CHAPTER XIII

THE AWAKENING

Frank Barton had gone to the Front. He would be where there was battle, murder, and sudden death! War had become a horrid, living reality to Ethel Clayton.

She heard that Morrison Copley had been in town to bid his mother good-bye and had gone away, too, bound for the transport. Likewise that Charlie Bradley, that hulking fellow who had been so notorious about town, supposedly had sailed at the same time Barton had gone to France.

Ethel had occasion to pass the Fuller house within the week. It was shuttered and empty looking. The _Clarion_ had told, in a column and a half, of the last reception tendered Helen Fuller and her mother before their departure. Grandon Fuller was living at the Bellevue and seemed rather relieved than otherwise, so people said, that his wife and daughter had gone abroad.

But Ethel did not scoff now--she had never done so openly--at the idea of flighty Helen Fuller settling down to Red Cross work. Secretly she wished that she, too, were on the way to France. Suppose Frank Barton should be wounded! Some woman would attend him in the hospital. It might even fall to Helen’s lot. Had Ethel gone to France it might be her fate to nurse Barton.

She felt a sudden and bitter distaste for her work in the offices of the Hapwood-Diller Company. The drab business affairs of every day disgusted her. Although she neglected nothing, Ethel had no satisfaction in what she did.

The war filled more and more space in the daily papers. But there was no news of the Rainbow Division, with which it was believed Barton and the other young officers from Mailsburg had sailed. Everything was so secretly done!

There was the story that sifted back from France to the families of some of the soldiers of the unit from the West, who thought they were bound for New York by train, but who found themselves alighting in New Orleans and going aboard the troop ships there, to sail for southern France by the way of Gibraltar.

The fact that the country was honeycombed by German and Austrian spies, and by those whom the enemy’s money could buy, was becoming slowly a settled conviction, even in Mailsburg. Those of German birth and name would in time be ostracised. It could not be helped. It was in the nature of things.

The man who in war time calls himself too broad-minded to hate the enemy is often one who has not yet awakened to the seriousness of war. The enemy-alien in our midst should tremble for his personal safety. Otherwise he becomes a menace.

Just off Burnaby Street was a little shop where, ever since Ethel was a child, had sat a little old German cobbling shoes. He was a marked character in this part of the town where the residents were mostly of the old, native American stock.

Somebody has said that the trade of tailor breeds socialists and pessimists. So being a cobbler used to breed philosophers of a kindly sort. Gessler had been wont to hand out bits of homely and comfortable philosophy with his mended shoes.

The war had changed his attitude toward life, it seemed. Until the United States had got into it he had talked eagerly with everybody who would listen.

The Kaiser he hated, for he was a “Prussian, arrogant and brutal.”

“My father used always to say that there would be war if that bloodhound came to the throne!” he frequently said. But he likewise was proud of his race. “The whole world is fighting them and can’t beat them already!” he cried.

Now that his adopted country was arraigned against the fatherland, Gessler was very glum and silent. He did not have so much work as before; but he sat all day on his cobbler’s bench, his hammer in his hand, often staring out of the window with empty eyes.

On her way to work one morning Ethel carried a pair of shoes to be mended. But when she reached the corner in sight of which the little German’s shop stood, she hesitated. How could she approach Gessler and speak to him with that pleasant familiarity that had been her custom.

She could think of him only now as an enemy. Every German was an enemy! His countrymen in their terrible undersea craft might sink the transport upon which Frank Barton had sailed. The war had come home to Ethel Clayton! It was real to her at last, as it becomes real to everybody who has a personal stake in it.

She took the shoes to another cobbler and went on her way to the office.

These days Ethel was almost vexed with Benway Chase because he continued to be so enthusiastic about his work and interested in it. He never seemed to flag in his tasks; and he might really be, as he had laughingly said, fitting himself for Jim Mayberry’s position.

He spent most of his noon hour talking with the foremen of the different shops. He learned much about the practical working of the factory system; yet he never neglected his own particular tasks.

Mabel Skinner still considered Benway the most wonderful young man who had ever crossed her path; but she worshiped from afar. She did not dream of preening her poor plumage to attract his notice; yet when he smiled at her in good comradeship Little Skinner was secretly in ecstasies.

“Gee!” she confided to Boots, her errant brother, on one occasion, “when Mr. Chase asked me did I like flowers, an’ give me some of them late asters from his mother’s garden, I almost swallowed my gum!”

“Cracky!” scoffed Boots. “That poor fish? Why, he ain’t got but one good wing!”

“An’ he can put over a spitter with that that _you_ can’t hit, Smartie,” retorted his sister vigorously. “And he’s a gentleman, Mr. Chase is!”

“Cracky!” repeated Boots. “Seems to me, if I was a girl I’d fall for a feller that could gimme something besides a flower an’ a sweet smile. Like that Jim Mayberry. He’s got a flivver and could take you ridin’.”

“He only took me once,” said Mabel complacently. “And I guess he must have give you a ride in his buzz-cart, too, that time, or you wouldn’t have give me that dream about Jim and Sam Blaisdell of Norville workin’ in cahoots against Mr. Barton.”

“Huh! That warn’t no dream,” grumbled Boots. “You think you’re allus so smart, Mab Skinner. I heard ’em talkin’ all right ’bout how to do Mr. Barton. And it had something to do with the Bogata works down to Norville, just as I told you.”

“Well, that egg never hatched, then,” declared his dubious sister.

They might have suspected the incubation of another egg had she known how often Jim Mayberry was in consultation with Mr. Grandon Fuller these days at the Bellevue, although Mabel Skinner of course knew little about the inside affairs of the Hapwood-Diller Company. It might have aroused any person’s suspicions to mark the superintendent’s intimacy with the largest stockholder of the concern.

Mr. Fuller had not again suggested the removal of Barton and the appointment of Mayberry as manager. Indeed, with the former already out of the country and in the Service, that change did not seem necessary to the carrying to conclusion of any schemes Mr. Fuller might have.

Not that there was anything wrong showing on the surface of affairs. The factory seemed to be running quite as usual. But as the end of the business year approached Ethel could not fail to note that the reports on output were not so favorable as they had been earlier in the year. As, of course, it was not really within the compass of her work she could not discover why this should be.

From the very day Mayberry had been balked in his endeavor to put the Bogata order through, the tide of fortune for the Hapwood-Diller Manufacturing Company seemed to have turned. The superintendent never spoke again about the Bogata Company to Ethel. The latter knew, however, that Hammerly’s prophecy regarding a receivership for that concern had come true--and that before the new year.

In the matter of the shop reports the girl was puzzled and alarmed. It did not seem to be anybody’s fault; certainly Mayberry did not neglect his supervision of the factory, and most of the foremen were old and faithful employees.

The report of the corporation compared unfavorably with the last report. A good deal of money was tied up in raw material. Contracts unfilled and bills not yet collectible were items that bulked big on the wrong side of the ledger.

The board voted the usual dividend; but the surplus was much reduced thereby. And then, suddenly and like the bursting of a bomb, trouble came.

The Hapwood-Diller Company stock was listed in the market; that is, it was traded in by the curb brokers both in State and Broad Streets. One morning Hammerly came raging into the offices, his _Financial Gazette_ in his hand, his spectacles pushed up to the line of his grizzled hair, and his eyes fairly snapping.

“What’s the meaning of this, I want to know?” he cried, shaking the financial sheet under Jim Mayberry’s nose as that young man appeared from the manager’s office. “Do you know anything about this?”

“About what, Mr. Hammerly?”

“This trading in Hapwood-Diller shares? It’s been going on for a week, I understand. Yesterday three hundred shares was sold for eighty-nine--eleven points off. Never heard of such a thing! Who’s selling?”

“Why, bless your heart, Mr. Hammerly,” said the superintendent, “I don’t know. I own only fifty shares and I haven’t sold them, I can assure you.”

“Some tarnal fool is dumping his shares on the market, and at a bad time. Right after such a poor showing as was made by our last report. If Frank Barton was on the job such a report would never have been made.”

Mayberry flushed. “No man can make bricks without straw, Mr. Hammerly,” he said.

“Huh?” snorted the grain dealer. “Who ever told you they made bricks of straw? That’s about all you know, Jim Mayberry. They make bricks with clay around these parts. You ain’t in Egypt. But that ain’t neither here nor there. This here selling of shares--and maybe these were only wash sales?” added the suspicious old man. “Here! let me see the stock book, Mayberry.”

“Ask Ethel for that,” returned the superintendent sharply, and, turning on his heel, walked away.

Mr. Hammerly looked after him with lowering brow. “Ha!” he muttered, “mighty independent of a sudden. Now, I wonder what that means?”

But he was as pleasant as usual with Ethel. Macon Hammerly approved of her. He retired to a corner seat to study the list of names to whom stock, at the reorganization after Israel’s Diller’s death, had been issued. Most of the local owners of the shares had clung to all their original allotment, even through the depression at the beginning of the war before Frank Barton had been elevated to the management of the concern’s affairs.

The Hapwood-Diller Manufacturing Company had always been a very close corporation. There were some Diller and Hapwood heirs in the West and South who had traded off their shares in the corporation; but nobody knew better than Mr. Macon Hammerly just where those shares lay. At least, up to this date he thought he knew where the bulk of them were.

The next shock to the working force of the Company, as well as to the board, was the turning back of the entire order billed to the Kimberly Binding Company. The order amounted to twelve thousand dollars. The goods were not according to specifications.

Jim Mayberry denied all responsibility for this error. The Kimberly order had been received and the contract signed by Barton. Mayberry showed that the shop sheets covering the contract had been followed exactly by the workmen. The duplicates of these papers in the office were the same as the working plans in every particular.

But the Kimberly Company produced its copy of the specifications with two differences in it, one of dimension and the other of quality, changes which made the finished product absolutely useless to the Kimberly people. Or for anybody else, for that matter! The product could merely go into the scrap heap.

There was a live tilt in the board meeting that day between Mr. Grandon Fuller and his followers, and Mr. Macon Hammerly. Ethel was in and out of the room to take dictation, and to furnish books and figures when required, so she heard much of the wrangle.

Jim Mayberry sat sullenly in his place at the table and had only one declaration to repeat: It was not up to him! Mr. Fuller did most of the talking.

Barton’s name was signed to the Kimberly schedule. He had O. K.’d it. Two bad errors had crept into the specifications and the now absent manager had overlooked them.

“And he was _absent_, all right, before ever he left here,” Fuller scoffed. “Absent in his mind if not in body. And his absent-mindedness has cost us a pretty penny. I can see right now that this board will have to pass the next dividend.”

The very next day a block of five thousand shares sold in Boston for eighty-seven and a half and two hundred in the New York market for eight-seven flat.

One evening Ethel came home from work to be greeted by her mother in a flurried state of mind.

“Good land, Ethel! What’s the matter with the Hapwood-Diller Company now? I feared how it would be if Frank Barton went away.”

Ethel keenly remembered her mother’s expressed doubt of Mr. Barton’s having much to do with the prosperity of the concern. Now she asked Mrs. Clayton:

“What do you think is the matter at the factory? I don’t know what you mean.”

“Well, I want to know! And you working right there, too. Here this little lawyer comes around and offers me a ridiculous price for our shares----”

“What lawyer?”

“I don’t know him. He says he’s from New York. Here’s his card,” and she handed to Ethel a card on which was engraved “A. Schuster, Atty.” and an address in a Wall Street building.

“Anyway, he seems to think he can buy our stock for sixty-five dollars. That’s all he’ll offer and he just laughed and laughed when I told him the shares of the Hapwood-Diller Company had never been worth less than a hundred dollars apiece since they were printed.”

“What did he say to that?” asked her more than curious daughter.

“He declared sixty-five was better than it would sell in the market in a month, unless the company was reorganized and put on a paying basis. I wonder what Grandon Fuller or Hammerly would say to that? And you ought to know the truth, Ethel,” added the worried woman. “Aren’t things going right in the office now that Frank Barton’s gone away?”

“There is nothing to worry over,” her daughter said stoutly.

“Well, that’s what I told that little lawyer,” Mrs. Clayton declared. “I said we’d just got our dividend check same’s usual, and he said--What do you suppose he said?”

“I have no idea,” confessed Ethel.

“That it would be the last one we’d get for many a long day. Can that be so, Ethel? I don’t know what we should do if our income from those shares your great-uncle Diller left us should be cut off.”

“I shouldn’t worry, Mother,” Ethel said composedly.

Yet this was only one of the many things she began to hear which suggested a coming catastrophe to the Hapwood-Diller Company.