Broken to the Plow. Charles Caldwell Dobie
"My, but isn't she Dutch, though!" frequently had escaped her.
Somehow the characterization had struck Fred Starratt as very apt even in his younger days. And as he shook hands with Mrs. Hilmer these same words came to mind.
Hilmer disturbed him. He was a huge man with a rather well-chiseled face, considering his thickness of limb, and his blond hair fell in an untidy shower about his prominent and throbbing temples. Fred felt him to be a man without any inherited social graces, yet he contrived to appear at ease. Was it because he was disposed to let the women chatter? No, that could not account for his acquired suavity, for silence is very often much more awkward than even clumsy attempts at speech.
As the dinner progressed, Fred Starratt began to wonder just what had tempted Helen to arrange this little dinner party for the Hilmers. When she had broached the matter, her words had scarcely conveyed their type. A woman who had helped his wife out at the Red Cross Center during the influenza epidemic could be of almost any pattern. But immediately he had gauged her as one of his wife's own kind. Helen and her women friends were not incompetent housewives, but their efforts leaned rather to an escape from domestic drudgery than to a patient yielding to its yoke. If they discussed housekeeping at all, it was with reference to some new labor-saving device flashing across the culinary horizon. But Mrs. Hilmer's conversation thrilled with the pride of her gastronomic achievements without any reference to the labor involved. She invested her estate as housekeeper for her husband with a commendable dignity. It appeared that she took an enormous amount of pains with the simplest dishes. It was incredible, for instance, how much thought and care and time went into a custard which she described at great length for Helen's benefit.
"But that takes hours and hours!" Helen protested.
"But it's a real custard," Hilmer put in, dryly.
Fred Starratt felt himself flushing. Hilmer's scant speech had the double-edged quality of most short weapons. Could it be that his guest was sneering by implication at the fare that Helen had provided? No, that was hardly it, because Helen had provided good fare, even if she had prepared most of it vicariously. Hilmer's covert disdain was more impersonal, yet it remained every whit as irritating, for all that. Perhaps a bit more so, since Fred Starratt found it hard to put a finger on its precise quality. He had another taste of it later when the inevitable strike gossip intruded itself. It was Helen who opened up, repeating her verbal passage with the butcher.
"They want eight hours a day and forty-five dollars a week," she finished. "I call that ridiculous!"
"Why?" asked Hilmer, abruptly.
"For a butcher?" Helen countered, with pained incredulity.
"How long does your husband work?" Hilmer went on, calmly.
"I'm sure I don't know. How long do you work, Fred?"
Starratt hesitated. "Let me see … nine to twelve is three hours … one to five is four hours—seven in all."
Hilmer smiled with cryptic irritation. "There you have it! … What's wrong with a butcher wanting eight hours?"
Helen shrugged. "Well, a butcher doesn't have to use his brains very much!" she threw out, triumphantly.
"And your husband does. I see!"
Starratt winced. He felt his wife's eye turned expectantly upon him. "Seven hours is a normal day's work," he put in, deciding to ignore Hilmer's insolence, "but as an employer of an office force you must know how much overtime the average clerk puts in. We're not afraid to work a little bit more than we're paid for. We're thinking of something else besides money."
Hilmer buttered a roll. "What, for instance?"
"Why, the firm's interest … our own advancement, of course … the enlarged capacity that comes with greater skill and knowledge." He leaned back in his seat with a self-satisfied smile.
Hilmer laid down his butter knife very deliberately. "That's very well put," he said; "very well put, indeed! And would you mind telling me just what your duties are in the office where you work?"
"I'm in the insurance business … fire. We have a general agency here for the Pacific coast. That means that all the subagents in the smaller towns report the risks they have insured to us. I'm what they call a map clerk. I enter the details of every risk on bound maps of the larger towns which every insurance company is provided with. In this way we know just how much we have at risk in any building, block, or section of any city. And we are able to keep our liability within proper limits."
"You do this same thing … for seven hours every day … not to speak of overtime?"
"Yes."
"And how long have you been doing this?"
"About five years."
"And how long will you continue to do it?"
"God knows!"
Hilmer rested both hands on the white cloth. They were shapely hands in spite of their size, with healthy pink nails, except on a thumb and forefinger, which had been badly mangled. "For five years you have worked seven hours every day on this routine … and in order to enlarge your capacity and skill and knowledge you have worked many hours overtime on this same routine, I suppose without any extra pay … It seems to me that a man who only gets a chance to exercise with dumb-bells might keep in condition, but he'd hardly grow more skillful … Of course, that still leaves two theories intact—working for your own advancement … and the interest of your firm. I suppose the advancement has come, I suppose you've been paid for your overtime … in increased salary."
Helen made a scornful movement. "If you call an increase of ten dollars a month in two years an advancement," she ventured, bitterly.
Starratt flushed.
"That leaves only one excuse for overtime. And that excuse is usually a lie. Why should you have the interest of your firm at heart when it does nothing for you beyond what it is forced to do?"
Fred Starratt bared his teeth in sudden snapping anger. "Well, and what do you do, Mr. Hilmer, for your clerks?"
"Nothing … absolutely nothing … unless they demand it. And even then it's only the exceptional man who can force me into a corner. The average clerk in any country is like a gelded horse. He's been robbed of his power by education … of a sort. He's a reasonable, rational, considerate beast that can be broken to any harness."
"What do you want us to do? Go on a strike and heave bricks into your plate-glass window? … What would you do in our place?"
"I wouldn't be there, to begin with. I've heaved bricks in my day." He leaned forward, exhibiting his smashed thumb and forefinger. "I killed the man who did that to me. I was born in a Norwegian fishing village and after a while I followed the sea. That's a good school for action. And what education you get is thrashed into you. The little that sticks doesn't do much more than toughen you. And if you don't want any more it does well enough. Later on, if you have a thirst for knowledge, you drink the brand you pick yourself and it doesn't go to your head. Now with you … you didn't have any choice. You drank up what they handed out and, at the age when you could have made a selection, your taste was formed … by others … I don't mind people kicking at the man who works with his hands if they know what they're talking about. But most of them don't. They get the thing second hand. They're chock full of loyalty to superiors and systems and governments, just from habit … I've worked with my hands, and I've fought for a half loaf of bread with a dirk knife, and I know all the dirty, rotten things of life by direct contact. So when I disagree with the demands of the men who build my vessels I know why I'm disagreeing. And I usually do disagree … because if they've got guts enough in them they'll fight. And I like a good fight. That's why potting clerks is such a tame business. It's almost as sickening as a rabbit drive."
He finished with a gesture of contempt and reached for his goblet of water.
Starratt decided not to dodge the issue; if Hilmer wished to throw any further mud he was perfectly