The Empty Sack

"Mr. Collingham will see you in his office before you go."

Having thus become the Voice of Fate, Miss Ruddick, shirt-waisted and daintily shod, slipped away between the pens where clerks were preening themselves before leaving their desks for the day.

The old man to whom she had spoken raised his head in the mild surprise of an ox disturbed while grazing. He, too, was leaving his desk for the day, arranging his work with the tidy care of one for whom pens, ink, and ledgers were the vital things of life. Finishing his task, his hands trembled. His smile trembled, too, when a young man in a neighboring pen called out in tones which mingled sarcasm with encouragement:

"Good luck, old top! Goin' to get your raise at last!"

It was what he repeated to himself as he shuffled after Miss Ruddick. He was obliged to repeat it in order to steady his step. He was obliged to steady his step because some fifteen or twenty pairs of eyes from all the pens in the office were following him as he went along. It was the last bit of pride in the man marching up to face a firing squad.

He had reached the glass door on which the word "Exit" could be traced in reversed letters, when a breezy young fellow of twenty startled him by a sudden clap on the shoulder. The boy had not come from a pen, but from the more distant portion of the bank where a line of tellers' cages faced the public.

"Hello, dad! Tell ma I'll be home for supper. Off now for a plunge at the gym."

The boy passed on, leaving behind a vision of gleaming teeth and the echo of gay tones.

Opening a glass door and entering a passageway, the old man stumbled along it till another door, standing open, showed Miss Ruddick, beside her typewriter, assorting her papers before going home. Miss Ruddick was a competent woman of thirty-five. She was in her present position of stenographer-secretary to the head of the banking house because Mr. Bickley, the efficiency expert, for whose opinion Mr. Collingham had a kind of reverence, had selected her for the job. Miss Ruddick cultivated her efficiency as another woman cultivates her voice or another her gift for dancing. Throwing off the weaknesses that spring from affection and softness of heart, she had steeled and oiled herself into a swiftly working, surely judging, and wholly impersonal business automaton. Ten years ago she would have felt sorry for a man in Josiah Follett's predicament. She would have felt sorry for him now had she not learned to her cost that sympathy diminished the accuracy of her work. Now she could turn him off as easily as an executioner the man condemned to death.

As a matter of fact, she knew that ten minutes previously the efficiency expert had been closeted with Mr. Collingham, dealing with this very case. With her own ears she had heard Mr. Bickley say:

"You will do as you think best, Mr. Collingham. Only, I can't help reminding you that once you admit any principle but that of supply and demand, business methods are at an end."

Miss Ruddick knew Mr. Collingham's inner struggle because she had been through it herself; but she knew, too, that to Mr. Collingham the efficiency expert was much what his physician is to a king. His advice may be distasteful, but it is a command. The most merciful thing now was rapidity of action, as with the application of the guillotine. It was mercy, therefore, to throw open instantly the door of Mr. Collingham's office, so that Josiah was forced to enter.

He stood meekly, feeling, doubtless, as the psalmist felt when all the ends of the world had come upon him. Confusedly he was saying to himself that all the threads of his laborious life, from the time when, as a boy in Canada, he had begun to earn his living at sixteen, till now, when he was sixty-three, had been drawn together at just this point, where he was either to get his raise or else--

The suspense was terrible. As the August Presence into which he had been ushered was engaged in examining the contents of a lower drawer of the flat-topped desk at which It was seated, It was only partly visible. All Josiah could see was the shoulder of a portly form, the edge of a pear-shaped pearl in a plum-colored tie, and a temple of grizzled hair. The clerk moved forward, coming to a halt midway between the door and the desk till the Presence should recognize his approach by raising Its head.

The Presence didn't quite raise Its head. It merely glanced upward in a casual, sidelong way, continuing the inspection of the drawer.

"Well, Follett, I suppose you know what I've got to say?"

Follett betrayed the fact that he did know.

"Is it the same as you said two years ago, sir?"

Thus challenged, the Presence lifted itself, becoming to the full Bradley Collingham, the distinguished banker, philanthropist, and American citizen, so widely and favorably known for his sympathetic personality. The essence of these traits rang in the appealing quality of his tone.

"What do you think, Follett? I told you then that you were not earning your salary. You haven't been earning it since. What can I do?"

"I could work harder, sir. I could stay overtime, when none of the young fellows want to."

"That wouldn't do any good, Follett. It isn't the way we do business."

"I've been five years with you, sir, and all my life between one banking house and another, in this country and Canada. In my humble way I've helped to build the banking business up."

"And you've been paid, haven't you? I really don't see that you've anything to complain of."

There was no severity in this response. It was made only because the necessities of the case required it, as Follett had the justice to perceive.

"I'm not complaining, sir. I only don't see how I'm going to live."

The voice already distressed became more so.

"But that isn't my affair, is it, now? I'm running a business, not a charitable institution. It isn't as if you'd been with us twenty or thirty years. You've shifted about a good deal in your time--"

"I've had to better myself, sir-with a family."

"Quite so. And once you admit any principle but that of supply and demand business methods are at an end. Don't think that this isn't as hard for me as it is for you, Follett, but--"

"If it was as hard for you as it is for me, sir, you'd--"

But, the possibilities here being dangerous, the banker was forced to cut in:

"Besides, you'll get another job. Stairs will write you any kind of recommendation you ask for."

"Recommendations won't do me any good, sir, once I'm fired for old age. That's a worse brand on you than coming out of jail."

The discussion growing painful, the banker rose to put an end to it. Even so, he had something still to say to justify himself.

"It isn't as if I hadn't warned you of this, Follett. You've had two years in which"-it was hard to find the right phrase-"in which to provide for your future."

The clerk was unable to repress a dim, faraway smile.

"Two years in which to provide for my future-on forty-five a week! And me with five mouths to feed, to say nothing of Teddy, who pays his board!"

The banker found an opening.

"I made a place for him-didn't I, now?-as soon as he was released from the navy. He ought to be able to help you."

"He does help, sir, as far as a young fellow can on eighteen a week with his own expenses to take care of. But I've two little girls still at school, and another, my eldest-"

A hint of embarrassment emphasized the banker's words as he began moving forward to show his visitor to the door.

"I understand that she's engaged as an artist's model. That, too, ought to bring you in something."

"I suppose Mr. Robert told you that, sir."

This was inadvertent on Follett's part, and a mistake. Any other distinguished man would have stiffened at the use of the name of a member of his family in a connection like the present one. Bradley Collingham was admirably temperate in saying:

"I don't talk of such matters with my son. I merely understood that your eldest girl was earning something-"

"She poses six hours a week for Mr. Hubert Wray, at a dollar an hour."

"She could probably get more engagements. I hear-I forget who told me-that she's the type these artist people like to put into their pictures."

Finding himself obliged to keep step with his employer, Follett felt as if he was walking to his soul's dead-march. Only the force of the conventions in which everybody lives enabled him to go on making conversation.

"We don't much like the occupation for a daughter of ours, sir; and, besides, there's lots who think that being an artist's model isn't respectable."

"Still, if she can earn good money at it-"

To Collingham's relief, they were at the door, which he opened significantly and without more words. Follett looked into the outer world as represented by Miss Ruddick's office as into an abyss. For the minute it seemed too awful a void to step into. When his watery blue eyes again sought Collingham's face, it was with the dumb question, "Must I?" which the banker himself could only meet with Mr. Bickley's manfulness.

He, too, spoke only with his eyes: "You must, my poor Follett. There's no help for it. You and I are both caught up into a vast machine. I can't act otherwise than as I'm doing, and I know you don't expect it."

Thus Follett stepped over the threshold and the door closed behind him. So short a time had passed since he had gone the other way that Miss Ruddick was still beside her desk, putting away her papers. Follett didn't look at her, but she looked at him, finding herself compelled to hark back to Mr. Bickley's axioms to check the tears she couldn't allow to rise.