Man's Country/Chapter 8
GEORGE'S chin was lowered, and he brooded. The doctor was a long time in coming downstairs. The delay was ominous, At length he heard his voice in the hall and, unbidden, hurried out to him.
"No fracture—no!" said Dr. Rigdon in a voice thoroughly professional. "Examination reveals no fracture. Patient weak from shock and some loss of blood, but nothing to apprehend. A few days rest, and he will be as good as ever."
"Thank God!" the young man murmured fervently, and with this great burden rolled from his mind, stood looking about him expectantly. Surely Fay would appear. His heart hungered for her. He needed the sight of her to confirm a thousand details his mind began to thirst for information upon. It required her radiant presence to quicken the courage of his hope and banish some of those dampening reflections in the library. But that bright flower of girlish beauty did not blossom to his yearning.
There being now no excuse to linger, George performed his last service by taking the doctor away with him. As he drove, the doctor—mind relaxed of professional responsibility—talked about automobiles in general and the Milton Morris in particular—talked about it and inquired about it—but for once young Mr. Judson was a rather indifferent advocate of automobiles.
"All right," he muttered to himself when the doctor had left him, in such tones of graveyard hollowness as indicated that things were a million miles from being, as he said, all right. "AI right. Let's admit it. She doesn't remember me. I don't mean anything to her now, but I will—later. By jumping Jeminy, I will!"
Next morning Milton Morris was sitting bowed at his desk. "Hello, George!" he hailed. "How are you getting on with that loan?"
"I'm not getting on, Mr. Morris," admitted the young man hollowly and passed on to his own modest desk in the same room.
The older man gazed across at the hunched shoulders of the younger with affection in his glance. It had taken only eight weeks for that affection to grow. It had its root in the fact that Judson was the first employee who had ever manifested more faith in the business than its owner had in it himself.
"And you won't get on with it, either, George," said Mr. Morris consolingly. "The idea's too new—too uncertain. I let you run away with me the other day, but in my soul I knew that I was wrong to do it. We've got to peck along slowly, making up a few cars at a time as we get the money and the orders, and watch how the cat's going to jump. We stand to make a lot of money on those orders you got."
"A lot?" he asked suspiciously. "What do you mean—a lot?"
"Ten thousand dollars or so—maybe twenty."
George coughed disdainfully and twitched impatient shoulders. "Ten thousand—twenty thousand dollars isn't anything, Mr. Morris," he announced. "I see this business in terms of millions. Millions, Mr. Morris!"
The older man gazed in silence, surprise mingling with a slight sense of irritation. The boy ought to know when he was beaten. Instead, he was bristling to argue—and the same old arguments.
"You know what Olds did last year and what he is doing this year. Besides that, Ford actually sold six hundred and seventy-four of that chicken-chaser of his, and now a lot of others are rushing into production."
"They're all nuts, every one of 'em," insisted Milton Morris testily.
"You couldn't call Henry Leland a nut, and he's into this Cadillac thing with all his heart," urged George.
"And you couldn't call Olds or Ford nuts, either," admitted the other honestly and as if repenting of his irritation; "nor Henry Joy, and they tell me he's bought the Packard plant down in Ohio and is moving it up here. But the trouble is they all get to be nuts as soon as they feel a gasoline engine chugging under their feet. I tell you, George, the world hasn't gone crazy yet, and a lot of these fellows are figuring that it has. They're in, some of 'em, for the biggest kind of smash. Now let's you and me keep out of it. The gasoline buggy has got a future for it all right. There's a place for it, but it's got to be a slow development. People have got to get used to it—got to get used to how to flirt with a gasoline engine. Look at the bicycle fad and let that be a lesson to you. Let's let this thing make us some money, George, and let's don't let it lose us any."
George had to smile at the homely forceful—ness of his employer's plea, but his face and his whole manner expressed total rejection of its logic. "Mr. Morris, do you believe in me at all?" he asked.
"Shucks!" exclaimed Mr. Morris. "'Course I believe in you, George. You've got the best bunch of selling brains under one straw hat that's ever come past my door. I suspect you've even got the best bunch of selling brains in the whole town of Detroit."
George looked encouraged; he even blushed—slightly, but immediately appealed with, "Then, Mr. Morris, for the sake of getting down to brass tacks, you lay modesty aside and admit that you're the best builder of 'em all."
"All I'll admit," qualified Mr. Morris with an embarrassed cough, "is that when it comes to hitching up gasoline to the family carriage I can see a little farther ahead mechanically than most of them probably. For instance, you'll find me putting into this batch of cars this winter some of the things that the other fellows will be putting in the winter after."
"Which is why I say," declared George, bounding to his feet, "that if Ford or Olds can sell four thousand cars in a year, by hokey, we can, even if our car does cost a few hundred more. Now, Mr. Morris, we talked last week about teaming up together and agreed that we were a team, but we didn't exactly define ourselves. Let's go ahead and do it. Let's prove our faith in our own future by organizing for it."
"Partnership?" suggested Milton Morris, not sure that he caught his drift.
"Not exactly. Not on equal terms, I mean. But here—I've been figuring it out. Suppose we organized the Morris-Judson Automobile Company and capitalized it at 250,000 shares of the par value of one dollar."
"The Morris-Judson Automobile Company," mouthed the older man slowly, as if trying out both the idea and the sound of the words.
"Yes," said George, accepting the challenge in the tone with unblinking gaze, "What do you count your shop worth—just as it stands?"
"I wouldn't have the heart to ask even the Government more than fifty thousand for it," admitted Mr. Morris.
"Let's call it fifty thousand," proposed George, eagerly. "It's worth that to the Morris-Judson Automobile Company. Now, for your name and the good-will of the business, let's add fifty thousand more. Then I'll take a hundred thousand dollars' worth of treasury stock out and sell it at par. That will give us one hundred thousand dollars in ready capital. That's enough to start those eleven hundred cars on, isn't it?"
Mr. Morris nodded a sort of incredulous and tentative approval, but thought he detected a naïve omission. "But that leaves fifty thousand shares of stock still undisposed of," he observed.
George Judson's olive skin turned a deep maroon under a wide, suffusing blush. "I thought," he hemmed, "I thought that if I sold this hundred thousand shares in the open market, and if I put ten thousand cash into the treasury myself, that you would be willing to allot me that remaining fifty thousand as my interest in the business. That, you see, would secure control in our hands."
"Settled, by hokey!" said Milton Morris with a flourish of his long arm.
The next morning the lawyers were put to work. But the next afternoon George, instead of going to work to sell stock, drove out to Grosse Pointe to the home of Stephen Gilman. A gray silk dressing-gown wrapped the tall form of the banker, and he reclined upon a chaise longue, smoking a cigar comfortably and with only a patch of cotton held by adhesive strips upon a spot above his left eye to remind of the encounter with the milk-cans.
"Mr. Gilman!" George exclaimed in tones of humble delight. "I am extremely relieved to find you looking so well!"
But the banker's reception was somewhat waspish. "You realized, of course, from the moment of the accident that even the possibility of the loan was off?"
Instantly George understood. After consenting to receive him, the idea had arisen in the banker's mind that his courtesy might be taken advantage of to reopen negotiations. But—if Mr. Gilman was still holding the mere possibility of being appealed to in his mind, there still must be the faint glimmer of a hope. George saw this like a flash, and with it came a sunburst of inspiration.
"You concede that, of course," emphasized Mr. Gilman shrewdly, as if he could not be at ease with his caller until that matter was settled.
"I could not admit that—no, Mr. Gilman," George returned quickly; "unless I would admit that you are the kind of man who, if one bank in which he trusted had failed, would thereafter never trust any bank."
"Hey!" grunted the banker, pricked with surprise and frowning again.
"I mean, Mr. Gilman," elaborated George, his eyes glowing with earnest intent to avoid giving offense, "that you are too shrewd and too discerning a man not to have gathered in our brief ride, even though it terminated unfortunately, a certain amount of faith in and fascination for the gasoline automobile."
"Fascination, fiddlesticks!" the injured man exclaimed irritably. "I'm sick to death with automobiles and with hearing about them."
"It's this way, Mr. Gilman," George explained, ingratiatingly. "We are engaged in the manufacture of one of civilization's greatest necessities. Once civilization gets it, all business, all pleasure, all comfort will roll along faster. Just that little experience of yours last night should convince you. You were injured—let us forget how—and it is an automobile that conveys you swiftly and safely to your home. It is an automobile that brings your family physician. Everything needful from a hospital's emergency equipment is rolled swiftly to your door."
Mr. Gilman was beginning to grow restless and to look about him as if seeking means of escape. "It's no use," he said and obviously he summoned resolution. "I may begin to see what you call the 'vision' myself, but bankers and credits are concerned not with visions, but with facts. I should not feel justified in risking my clients' money upon such a vision."
"Then don't. Risk your own! We are organizing the Morris-Judson Automobile Company today. One hundred thousand shares of stock are for sale at par value of one dollar. Take ten thousand—fifty—take all of it, Mr. Gilman, and you will never regret it. I expect to sell one thousand cars next year, with nearly two hundred thousand dollars profit. That's eighty per cent. on our capital in one year. Does that look reasonable?"
"No, it doesn't," declared Stephen Gilman shortly, yet his eyes were alight; there was a certain cupidity in the way in which he licked his long, thin lips. "And yet it does look to have a certain amount of basis, the way you put it."
George fell back as inevitably as ever on what others were doing in their pioneer years. "And probably not a banker in on those creamy profits because they were too conservative to see the opportunity! Business men see it though. Why not your You are banking to make money. Here's something that will make money faster. Here's a chance to get in on the ground floor of a new enterprise with a block of stock as large as you want it."
Gilman's manner was peculiar. His hand had stolen up till it masked the expression of his mouth, and over the screen of the hand the eyes peered out, questioning, deliberating, hungering.
George had finished. He had said his say. Good tactics required that the banker should from this on nibble his own way into the enterprise if he would.
It was now, therefore, that real chaffer began. Stephen Gilman hemmed and hawed; he examined and cross-examined; he analyzed and reanalyzed the constituent elements in and the prospects of the Morris-Judson Automobile Company. To George the moment when the shrewd old banker definitely made up his mind was as clear as if the jaws of a steel trap had clicked. But even then it was some minutes before Mr. Gilman spoke.
"I will take ten thousand shares of your stock, George!" he said decisively, and quite with the air of a man entirely well and physically alert, he lifted his softshod feet, swung them to the floor, and stood erect, a tall, spare drape of gray, and stalked to a richly appointed writing desk in the corner, where he seated himself and drew toward him a sheet of heavy notepaper with embossed crest. Upon this he wrote methodically, with heavy down strokes, a communication addressed to the Morris-Judson Automobile Company, signed it, blotted it, and scanned it approvingly.
The scratching of the pen had etched certain lines of triumph into George's very soul. The blood in his veins was jumping for he understood that this was a subscription of the banker for those ten thousand shares of stock.
But in the very act of passing this signed subscription over to George, Mr. Gilman hesitated, faced his desk again, turned the leaf, and began to write upon the second page also.
The young promoter was on nettles. This writing was being done, he perceived, so as to make the addendum a portion of the stock subscription upon the first page. Gradually the ardent salesman's heart began to sink, his sense of victory to abbreviate itself. The canny financier was attaching some sort of string to his subscription—tying him up in some way.
Once more there was the agony of a patient blotting, a slow, contemplative reading, and a final approval of the document as a whole, and then with a grim smile and an appearance almost of reluctance the banker passed it over. "There," he said, "I feel as if I owe you something anyway. I was rather sharp with you yesterday and this afternoon, and you were very patient. At the same time you didn't kow-tow. I like a man who can stand up under attack but without being offensive."
George flushed under the compliment, greatly relieved by the speech, and tried to restrain himself as he reached for the document. The first page, as he had divined, was a written subscription for the ten thousand shares of stock, but the second page, when, without seeming too disgracefully eager, he could get his eye upon it, was something different, something astonishing. It read:
"I condition my foregoing subscription upon the agreement that each of these friends of mine listed below shall be given an opportunity to acquire a portion of the remaining ninety thousand shares upon the same terms as myself before it is offered to others."
There followed the names of some eight or ten capitalists of the town. Swiftly the significance of what had here been done swept over George. His physical sensation was a sort of chill of delight.
"Mr. Gilman!" he cried, as he wrung the banker's hand, "Mr. Gilman! That means that you've practically sold every dollar of this stock for me. Not a man of them will pass it up."
Stephen Gilman smiled at the compliment in the deduction, at the same moment that he was lifting both hands in an endeavor to check the flow of George's stammering gratitude. Although George did not know it this transaction, as it stood, was like the character of Stephen Gilman. When he did a thing at all, he liked to do it handsomely.
"You're going against a good deal of odds," he said almost apologetically, "and I felt like giving youa boost. Anyhow, it's not automobiles I believe in, so much as I believe in you. Keep your head up and you have a remarkable business career before you, George. I predict it. I shall watch your course with interest. Don't disappoint me now, will you?"
The plea was almost fatherly—it was almost as Milton Morris had become accustomed to talk to him.
"I'll try not to, sir," the young man answered earnestly. Then he held up the list to explain a sudden eagerness to be off: "This is a trail so warm I feel I've got to follow it up instantly," he said. "You'll excuse me if I go now?"
"Certainly. Get busy. You're working for me now, as well as for Milton Morris and yourself. Get along with you," chuckled the banker, immensely pleased with himself.
But on his way out, even with the mad excitement of such unexpected success dancing in his veins, the young man remembered to look around for that soft Persian kitten of a girl whose appearance yesterday had supplied such a satisfying materialization of his youthful dream. He felt as if in an enchanted palace. Why, he might meet Fay; or at least see her at a distance. Failing that, he might hear her voice humming happily from some of the rooms, or her light foot padding on the stairs, or he might detect that delicate fragrance on the air which had been associated with her presence yesterday, thus indicating that she had recently passed that way and giving him delicious assurance that he was moving through the same world with her.
But none of these delightful speculations was realized and with all the brilliant prospects flecking their bright banners before him as he drove away, he still found it possible to feel cheated on that account.