The Rules of the Game Part 2

"What?" Bob inquired.

"Verify it, check it over, compare it," snapped Harvey, impatiently.

Bob took the list, and with infinite pains which, nevertheless, could not prevent him from occasionally losing the place in the bewilderment of so many similar figures, he managed to discover that he had omitted three and miscopied two. He corrected these mistakes with ink and returned the list to Harvey. Harvey looked sourly at the ink marks, and gave the boy another list to copy.

Bob found this task, which lasted until noon, fully as exhilarating as the other. When he returned his copies he ventured an inquiry.

"What are these?" he asked.

"Descriptions," snapped Harvey.

In time he managed to reason out the fact that they were descriptions of land; that each item of the many hundreds meant a separate tract. Thus the first line of his first copy, translated, would have read as follows:

"The southwest quarter of the northwest quarter of section number four, towns.h.i.+p number six, north, range number twenty-six, west."

--And that it represented forty acres of timber land. The stupendous nature of such holdings made him gasp, and he gasped again when he realized that each of his mistakes meant the misplacement on the map of enough for a good-sized farm. Nevertheless, as day succeeded day, and the lists had no end, the mistakes became more difficult to avoid. The S, W, E, and N keys on the typewriter bothered him, hypnotized him, forced him to strike fantastic combinations of their own. Once Harvey entered to point out to him an impossible N.S.

Over his lists Harvey, the second bookkeeper, and Fox held long consultations. Then Bob leaned back in his office chair to examine for the hundredth time the framed photographs of logging crews, winter scenes in the forest, record loads of logs; and to speculate again on the maps, deer heads, and hunting trophies. At first they had appealed to his imagination. Now they had become too familiar. Out the window were the palls of smoke, gigantic buildings, creva.s.se-like streets, and swirling winds of Chicago.

Occasionally men would drift in, inquiring for the heads of the firm.

Then Fox would hang one leg over the arm of his swinging chair, light a cigar, and enter into desultory conversation. To Bob a great deal of time seemed thus to be wasted. He did not know that big deals were decided in apparently casual references to business.

Other lists varied the monotony. After he had finished the tax lists he had to copy over every description a second time, with additional statistics opposite each, like this:

S.W. 1/4 of N.W. 1/4, T. 4 N.R., 17, W. Sec. 32, W.P. 68, N. 16, H. 5.

The last characters translated into: "White pine, 68,000 feet; Norway pine, 16,000 feet; hemlock, 5,000 feet," and that inventoried the standing timber on the special forty acres.

And occasionally he tabulated for reference long statistics on how Camp 14 fed its men for 32 cents a day apiece, while Camp 32 got it down to 27 cents.

That was all, absolutely all, except that occasionally they sent him out to do an errand, or let him copy a wordy contract with a great many _whereases_ and _wherefores_.

Bob little realized that nine-tenths of this timber--all that wherein S P (sugar pine) took the place of W P--was in California, belonged to his own father, and would one day be his. For just at this time the princ.i.p.al labour of the office was in checking over the estimates on the Western tract.

Bob did his best because he was a true sportsman, and he had entered the game, but he did not like it, and the slow, sleepy monotony of the office, with its trivial tasks which he did not understand, filled him with an immense and cloying languor. The firm seemed to be dying of the sleeping sickness. Nothing ever happened. They filed their interminable statistics, and consulted their interminable books, and marked squares off their interminable maps, and droned along their monotonous, unimportant life in the same manner day after day. Bob was used to out-of-doors, used to exercise, used to the animation of free human intercourse. He watched the clock in spite of himself. He made mistakes out of sheer weariness of spirit, and in the footing of the long columns of figures he could not summon to his a.s.sistance the slow, painstaking enthusiasm for accuracy which is the sole salvation of those who would get the answer. He was not that sort of chap.

But he was not a quitter, either. This was life. He tried conscientiously to do his best in it. Other men did; so could he.

The winter moved on somnolently. He knew he was not making a success.

Harvey was inscrutable, taciturn, not to be approached. Fox seemed to have forgotten his official existence, although he was hearty enough in his morning greetings to the young man. The young bookkeeper, Archie, was more friendly, but even he was a being apart, alien, one of the strangely accurate machines for the putting down and docketing of these innumerable and unimportant figures. He would have liked to know and understand Bob, just as the latter would have liked to know and understand him, but they were separated by a wide gulf in which whirled the nothingnesses of training and temperament. However, Archie often pointed out mistakes to Bob before the sardonic Harvey discovered them.

Harvey never said anything. He merely made a blue pencil mark in the margin, and handed the doc.u.ment back. But the weariness of his smile!

One day Bob was sent to the bank. His business there was that of an errand boy. Discovering it to be sleeting, he returned for his overcoat.

Harvey was standing rigid in the door of the inner office, talking to Fox.

"He has an ingrained inaccuracy. He will never do for business," Bob caught.

Archie looked at him pityingly.

III

The winter wore away. Bob dragged himself out of bed every morning at half-past six, hurried through a breakfast, caught a car--and hoped that the bridge would be closed. Otherwise he would be late at the office, which would earn him Harvey's marked disapproval. Bob could not see that it mattered much whether he was late or not. Generally he had nothing whatever to do for an hour or so. At noon he ate disconsolately at a cheap saloon restaurant. At five he was free to go out among his own kind--with always the thought before him of the alarm clock the following morning.

One day he sat by the window, his clean, square chin in his hand, his eyes lost in abstraction. As he looked, the winter murk parted noiselessly, as though the effect were prearranged; a blue sky shone through on a glint of bluer water; and, wonder of wonders, there through the grimy dirty roar of Adams Street a single, joyful robin note flew up to him.

At once a great homesickness overpowered him. He could see plainly the half-sodden gra.s.s of the campus, the budding trees, the red "gym"

building, and the crowd knocking up flies. In a little while the shot putters and jumpers would be out in their sweaters. Out at Regents'

Field the runners were getting into shape. Bob could almost hear the creak of the rollers smoothing out the tennis courts; he could almost recognize the voices of the fellows perching about, smell the fragrant reek of their pipes, savour the sweet spring breeze. The library clock boomed four times, then clanged the hour. A rush of feet from all the recitation rooms followed as a sequence, the opening of doors, the murmur of voices, occasionally a shout. Over it sounded the sharp, half-petulant advice of the coaches and the little trainer to the athletes. It was getting dusk. The campus was emptying. Through the trees shone lights. And Bob looked up, as he had so often done before, to see the wonder of the great dome against the afterglow of sunset.

Harvey was examining him with some curiosity.

"Copied those camp reports?" he inquired.

Bob glanced hastily at the clock. He had been dreaming over an hour.

A little later Fox came in; and a little after that Harvey returned bringing in his hand the copies of the camp reports, but instead of taking them directly to Bob for correction, as had been his habit, he laid them before Fox. The latter picked them up and examined them. In a moment he dropped them on his desk.

"Do you mean to tell me," he demanded of Harvey, "that _seventeen_ only ran ten thousand? Why, it's preposterous! Saw it myself. It has a half-million on it, if there's a stick. Let's see Parsons's letter."

While Harvey was gone, Fox read further in the copy.

"See here, Harvey," he cried, "something's dead wrong. We never cut all this hemlock. Why, hemlock's 'way down."

Harvey laid the original on the desk. After a second Fox's face cleared.

"Why, this is all right. There were 480,000 on _seventeen_. And that hemlock seems to have got in the wrong column. You want to be a little more careful, Jim. Never knew that to happen before. Weren't out with the boys last night, were you?"

But Harvey refused to respond to frivolity.

"It's never happened before because I never let it happen before," he replied stiffly. "There have been mistakes like that, and worse, in almost every report we've filed. I've cut them out. Now, Mr. Fox, I don't have much to say, but I'd rather do a thing myself than do it over after somebody else. We've got a good deal to keep track of in this office, as you know, without having to go over everybody else's work too."

"H'm," said Fox, thoughtfully. Then after a moment, "I'll see about it."

Harvey went back to the outer office, and Fox turned at once to Bob.

"Well, how is it?" he asked. "How did it happen?"

"I don't know," replied Bob. "I'm trying, Mr. Fox. Don't think it isn't that. But it's new to me, and I can't seem to get the hang of it right away."

"I see. How long you been here?"

"A little over four months."

Fox swung back in his chair leisurely.