Part 13 (1/2)
”Oh, I've known about it all along. Rankin and I have discussed Lydia as well as other weighty matters, a great many times.”
Mrs. Sandworth's easily diverted mind sped off into another channel.
”Yes, how you do discuss. I'm going to look right at the clock every minute from now on, so's to be sure to remind you of that engagement at Judge Emery's office at half-past nine. I know what happens when you and Mr. Rankin get to talking.”
”I'll not stay long; Miss Emery has precedence.”
”Oh, don't mind me,” said Lydia.
”They won't--nor anything else,” her aunt a.s.sured her.
Rankin laughed at this characterization. The doctor did not seem to hear. He was brooding, and drumming on the table. From this reverie he was startled by the younger man's next statement.
”I've got an apprentice,” he announced.
”Eh?” queried the doctor with unexpected sharpness.
”The fifteen-year-old son of my neighbor, Luigi Carfarone, who works on the railroad. The boy's been bad--truant--street gamin--all that sort of thing, and his mother, who comes in to clean for me sometimes, has been awfully anxious about him. But it seems he has a pa.s.sion for tools--maybe his ancestors were mediaeval craftsmen. Anyhow, he's been working for me lately, doing some of the simpler jobs, and really learning fast. And he's been so interested he's forgotten all his deviltry. So, yesterday, didn't he and his father and his mother and about a dozen littler brothers and sisters all come in solemn procession, dressed in their best, to dedicate him to me and my profession, as they grandly call it.”
”Oh, how perfectly lovely!” cried Lydia.
The doctor resumed his drumming morosely. ”Of course you know the end of that.”
”You mean he'll get tired of it, and take to robbing chicken-roosts again?”
”Not much! He'll like it, and stick to it, and bring others, and you'll extend operations and build shops, and in no time you'll go the way of all the world--a big factory, running night and day; you on the keen jump every minute; dust an inch thick over your books and music; nerves taut; head humming with business schemes to beat your compet.i.tors; forget your wife most of the time except to give her money; making profits hand over fist; suborning legislators to wink at your getting special railroad rates for your stuff; can't remember how many children you have; grand success; notable example of what can be done by attention to business; nervous prostration at forty-five; Bright's disease at fifty; leave a million.”
Rankin burst into a great roar of boyish laughter at this prophetic flight. The doctor gnawed his lower lip, and looked at him without smiling. ”I've got ten million blue devils on my back to-night,” he said.
”So I see--so I see.” Rankin was still laughing, but as he continued to look into his old friend's face his own grew grave by reflection. ”You don't believe all that?”
”Oh, you won't mean to. It'll come gradually.” He broke out suddenly, ”Good Heavens, Rankin, give me a serious answer.”
”Answer!” The cabinet-maker's bewilderment was immense. ”Have you asked me anything?”
The doctor turned away to his desk with the pettish gesture of a woman whose inner thoughts are not divined.
”He makes me feel very thick-witted and dense,” Rankin appealed to the two women.
Mrs. Sandworth exonerated him from blame. ”Oh, n.o.body ever can make out what he's driving at. I never try.” She took out a piece of crochet work. ”Lydia, they're at it now. I know the voice Marius gets on.
_Would_ you make this in sh.e.l.l st.i.tch? It's much newer, of course, but they say it don't wash so well.” As Lydia's attention wavered, ”Oh, there's not a particle of use in trying to make out what they're saying.
They just go on and on.”
Rankin was addressing himself to the doctor's back. ”I don't, you know, see anything wicked in making a lot of chairs by machinery instead of a few by hand. I'm no handcraft faddist. I did that in the beginning only because I had to begin somehow to earn my living honestly without being too tied up to folks, and I couldn't think of any other way. But I think, now that you've put the idea into my head--I think it would be a good thing to gather the boys of the neighborhood around me--and, by gracious! the girls too! That's one of my convictions--that girls need very much the same treatment as boys. And if it should develop into a large business (which I doubt strongly), what's the harm? The motive lying back of it would be different from what I so fear and hate in big businesses. You can bet your last cent on one thing, and that is that the main idea would not be to make as much furniture as fast as possible, as cheap as possible, but to make it good, and to make only as much as would leave me and every last one of the folks that work for me time and strength to live--'leisure to be good.' Who said that, anyway?
It's fine.”
”_Hymn to Adversity_,” supplied the doctor, who was better read in the poets than the younger generation. He added, skeptically, ”Could you, though, do any such thing? Wouldn't it run _you_, once you got to going?”
”Well, if worst came to worst--” began Rankin, then changing front, he began again: ”My great-aunt--”