The Big Idea/Chapter 5

IMMY got his job. He wouldn’t have, probably, except for the fact that his message from Mr. Hope enabled him to get an interview with Mr. Cooper, during the course of which Jimmy convinced the office manager that he was an extremely intelligent and likable young man. Since he had no business experience whatever, all Mr. Cooper could think of to give him was a sort of glorified office-boy job, at a salary of fourteen dollars a week.

Jimmy didn’t keep that job very long. Within a month he convinced the office manager that he could dictate business letters, and that his judgment on things he understood could be trusted. Also, Jimmy had made it clear by his attitude during that month that he never would tackle anything that he did not understand thoroughly; his encounter with Mr. Hope had impressed the importance of that on his mind for all time.

So Jimmy was given a desk and a dictating machine, and a steady stream of letters, comparatively unimportant letters at first, was diverted in his direction.

All that summer Jimmy worked very hard. He entered a night school where three evenings a week he studied with a view to getting “dope” on his big idea. He found this study helpful to him in general, but not very useful in giving him specific information on how to burn coal underground, especially since he was determined not to broach the subject directly to any one.

When he had been with the company about a week, Jimmy approached Mr. Hope in the office and thanked him for the job.

“All right,” said the secretary, and smiled. “I’m glad you like it.”

Jimmy felt then that his first impression of Mr. Hope had been quite a wrong one.

“I do,” he answered earnestly. “Thank you very much—did you see Mr. Wentworth yet about that—that idea of mine?”

Mr. Hope looked him steadily in the eyes. “Yes. He said to tell you he’s not interested. Sorry.”

This was hardly a blow to Jimmy, for he had expected as much. But next time he broached the subject—it would be different, then!

“Take my advice, young man,” the secretary went on, “get that foolish stuff out of your head. Stick to your job—you’ll get along—you look as though you had brains.”

“Thanks,” said Jimmy. He tried to avoid sarcasm, “I will.”

Mr. Hope nodded and left him.

That summer was a hard one for Jimmy. Even though he had an all-absorbing idea to fill his thoughts, the utter loneliness of his life was hard to bear. He worked all day at the office. Three evenings a week he spent at the night school; and the others he wandered aimlessly about, going to the movies often and to a play occasionally, and always alone.

At the office Jimmy made many business friends. Every one liked him; his ready smile and his ingenuous manner made friends easily. Jimmy’s work took him constantly into many different departments of the organization, and in each of them he soon found opportunity to learn what there was to know about that particular branch of the work. His system, as he developed it in his mind, was not only to learn about his own job, hut about the jobs of as many others as he possibly could.

It wasn’t so very hard to do either, as he soon found out. There was no particular mystery about business, as he had always supposed, and among the clerks and under officials with whom he was working during this period, the competition, so far as brains was concerned, was not alarming.

Jimmy was not the least inclined to be conceited, but there were at least twenty young men in the company that he told himself he had “skinned to death for brains.”

It was just after his second visit home, and when he had been with the Wentworth Company about three months, that he first made friends with George Cooper outside of the office.

The office manager was a lanky chap of thirty-one. He was smooth-shaven, with big, rough-hewn features; piercing blue eyes, and sparse, sandy hair. His voice had a deep, booming quality, and, around the office, a vigorous note of authority that commanded respect.

But at the theater, where he and Jimmy went that first evening, he was very different—a modest, unassuming, laughing boy, years younger than he appeared during business hours. The change surprised Jimmy tremendously. He immediately lost the awe he had always unconsciously felt for his business superior, without losing any of the respect or admiration; and in consequence felt his own importance and confidence in himself enhanced.

This friendship of Jimmy and George Cooper grew rapidly; until finally, one evening in September, Jimmy felt he could no longer keep his great secret to himself. So he told his friend all about it, and just what Mr. Hope had said.

The office manager was enthusiastic. He knew no more than Jimmy about the feasibility of the plan itself—and Jimmy up to this time had learned very little—but he realized more than Jimmy possibly could how beneficial to the company it would be if it worked. Also, Mr. Cooper had a better idea of how to go about finding out the things Jimmy wanted to know than he had.

So they planned to “dope it out” together, and immediately started spending two evenings a week at the public library looking it up. After which, by Christmas at least, the office manager proposed taking Jimmy to one of the company’s technical men.

“I been thinking, George,” said Jimmy one evening, when they had been working on his idea about a month. “I told Mr. Hope all about this plan of ours that first day. He’s never said a word about it since, except to tell me Mr. Wentworth said it was rotten. It worries me sometimes to think he’s in the secret. I used to think I liked him. But I don’t. I’m afraid of him, somehow. Do you like him?”

“No, I don’t,” said Mr. Cooper decidedly.

“I’ve been wondering,” Jimmy went on, “suppose he wanted to use the idea for his own. It’s good—we know that now. And anybody who knows about it could use it. That’s what worries me—to think Hope knows all about it, too.”

The office manager deliberated on this.

“What could he do if he wanted to?” he asked finally.

“I don’t know; what could he?”

“Nothing that I know of. He told the boss about it—the boss knows it’s your idea. You can trust R. G., Jimmy; he’s as square as they come.”

“I believe you,” said Jimmy. “But just the same—”

“Just the same, Hope will bear watching. You’re right on that. I’ll watch him. But I don’t see what he could do. Probably he’s forgotten all about it by now.”

“I hope so,” said Jimmy fervently.

With the office manager to help him, Jimmy progressed rapidly with his big idea.

It hadn’t taken them more than a few days to discover that the scheme of piping up heat from a fire in the ground was impractical. Then, when they came to study the company’s furnaces, about which Mr. Cooper, being entirely an office man, was almost as ignorant as Jimmy, they found that it was the unconsumed coal gases that could be piped up, not the actual heat—a conclusion that to Isaac Merkle had been immediately obvious.

At this point in their investigations they were jubilant, for they realized that the idea was feasible. Mr. Cooper was for an immediate consultation with one of the technical men of the company, but Jimmy absolutely refused. There were too many who knew about it already. Something might happen. And so the office manager had to give up that plan, and they went ahead, studying the thing out alone.

“I’d rather it took longer,” said Jimmy. “When we get it ready ourselves we’ll put it up to Mr. Wentworth. After that, we can talk to everybody all we want.”

It was just after this—early in November—that Jimmy met Estelle Wentworth socially. And the way it came about was this:

Estelle Wentworth was typically a daughter of the rich, aptly described by that familiar alliteration: pretty, proud and petulant. In all her twenty-one years she had been cared for with that care that only a misguided, adoring mother, a father weak enough to desire peace above all else, and the character-enervating luxuries that unlimited money can give.

Estelle was neither weak, nor vicious. She was only normal—and with her environment and upbringing was just what one would have expected her to be. Her one creed, at the age of twenty-one, was to have a good time. This, somehow, she found increasingly difficult. All the usual forms of pleasure desired by young girls, were freely hers. Dances, parties, the theater and opera, were all lavished upon her.

For a time they sufficed; and yet, because she was a normal girl, no finer or less fine than thousands of others of her race, inevitably the time came when she found herself desiring something more.

Affairs of the heart, which usually play so large a part in feminine adolescence, had never seriously touched Estelle. That, too, was the inevitable result of her environment. Young men admired her, adored her, and plied her with attentions. But Estelle felt herself in some way above them all. She accepted their adulation amusedly, just a little as a princess of the middle ages might have accepted the adulation of her courtiers—or laughed at the antics of her favorite jester—but nothing more.

Perhaps Estelle had no capacity for love; or perhaps, because of what civilization had made her, those men of deeper feelings knew that she had nothing to offer them—and so went their way.

Estelle was mildly interested when she first saw Jimmy that morning in her father’s office. He was a new type to her, so obviously different from any man she had ever met. She had no thought of ever meeting him socially; indeed, the idea then would have filled her with indignation. But the sturdy manliness of him attracted her in spite of herself.

She liked Mr. Leffingwell Hope—better, perhaps, than most of the young men of her acquaintance, for the secretary, seeing in her a practical and easy route for his own self-advancement, had for nearly a year been making himself as charming as possible; but she could not help comparing him to Jimmy.

They were as different as two individuals of the same sex could well be, and although Estelle did not know it, Jimmy did not suffer by the comparison.

Estelle was mildly interested in Jimmy from the moment she first saw him. There was no sentiment in her thoughts of him, merely curiosity. She remembered, too, when he had first seen her, the look of awe that had come to his face. And later she had seen plainly his resentment at her presence in the office. Resentment from a young man was something new to Estelle. It did not make her angry; it piqued her, and she could not forget it.

When Jimmy had been with the company about two weeks Estelle came to the office again, and saw him there. Later she learned from George Cooper how he happened to be there, and what he was doing. She felt a little ashamed of herself at the sudden realization that she was interested in one of her father’s office boys, and decided to forget all about him. Soon after that she went to the seashore with her mother for the summer.

When she returned to the city in the fall the very first time she went to the office she passed Jimmy in the corridor. The change in his appearance was startling. His hair was no longer close-cropped high over his ears. His clothes were those of the city; his whole bearing had changed. Nothing could make Jimmy look in the least foppish. He was still rugged and manly looking, but, Estelle thought, no longer uncouth.

As he passed her he smiled an answer to her nod of recognition. There was no resentment in his smile, but neither was there admiration for her, nor awe. It was just a calm, impersonal smile as though he had already forgotten her existence as soon as he passed.

This piqued Estelle still more—and made her vaguely angry. She sought out George Cooper at his desk.

“I just passed that young man—Mr. Rand, isn’t that his name?—in the corridor,” Estelle began, after they had exchanged a few remarks. “How is he getting on?”

Mr. Cooper was a little surprised at her question, but he did not show it. “He’s getting along fine, Estelle,” he replied with enthusiasm. “Have you met him—I didn’t know that.”

“No,” said Estelle carelessly. “He was in father’s office one morning—I thought he looked interesting. Why?”

“He’s a dandy chap. Not a city boy at all—used to be a coal miner. We’ve been out together a good dead—Marion likes him tremendously.” (Marion was George Cooper’s sister.)

“Oh,” said Estelle. Then, after a moment—“He was going to tell father about some plan he had. Father told me it was some foolish idea. What ever happened to it?”

The office manager hesitated. He rather liked Estelle. She was a silly, vain little thing, but he liked her—perhaps partly because his sister seemed to be her only real girl friend.

“Can you keep a secret, Estelle?”

The girl nodded.

“Honest?” Mr. Cooper’s manner was as boyish with her as it was stern and authoritative toward his office employees.

“Yes—surely.”

“He and I have been working on it together, and—it’s going through!” said the office manager impressively.

“What does father say?” Estelle was thrilled more by the solemnity of Mr. Cooper’s manner than by his words, for she had no idea what it was Jimmy proposed doing.

“That’s why it’s a secret, Estelle. We haven’t put it up to him yet. But we’ve got it all ready—as near as we can without having broached it to any one in the company. And we’re going to spring it in a day or two.”

The office manager was already sorry he had told the girl this much, and he hastened to add:

“You’ll be careful not to mention it, won’t you, Estelle? Not to any one. It wouldn’t be very nice to have it get to your father before we tell it to him ourselves.”

Estelle frowned. “I told you I wouldn’t say anything. I’m not a child.”

“Don’t,” said Mr. Cooper briefly; and then changing suddenly, gaily asked her when she was going to let him take her to the theater again.

“Next Tuesday or Wednesday, if you like,” she replied. Then, as another thought came to her, she added slowly: “To-morrow’s our night at the Metropolitan. Father said I could have all six seats. I thought, perhaps, you and Marion would like to go with me?”

“Fine,” agreed Mr. Cooper cordially.

Estelle hesitated. “And if you say Marion likes this Mr. Rand, it might be all right to take him, too. He would probably enjoy it.”

The unconscious patronage in her tone was not lost on Mr. Cooper. “I’ll ask him if you want me to,” he said with a smile. “He would enjoy going, I’m sure.”

“And I’ll ask two others,” said Estelle. “It’s ‘Boheme’ to-morrow night—it ought to be good.”