regrets.
"Damned bombastic pride again!" he was saying to himself. "I wouldn't tell them frankly, and I wouldn't let them know. Therefore they couldn't tell me—and therefore all these needless, agonizing fears of loss of factory control—and why, we might have understood each other all along if—"
This was the train of his thought, and he was so absorbed by it that he did not notice that the door opened softly and that a very small person in the uniform of an American soldier had entered it—an unusually smart uniform, topped off with the overseas cap and finished by a swagger stick. This trim, smart figure in the exquisitely tailored uniform clicked heels and saluted—a diminutive figure for a uniformwearer, say about the figure of a boy of eight years. The rose of health was upon his cheeks, his features were regular, and the blue eyes, filled at first with a curious kind of concern at that absorbed, bowed figure of a man leaning against the desk, sparkled with joy at his first glance of recognition.
"Junior!" George Judson shouted. "Junior! My boy, my boy!" and flung out his arms.
"Dad-dee!" the small soldier cried and leaped into his father's embrace, "Dad-dee-e-e!"
"Where on earth did you come from?" George asked when he could get his breath.
"Home!" and the youngster, now in his father's lap, kicked his heels and smiled with an amazing air of satisfaction.
"What home?" demanded George Judson frantically.
"Our home—that we always lived in till we went away."
"But how did you get there?"
"Mother brought me."
"Your mother? She is there?"
Junior hesitated a moment. "Yes, Daddy. She sent me to fetch you."
The child was talking with an English accent; but George Judson could not resent that now. It sounded utterly charming.
"To bring me?" he almost screamed. "Let's go!"
He sprang for his hat and offered a hand to the boy. With a shout of glee Junior fastened upon that forefinger which he had been used to hold in infancy, and shouting with boyish delight, he clung on and flew, with his feet scarcely touching the floor, as his father dashed out of the door. Along the corridor and round the turns they ran, and, not waiting for the elevator, plunged downward floor by floor and out upon the curb in front where the president's car and his chauffeur were once more in waiting as they had been accustomed to be before the war took him away.
"Home—quick!" he panted.