Edwin Lefevre

“ The harder the fight, the better! Fight the world, life, hell, Thompson, everything, and everybody, the more the better. He would die fighting, with his soul full of rage. The great reward was the end of all trouble!
When a man commits suicide in a really glorious way he grows calm. How can petty annoyances disturb a heroic corpse? Tommy grew calm. He would have to leave Dayton, but Dayton had taught him just one thing—that beyond all question there was some place in the world where Thomas Francis Leigh would prove his value! ”

“ Tommy's entire life-to-be passed pageant-like before his mind's eye in a twinkling. The banners were proudly borne by Tommy's emotions; and Tommy's resolve to do what he must was the drum-major.
“Sure thing!” answered' Tommy. He felt the false note in his reply even before he saw the change that came over his father's face. “Yes, sir,” pursued Mr. Thomas Leigh, in a distinctly middle-aged voice. “I don't know what he wants, but I know what I want. And if I want to be a man and he wants me to be one, I can't see what's to hinder either of us. ”

“ Tommy felt completely at his ease. “Well,” he began, and paused in order to visualize the shop and the men and their daily duties, “you tell your men what they must do to keep their jobs. Their product must always be the same, day after day. At college they tell a man what he must do in order that he himself may become the product of his own work. A man here is a cog in a machine. At college he is both a cog and a complete machine.” Tommy looked doubtfully at Mr. Thompson, who said:
“You are right—and very wrong. In the men themselves, Tommy, what is the difference?” ”

“ In order to think about his father Tommy found himself compelled to think about himself. The secret had driven him to Dayton. It had taken away his happiness, and in exchange had given to him Thompson, Byrnes, Grosvenor, Nevin, La Grange, and the men in the shop—more real friends than he had in New York. It had given to him not only something to do, but something to do gladly.
The friends and the work had increased his own power to fight. He must always fight everybody, everything that antagonized his friends and his work. ”

“ There was nobody in New York to whom he could talk. In Dayton there was no reason why he should not tell everything to Mr. Thompson or to Bill Byrnes or even to Mr. Grosvenor. They would stand by him after they knew. They were men who would be loyal to him. Therefore, he must be loyal to them, to the men who would ask him to do his work, knowing he was not to blame. The best men in the world these, his good friends, who alone of all men would understand how a man might do for love what his father had done. And here in New York where his father lived nobody would understand! ”

“ I was thinking that in the shop I can learn only what a mechanic thinks of the product, and what the shipping departments think of moving it away. What the buyer thinks, I don't know. So I don't know whether I'd like to be a salesman.”
“They get good money. You'd like that. Think again before you answer.”
Tommy thought. To him money meant only one thing: Not what one hundred thousand dollars, for instance, might buy for him, but what seventeen thousand dollars—no more, no less—would do for his soul's peace. ”

“ Thompson was frowning so earnestly that Tommy felt a sharp pang of mortification at his own failure to grasp exactly what the job meant. But Thompson went on:
“You will find, Tommy, that even wise men can be unreasonable and square men can be petty and brave men can whine—at times. But in the end their errors correct themselves, just as political fallacies do in the affairs of a nation. You must help the men to feel toward the Tecumseh as you do. It is a big job. If you make good I can tell you that all of us will be in your debt, no matter what your salary may be.” ”

“ Leigh, obstinately. “Thomas, bear in mind that you are not a business man. You don't understand that money is never to be had merely for the asking. Your problem is to get the money as quickly as possible.”
Mr. Leigh was frowning, full of a feverish impatience that alarmed Tommy. To him his father had always been a slave of routine and method, almost an automaton. Evidently the old man's nerves were overwrought, and there was no telling the reason. But his desire to help his son was prompted by love and loyalty to the living and the dead. ”

“ Thompson looked at Tommy not at all quizzically, not at all interestedly, not at all curiously, but steadily, without any suggestion of the imminence of either a smile or a frown.
Tommy returned the look neither nervously nor boldly. He was certain that Thompson knew men in overalls and men in evening clothes, old men and young men, equally well, equally understandingly.
“What makes you think,” asked Thompson, “that you have the makings of a man in you?” ”

“ By the time Tommy Leigh returned to his house, once the abode of fear, he was so brave that he could think calmly. Thinking calmly is always conducive to thinking forgivingly, and forgiveness strengthens love.
“Poor old dad!” he said, and thought of how his father had loved his mother and what he had done for his only son. He would stick to his father through thick and thin.
That much settled, Tommy thought of himself. That made him think of the luncheon at Sherry's with Rivington Willetts. Marion Willetts would be there. ”

“ La Grange told him one day, because he saw the disappointment in Tommy's eyes, “we are up against a series of compromises. One must try to lose as little as possible in one place in order to gain more somewhere else. It is a matter of weighing profits and losses.”
“You must be a bookkeeper under your vest,” retorted Tommy, “you are so struck with the philosophical value of items. Life isn't a ledger. 'Profit-and-loss' was invented as a sort of wastebasket for the mistakes industrial corporations make through their mechanical experts.” ”

“ But you were a rich man's son and I had to save you from your own father! The love that had made me a thief might easily make me a fool!” Tommy shook his head, but his father continued: “Every time you sent me those remittances from Dayton—Tommy, Tommy, they nearly killed me! But I allowed you to think that you were the son of a thief and that you had to make good my crime, knowing that if you behaved like a man then, you would be a man after you discovered that you did not have to pay back that money. And you are a man, aren't you, Tommy?” ”

“ Since they thought this a very important point, Tommy asked the lawyer, “Could we get a patent on that?”
“Yes, if it's new,” answered Kemble.
“Sure it's new. There isn't any other in the market,” said Bill.
“That's a fact,” chimed in Tommy.
“I'll have to look into that,” said the patent lawyer, calmly.
“If there was any patent, people would be using it, wouldn't they?” challenged Bill, unaware that all inventors make the same point at their first interview with their patent lawyers. ”

“ Sell me a car!” Tommy Leigh looked him boldly in the eye and answered confidently:
“Can't!”
“Why not?”
“Because it is impossible.”
“Why?”
“You are you. You give me a problem that can't be answered except by an answer to quite a different problem. You know cars. You have cars. You make cars. You really don't want me to sell you a car. You want me to talk to a groceryman who has never spent more than seventeen cents for recreation, or to a speed maniac with ten thousand dollars a year pocket money. It wouldn't be Thompson. Nobody could sell a car to Thompson. ”

“ It came to Tommy that Bill, too, had his cross to bear, and it was not of his own making—the sister for whom he must work, about whom he never talked. Yet Bill had shared his secret with Tommy, and Tommy couldn't share his with anybody! The more he thought about it the more he liked Bill. And the more he liked Bill the more he desired to help Bill in his experiments with the carburetor. It was a man's duty to help a friend. Tommy told himself so and agreed with himself. ”

“ Leigh, sternly, “figures don't speak to the average man, and often not even to the expert. The man behind the figures—that's what counts.”
An icy hand squeezed Tommy's heart. An expert at figures had paid for his education. The only figures that now came into his throbbing mind were: seventeen thousand dollars! And the man behind those figures was his own father!
“You must see Willetts again,” said Mr. Leigh, quietly. “Perhaps I'd better explain the figures to him myself, Thomas.” ”

“ Leigh had lived her seventeen months of married life—it was where Tommy was bom and where she died. The furniture was chiefly old family pieces which, without his being aware of it, had made Tommy feel at home in the houses of the very wealthy friends he had made at college. It is something to have been American for two hundred years. Family furniture reminds you of it every day.
Tommy wondered, curiously rather than anxiously, how much his father would allow him, and whether it would be wiser to argue like a man against its inadequacy or to plead like a boy for an increase ”

“ Leigh, when you work with the company's machine in the company's shop in the company's time, the company has a claim on your invention. Oh, yes, I could tell you a thousand stories of fellows who—”
Bill's voice grew so bitter that Tommy broke in: “You make me tired, Bill. If you get to think that everybody's a crook, you'll find everybody not only willing, but delighted to do you. Do you know why? Because everybody that you take for a crook will take you for one, too.” ”

“ This gave him the buyer's point of view—an invaluable gift, though he not only did not know it, but felt sorry he had it. To conceal part of the truth, to be only technically veracious, to have a customer say, “You did not tell me thus and so when you sold me that car!” was an apprehension he could not quite shake off. All he could conceal was one thing, and in his introspective moments at home he almost convinced himself that his secret, by making it difficult for him to become an enthusiastically unscrupulous salesman, was interfering materially with the success of Thomas Francis Leigh. ”

“ There is a vast difference between a capitalist and a captain of industry.
“I'm still on it, Colonel,” replied Tommy, thinking of an opening.
“H'm! Can't you find something for a needy friend to do in Dayton? Rivington”—he used the elaborate sarcasm of the fond father who can't control his children because his own program changes daily—“is very anxious to go into business.”
“Tommy's business is automobiles and so is mine,” cut in Rivington, pleasantly. “I am learning the fine points of the car before I go on the road.” ”

“ Bill was again at work before Tommy walked out of the room. A great world this, thought Tommy, in which each man had his work, in which he could think of himself and gratify his personal desires, and withal one in which the work of each man would harmonize and merge with the work of the others. He felt a greater admiration for Thompson than ever, but he also began to feel that even without Thompson it was well to work for the Tecumseh Motor Company. If Thompson lived he certainly would make the Tecumseh greater than Thompson. ”

“ After all, what was the secret but the wonderful story of an old man's unreasoning love for his only son, of a loyalty to his wife so steadfast that death had but made it stronger?
Well, as soon as the money was paid back the first thing Tommy would do would be to tell Thompson all about it. Then Tommy could be proud of his father's deed before all men, who would understand. A man who would do such a thing for a son was a big man. ”

“ I don't want any man for a stockholder who expects the company to run its business as he would not have the nerve or the conscience to run his own. I am going not only to give, but to take a chance in giving. The statement I have prepared for you here is for your guidance, that you may make my intentions clear to your friends. You don't have to call attention to the big fortunes that have been made in the automobile business, because I wish you to interest only people who already are interested in Tom Leigh.”
Tommy's feeling of relief had grown as Mr. Thompson spoke. ”

“ At the luncheon he was a pleasant-faced chap, well set-up, with an air of youth rather than of juvenility, as though he were a young business man. If he had not come naturally by it this impression of business manhood might have degenerated into one of those unfortunate assumptions of superiority that so irritate in the young because the old know that age is nothing to be proud of, age with its implied wisdom being the most exasperating of all fallacies. ”

“ So Tommy contented himself with looking judicial and told Bill:
“This carburetor business is becoming an obsession with you. Give it a rest and then go back to it fresh. When you get a hobby and ride it to death—''
“Grandpop,” interrupted Bill, unimpressed by Tommy's octogenarian wisdom, “the moment I see a carburetor that suits me, no matter whose it is, I'll have no more interest in the problem than I have in the potatoes in the neighbors' cellars.” ”

“ At college such boys are active citizens in their community, concerned with sports and class politics, and the development of their immemorial strategy against existing institutions. And for the same sad reason of youth Tommy could not possibly know that he was now standing, not on a rug in his father's dining-room, but on the top of life's first hill, with a pleasant valley below him—and one steep mountain beyond. ”

“ Therefore, the men with whom Tommy must associate, in the intimacy of boarding-house life, should be men from whom he could learn all about Tecumseh motors.
The one compensation of tragedy is that it strengthens the strong; and only the strong can help the world by first helping their own souls. The secret was working for Tommy instead of against him.
“I say, Mr. Nevin.” There was in Tommy's attitude toward his guide not only the appeal of frankly acknowledged helplessness, but also a suggestion of confidence in the other man's ability and willingness to answer understandingly. ”

“ Thompson may tell you what to specialize on. In the mean time just breathe, Tommy. Most people have a habit of telling themselves that a certain thing is very difficult. From that to saying it is impossible to understand is a short step, and that keeps them from trying to understand. Details can be so complex and intricate as to hide first principles.”
Tommy nodded gratefully, but in his heart of hearts he yearned for details, because he remembered that he had not seen any pleasure in selling cars until he had begun to sell, in his mind, his own kerosene-car. ”