Man's Country/Chapter 5
SOME years slipped along, and a miracle happened to the world. Concerned with that miracle was Milton Morris. He was a man of fifty, with an open but rather serious countenance, with broad brow, with recessed, crow's footed eyes.
Mr. Morris sat in his shirt-sleeves at a flat desk that was large, substantial, and scarred with much usage. It was littered with correspondence, with drawings and much small mechanical junk. The room in which the desk was located, besides some office furniture, was also cumbered with cogs, wheels, pieces of shafting, and parts of gas engines with half-exposed workings. This cluttered office was situated on the ground floor of a rangy, two-story structure of brick and corrugated iron in Franklin Street on a lot reaching back toward the Detroit River. Across the top of this building was a sign in cut-out letters against a screen of wire, somewhat loppy under the impact of winds and years, but which still lifted to the world the words:
Milton Morris—Gas Engines
"Automobiles."
The automobile was the miracle which had now happened to the world. When Charlie King and George Judson shook hands that day, there was no such thing—only groping experiments with a horseless carriage. Now the carriage had got the name "automobile"—over which people stumbled somewhat—but it had it; and its commercial manufacture had begun in several American cities. One of these was this same city of Detroit, where a progressive citizen, R. E. Olds by name, astounded those of his fellow-townsmen who took note of such things by the manufacture and sale of four hundred and eighteen automobiles in a single year.
Stories were immediately rife that Olds had made an amazing profit. Scores of men rushed into the manufacture of the new vehicle—some men of ideas, some men of energy, some men of money, all men with dreams of large and glittering profits.
But Milton Morris was different from all these inventors and enthusiasts and promoters. They were young men; he was matured. He had a slow, solid business in gas engines, but it never grew large because he was more interested in building machines than in selling them. It was because he was a builder that he added automobiles at all. An automobile was several times more complicated than a gas engine; it challenged his building instinct. The result was a little spawn of automobiles, each an almost individual product—a more costly car, but a better car, than most of its early rivals in that city.
But because he was not a salesman, these better cars stood neglected on his floors, and because they stood so neglected Milton Morris sat at his desk and frowned. Yet it was perfectly characteristic that while he frowned, what his mind worked at was not a problem in salesmanship, but an idea half sketched out before him, an idea for taking the controls for his car off the dashboard and running them up through the center of the steering shaft, which would therefore have to be made hollow.
Peering over steel-framed glasses with peculiar flat tops constructed to make peering over easy, he became aware of a young man in a blue serge suit and a straw hat, slightly over the medium height, with dark but luminous eyes, an olive skin, an arching chest, sturdy shoulders, and a combined air of solidity, energy, and smiling aggression about him. Along with buoyant youthfulness, the stranger displayed an odd commingling of mannish gravity and earnestness, which challenged closer observation.
"I am George Judson," announced the visitor, quietly, but with the subtle, though perhaps unintended intimation that it was something to be George Judson. At the same time the young man smiled yet more broadly, thereby revealing rows of even, white, strong teeth.
But Mr. Morris did not wish to be sold anything this afternoon. "What can I do for you, Mr. Judson?" he asked, a trifle brusquely.
Now Mr. Morris, without knowing it of course, had got his question all wrong. He should have inquired, "What can you do for me, Mr. Judson?"
The George Judson standing here was himself a sort of miracle. Comparing him with that straddling adolescent who had gawped at Mr. King's horseless carriage, this young man represented as much the magic of evolution as the transmutation of "a wagon without a horse" into an automobile.
To believe in this miracle one turns back to that day of dreams shattered by a father's broken back and the stubborn resolve of a boy to realize his dreams in spite of obstacles.
It was from that hour that the boy's old-time, happy-go-lucky ways began to fall from him like the tattered pieces of a frayed and failing garment. He straightened his small back under responsibilities, preparing to keep the bond of words which he had given. Yet the ensuing two years proved very hard on the stricken family, mostly because the elder brother, Jim, failed it so completely.
But fortunately, as Jim brought home less and less, George Judson brought home more and more. This was possible because, every day when the afternoon paper route was carried, he went on the street with papers under his arm to sell, and the spring of 1898 was a great year for a newsboy. Cuba was a daily source of sensations. At length the Maine was blown up, and swiftly the scare-heads of war became thrilling facts.
George sold out edition after edition. He read the news, of course, and felt a great pride in his country. In his boyish heart he longed to have been storming up San Juan Hill with the Colonel of the Rough Riders, but the regret he felt over an involuntary absence from those stirring scenes of battle was compensated in a measure by the joy and pride he felt in going home each night to his mother with pockets jingling full of nickels, dimes, and quarters. On the 4th of July, 1898, the events of that day being big in news value, he put another boy on to carry his route for him and took the whole afternoon for salesmanship. He made double the usual amount of money and got the first glimpse of a new business idea. From that day he never carried another afternoon route. He sublet the job and established himself on a Jefferson Avenue corner.
To maintain himself here, he had: sometimes to fight. In business matters his brain was keen. His temper was quick as a flash. His fists were quicker. And yet he was no brawler—no bulldozer. He was fair—fair to the smaller boys, whereat they rallied around him and bought their papers through him. He gave them their rights, but he fought tenaciously against the older fellows for his rights. Presently he had a little stand from behind which he handled his papers. The stand enlarged. He added a few magazines, and then a few more. The stand became a hole in the wall, and he added a whole line of magazines.
Then one day George tried an experiment. He employed a broken-down Civil War veteran, ambitionless but faithful and honest, to keep the stand open all day while the boy was himself in school. This was an enlarging glimpse of that idea which had come to him when he farmed out his afternoon paper route. While he studied, an old man and a six-foot wooden shelf with a two-dollar cotton awning over it made him as much money as he had made in the three after-school hours in which he had been accustomed to prosecute his business so energetically, and George was greatly excited by the possibilities revealed. He explained the principle to his brother Jim, now eighteen, sly, furtive, oversophisticated, but still his brother, for whom George continued to hope the best, even against his better judgment. He emphasized this belief by setting Jim up in another stand, the duplicate of the first, and located two blocks distant on Griswold Street. But Jim absconded at the end of the first week with some seventy-two dollars of the little news-stand's funds. For George to lose a dime in these days was like losing a drop of heart's blood, but he gritted his teeth and never told his father and mother why it was that Jim did not come home at all now, or, indeed, that he had departed from the city.
Yet this final defection of his brother was a discouraging blow to struggling youth. It hurt George while it hardened him. His life was now all strain and struggle anyway; up betimes each morning to carry his paper route, then came next an hour on the news-stand, at the end of which he set old Nick Cross going for the day and made hasty strides to school and the lessons that he somehow found time to con half-way at least. In the after-school hours there was no play for him. He hurried to the news-stand once more to take up that keen chase for nickels, dimes, pennies that continued till seven or later in the evening. Arrived at home he was accustomed to smile and kiss his mother, force a cheery "Hello, Dad! How's it been?" for his father, press on him some beguiling magazine, and then, after bolting food he was too weary to enjoy, his school-books displaced the dishes on the table before him. But this study was seldom finished. Usually it merely ended with the youth's face down and fast asleep upon an open page.
"It's too much—too much for you, Sonny!" his mother would urge, almost weeping as she roused and dragged him off to bed.
"No! No!" George would protest, shamefaced. "I wasn't asleep—honest. I got through and just laid down my head for a minute."
The boy was tired, dog-tired all the time, and yet there was a compensating thrill to it all—if he could just hold out. He was getting an education; he was supporting his parents; he was learning wonderful lessons not taught in school, and opportunity, the whole wide field of business and opportunity, was opening before him most astonishingly. Take, for instance, the case of Tony Colombo—Tony who kept the boot-black stand next door to George, with four chairs operated by himself and one assistant. Tony one day got into trouble with the officers of the law over a matter of no concern to this narrative and had immediate necessity for $200, with also the prospect that he might not be able to give his personal attention to business duties for some months to come. Tony told his misfortune to the bustling young chap who owned the news-stand, casually and not hopefully.
"Too bad," sympathized George. "Too bad, old man!" and considered the incident a closed one. But later, watching the number of patrons who climbed up in Tony's chairs, and computing the total of the dimes they left each day in Tony's cash drawer, he began to scent an opportunity. The chairs, the brushes, the bench, the whole outfit, could have been duplicated for $40. The balance of the $200 Tony demanded was his valuation on good will, on the steady stream of patrons, and George had been in business long enough to know that this stream of patrons was the difference between success and failure. He estimated the stream and decided it was worth the money—provided one had the money.
Now it happened that George had observed quite early this important fact—that the most flourishing tree of prosperity has its beginning in a very small plant and that while this plant is small it may be bought for very little, but that little must usually be cash. That he might be ready when such an opportunity knocked at his door, George had enjoined upon himself the habit of a cash reserve. At first it used to be only fifty cents to buy the morrow's stock of papers with, but it grew larger; and all the while George was taking care of the folks at home quite generously, he was skimping and almost cheating himself to increase day by day this cash reserve. This afternoon, counting up, his cash reserve totaled $190.
From the day's take-in he added another ten dollars and laid the whole in Tony Colombo's surprised and grateful hand—after Tony and George had together evolved a bill of sale, to which the seller affixed his scrawling signature.
The next day, with another assistant in Tony's place and the first man raised to a sort of foreman, George Judson at school—and making an excursion into the literature of the Elizabethan period—was distracted by glowing reflections that besides old Nick Cross selling papers and magazines, two pairs of swarthy hands were shining shoes for his customers and ringing up dimes in the cash-drawer. He got a rare thrill out of this and knew that he was becoming a magnate upon a small scale.
But there were always happening things to prevent him from feeling plutocratic—to remind him that his necessities still exceeded his rewards. As, for instance, on the very evening of his acquisition of the boot-black stand, Doctor Denman, while making a family rather than a sick-call upon the Judsons, had ventured the remark that some wonderful things were beginning to be done with spines now. He dropped the hint that some months for Malachi in the surgical ward of a great hospital, with the attentions of a certain eminent specialist and the use of some newly contrived and very expensive apparatus, might work a great improvement in the afflicted man's condition.
There was general talk and nothing decided. But the next day George called on the physician in his office.
"Say, Doc, what will it cost?" he asked eagerly—and anxiously.
Doctor Denman was thoughtful, wiping his glasses and staring out the window. "Figuring the lowest possible, and with the specialist cutting seventy-five per cent. off his fee, about $1200."
"Twelve—twelve hundred!" gasped George hollowly. "Twelve hundred to try it?"
"To try it—hospital bills and all."
"And it may not help?"
"It may not."
"But it might?"
"It might."
George's voice was getting steadier and steadier, until he gulped the proposition down. "I can pay you forty dollars a month till the twelve hundred's paid," he said, having made swift calculations.
The experiment failed.
Malachi Judson came home from the hospital sentenced to a life-long helplessness so far as all but his hands were concerned, yet faced the situation with a dismal fortitude.
And George, having recently attained the proud dignity of a bank account, was sending his check for forty dollars till the whole twelve hundred was paid; and not a dollar of it did he regret, deeming that he got his money's worth in knowing that his father had his chance. Besides, he was getting to be more of a magnate every day. He had two news shops now instead of one, with an alert young woman in charge of the second. But there must have been too much distraction in so many business enterprises for a student's mind, for this year, his first in high school, George failed completely in his midwinter examinations. It was a crushing blow to his self-esteem.
"Better take it slower, George," urged his friends, the teachers.
And he did. Fewer studies allowed him more sleep, while the steadiness of his income and its equally steady enlargement brought additional ease to mind.
Almost as if in consequence of these things there began to take place a remarkable physical change in George. The intensive labors of the past three years had made him scrawny and nervous. He had been hollow-cheeked, big-eyed, rough-haired, almost ill-favored. But now, suddenly, he was none of these things. Adolescence was completing its brilliant transformation act; it was delivering a gawky youth into the arms of glowing, symmetrical young manhood.
It was in this period that George first began to play at salesmanship as if it were some stirring piece of drama.
One day his customers noted, over and above the stock of newspapers and magazines, a shelf of bound books—cheap reprints of best sellers, they were, yet they gave the whole place dignity from George's point of view. Gradually a modest line of new fiction was added, and young Judson was gathering a finer and a finer clientele and supplying a larger and larger stock to meet its requirements.
Yet such successes only whetted the youth's ambition. Among the books that now got on his shelves was a volume called "Self Help," by Samuel Smiles. George found this book full of recitals of how poor boys had won successes, how struggling young men had become artists or sculptors or successful manufacturers or business men. He pored over its pages. He gloated over its heroes. The book became his Bible. And there was a magazine called "Success" that came monthly to his stand, which devoted itself to inspiring men and women of all classes to better their conditions. On this George used to feed his ego fat each month with higher hopes and more solemn determinations.
Inevitably, as it seemed, both his hole-in-the-wall news shops widened and lengthened into real little stores with considerable stocks upon their shelves. He began to develop a chain of news-and-magazine stands. The shoe-shining parlor grew to ten chairs, and six men bent their backs and agitated their elbows to make dimes for George Judson. From every standpoint the young man flourished. In his plan of life there seemed no flaw.
George had a horse and buggy, with which he drove himself to and fro; he built a stable where the cabbage patch had been. He had the cottage painted and new carpets and curtains added. An up-to-date wheel chair that was the last word in comfort replaced the old one. He bought his father fancy shirts and attractive neckwear.
"Making a darned dude out of me," Malachi used to grumble, though secretly pleased.
George bought pretty dresses for his mother and insisted on her wearing them. His manner toward his parents was dutiful, and yet it was also masterful. He was quiet, thoughtful, considerate—but authoritative. His parents, proud of him as they were, began to be a little in awe of him.
"Ain't it wonderful, the way that boy's come out!" boasted Malachi one day and waited to hear his wife's approving echo.
Instead there came a sound like a sob, and he turned with astonished eyes to behold a coddled mother who was weeping.
"Oh, I think it's terrible, Mal!" she broke out, as with emotion that had been long suppressed. "It's been necessary, I guess, but he's almost ruined," she wailed. "He's a little old man. He don't think of anything but money—making money—Success! Success! Success! He's just got his eye on that."
If George Judson could have seen his mother's tears, he would have been mystified. If he had heard her speech he would have laughed. Neither seeing nor hearing, he went blissfully and determinedly upon his way.
Eventually he graduated from high school two years behind his class, and he had been at least a year behind his age to begin with. He was an oldster among youngsters and was sufficiently embarrassed by this fact that he would not appear upon the platform at the commencement exercises to receive his diploma. He had gained the knowledge it stood for, and that was the important thing with George anyway. The diploma was eventually slipped into his hand at one of his stores by his admiring principal.
These two stores, by the way, had by this time grown to be considerable enterprises, with ever-growing stocks upon their shelves and with trained salespeople to dispose of them. But the best, the most assiduous sales person of them all was George Judson himself. Indeed it was as a salesman that his genius manifested itself. George would not be an inventor like Charlie King; he would not be a builder like Henry Ford. But he was already a salesman. He was a marvel at selling things. Being that, he one afternoon sold out his business to the last shoestring—the shining shop, the chain of news-stands, and the two book stores—everything that he owned; and the proceeds put fourteen thousand dollars in the bank. Fourteen!
Now it would not be strange if at this moment George Judson felt a bit cocky, and underneath his prematurely varnished exterior, George was still naïve and human. A little more than twenty-one years old, toughened rather than hardened by his experiences—tempered perhaps is the better word—he straightened his shoulders with this sale of all his business, as if a burden had rolled off, then filled his lungs afresh. He stood upon the threshold of manhood, amply equipped. Before him were two choices. He could go to college and drink in knowledge in long, thirsty draughts with absolutely nothing to distract, or he could launch directly out. He had made up his mind which.
But what he did first was a perfectly natural expression of that habit of duty which he had formed. He climbed into his buggy and started for the cottage out beyond the "Indian Village," into that district which had so long been negligible, but now all at once began to be within speaking distance of the homes of the ultra well-to-do.
Once in a while, as they bowled along, the foolish horse looked askance or shied a little at a "devil-wagon" as people still called the gasoline-propelled vehicles now fairly common in the streets of Detroit, though there were yet plenty of superior people who had not so far deigned to ride in one. But as George himself bent his glance upon the devil-wagon it was with an admiring eye—an eye that looked almost as if it knew something that it wouldn't tell.
"Dad," the young man hailed, when he surprised his parents by arriving at home at this unusual time of day. "I'm going to build you and mother a new house and furnish it; and besides, mother's done her last lick of work except waiting on you. I'm going to hire a girl to do the cooking and the housework."
Malachi Judson was impressedly silent as he heard this announcement, contemplating his son with respectful, almost reverential eye.
But his mother was more vocative. "Oh, George!" she exclaimed with a gesture and a tone that were almost of protest. "Are you sure you can afford it?"
"Surest thing!" boasted George, and in a sudden release of animal spirits long pent up, he seized his mother in his arms, swung her clear off the floor, and spun round with that scandalized lady stretched almost horizontal. He laughed boisterously as he let her down.
"It seems so good, George, to hear you laugh," panted his mother when things had quieted somewhat. "Seems as though as you grow up you grow kind of hard. You just smile and smile kind of cunning like a possum but you don't laugh any more. You're just all business."
"I suppose I'll laugh all the time now," responded George, "for I've just sold out my business."
"Sold it out?" exclaimed the mother, almost in alarm, while the bearded mouth of Malachi fell open in surprise and remained a gaping orifice that demanded to be filled with some sort of explanation.
"Lock, stock, and barrel!" declared George.
"Hum!" mused his father, recovering somewhat from the shock of his surprise and pulling at his beard. "What you going to take up now?"
"It isn't settled yet," said George. "But something big, you bet!"
Neither parent had a doubt of that. Leaving them puzzled, to look into each other's eyes questioningly, yet nodding and glowing or chuckling with pride, George went back to town and sold the horse and buggy.
"The day of the horse is over," he said to himself, but required the man who had bought the outfit to drive him to the shop of Milton Morris on Franklin Street.
But where, by the way, was Charlie King? In Paris—painting pictures. Where was his factory? He had none—at this time. That George did not have himself driven to the factory of R. E. Olds instead merely showed his independence. Olds had the great successful factory; it became the school from which graduated so many able men into the ranks of the industry, but for reasons which seemed good to him young Judson's choice had fallen upon Milton Morris.