MR. HADDON’S POINT OF VIEW

HADDON, puffy about the eyes, trembling of fingers, sat at table the next day offering a very fine example of the morning after organized hilarity. The man opposed to him, haggard and hollow-eyed, might have been suspected of indulgences similar to those of his host, although such would have been an unjust accusation.

Haddon found two stiff drinks of whisky needful to attract his interest to his breakfast. Then he broke the moody silence which had marked him.

“I say, old man,” he began, “you made a pretty fair speech to the boys last night. We’re holding down more than three hundred thousand acres of land in the Cumberlands. We’re in deep, and some of the fellows were getting cold feet until I brought you on to tell them something about our holdings.”

Joslin sat looking at him in silence, and he went on presently.

“You see, our money has been in there for twenty years, some of it—that was long before I went into the Company, of course. The holding of raw resources is a waiting game—you cash in stiff after a long wait. That’s what we’ve got to do now.

“But the way to handle this thing is to crowd when the line begins to break. It’s time now for us to begin to crowd. We’ve got to begin to cash in before long, for the interest and taxes have been eating us up long enough.

“Now, we need a good man down in there. The boys have been sending me because they couldn’t do any better. You and I between us know about how much I know—we both know that you know a lot more than I do. Now, you’ve been talking to me a lot of rot about starting a college or a school, or something—I don’t remember what all you were saying. Forget it! Cut out all that business about saving your country. Think a little bit about saving yourself. This business of doing a whole lot for other people is all right on paper, but when it comes down to practical life there’s nothing in it. A fellow’s got to think of himself.

“Now, what are you doing for yourself? You’re sitting here in my house—not that I want to rub it in by telling you so—in a suit of my clothes and a pair of my shoes. You’re wearing my shirt and my socks right now. You haven’t got a dollar of your own money in your clothes to-day. You told me that you had a wife and a grandmother. What are you going to do about them? Any way you look, you’re in a fine position to build a college! Why, hell!

“On the other hand, New York ain’t such a slow village, is she? Pretty nice, eh? Something of a party last night, what? Some girls, huh?

“Now, listen. You might do a lot worse than staying right here in New York this fall and winter—you’d be on the pay roll all right. We could make a pretty good thing of it for you if you went in with us and stood by us through thick or thin, right or wrong. We might think of a lot of things we’d like to ask you.

“You’ve been talking a lot of bally rot about your duty to these people—seeing that we wouldn’t rob them in the price we paid for the land or the oil leases. You know mighty well we can go down there and lease a whole farm a hundred years for a dollar. Now, you can crab our whole act—that’s easy to see—if you go down there and tell those people they’re fools, and that they ought to have two dollars an acre for their oil rights—more’n we’ve paid them for all their coal and their timber and their land any time these last twenty years! You can see easily enough from the class of men I’ve shown you here last night that we’ve got all the money we need, all the money that anybody needs to pay for what we want. But we want loyalty. We want service. We want someone to stand with us, thick or thin, right or wrong. Do you understand?”

Joslin looked at the puffy face of the man who spoke, his heavy cheeks, his thickening neck, his watery eyes, somewhat reddened about the rims. He replied slowly.

“Yes, Mr. Haddon, I reckon I do understand,” said he.

“Well, well, then, what about it? Do you find New York such a poor place to live in? Isn’t there anything here to light you up a little bit more than anything you ever saw down in the Cumberlands?”

Joslin looked at him, his pale face going still paler. “I’ve seen things here I didn’t know was in all the world. But ye wasn’t asking me to sell out my own people, was ye?”

“There you go again!” retorted the irritated man across the table from him. “Rot! I’ve told you the question of right or wrong don’t come into business at all. Business is business. Highbrow things don’t come into it at all. Don’t you want to know what life is—don’t you want to branch out—don’t you want to see what the world has—all the people in it, the life of it? Why, man, at first you looked to me as though you weren’t a sissy or a simp.”

The moisture on Joslin’s forehead meant nothing to the man who faced him, who knew nothing of the self-loathing, the self-reproach, that lay in Joslin’s heart.

“Well, anyhow, if you lived in this country for a while you might change your point of view,” finished Haddon, pushing back his chair. “What’s your hurry, getting out of town? You haven’t got a cent to your name, you don’t know where you’re going, you don’t know what to do. I’m sorry for you——”

“Ye needn’t be,” said David Joslin. “Ye kain’t pity a mounting man—he won’t have it!”

“Hell’s bells!” ejaculated the irate man whom he addressed. “I’m not trying to change any of those damned hill-billies down there. That’s not the question. I put it up to you that you’re here in New York, and you’ve got a chance to save up a little money to buy your bally old education. You don’t have to lose any of your principles. It’s just making good—that’s all there is to it. If you want to make good you’re on. If you don’t—good-by!”

He rose from the table, irritated, his nerves still a-jangle; but a sort of compunction came to him, or perhaps the feeling that he was making a business mistake in crowding this man. A sudden half-smile came to his face as he turned when the house man brought his hat and stick for him.

“It’s a stiff gait we travel here,” said he. “Now I’m going to my shop to see if I can earn a dollar or two to pay the rent. I believe I’ll turn you over to my chauffeur and let him drive you ‘bout town for a day or so. You remember that kid that was there last night—one that sang and played to us—Polly Pendleton, her name was. I saw you having a good look at that young dame. Some calico, what? Yeh, some girl. Now, listen here—how’d you like to go up and have a little visit with Polly around eleven-thirty or so? I could fix it up. Touch of life, eh? Gad, she seemed to be interested in you somehow—scared or something. Now——”

David Joslin went suddenly white. “Ye fergit, I reckon—I told ye I was a married man. I’ve got a wife—we had two children, down thar in Kentucky.”

“Well, I’ve got a wife too,” rejoined Haddon contemplatively. “If I had any children I’d need that much more of something to make me forget my condition of servitude. I don’t know where the Missus has gone to, but she’s shook us this morning, that’s plain! You go up and talk religion to Polly, while I go down to the office and try to make a dollar and a quarter. Maybe you can save a human soul—eh? That’s up to you.

“Life is so short,” he went on presently, finding a cigarette in his pocket. “Why hang crÊpe when life is so darned short? I don’t blame you for wanting to learn the alphabet and the multiplication table, but if a man came to me and gave me a chance like this, I’d postpone those things.”

Jimmy Haddon went grimly chuckling to his own desk, and left the question of the gentleman from Kentucky and the lady of Harlem strictly upon the knees of the gods.