"Then I'll accept your resignation."
"But I don't want to resign. I want to be worth still more to the bank so that the bank will be only too glad to pay me more. I don't want to live and die a clerk. That would be stupid for me, and also for the bank."
"Take the walk, Hen. Then come back and see me."
"What good will that do me?"
"As far as I can see, it will enable you to be fired by no less than the Big Chief himself. Tell Morson you are going to do something for me. Walk around and look at the people—thousands of them; they are working! Don't forget that, Hen; working; making regular wages! Good luck, my boy. I've never done this before, but you caught me fishing. I had just hooked a three-pounder," he finished, apologetically.
Hendrik was suffocating as he returned to his cage. He did not think; he felt—felt that everything was wrong with a civilization that kept both wild beasts and bank clerks in cages. He put on his hat, told the head bookkeeper he was going on an errand for Mr. Coster, and left the bank.
The sky was pure blue and the clouds pure white. There was in the air that which even when strained through the bank's window-screens had made Hendrik so restless. To breathe it, outdoors, made the step more elastic, the heartbeats more vigorous, the thoughts more vivid, the resolve stronger. The chimneys were waving white plumes in the bright air—waving toward heaven! He wished to hear the song of freedom of streams escaping from the mountains, of the snow-elves liberated by the sun; to hear birds with the spring in their throats admitting it, and the impatient breeze telling the awakening trees to hurry up with the sap. Instead, he heard the noises that civilized people make when they make money. Also, whenever he ceased to look upward, in the place of the free sunlight and the azure liberty of God's sky, he beheld the senseless scurrying of thousands of human ants bent on the same golden errand.
When a man looks down he always sees dollar-chasing insects—his brothers!
He clenched his fists and changed, by the magic of the season, into a fighting-man. He saw that the ant life of Wall Street was really a battle. Men here were not writing on ledgers, but fighting deserts, and swamps, and mountains, and heat, and cold, and hunger; fighting Nature; fighting her with gold for more gold. It followed that men were fighting men with gold for more gold! So, of course, men were killing men with gold for more gold!
So greatly has civilization advanced since the Jews crucified Him for interfering with business, that to-day man not only is able to use dollars to kill with, but boasts of it.
"Fools!" he thought, having in mind all other living men. After he definitely classified humanity he felt more kindly disposed toward the world.
After all, why should men fight Nature or fight men? Nature was only too willing to let men live who kept her laws; and men were only too willing to love their fellow-men if only dollars were not sandwiched in between human hearts. He saw, in great happy flashes, the comfort of living intelligently, brothers all, employers and employed, rid of the curse of money, the curse of making it, the curse of coining it out of the sweat and sorrow of humanity.
"Fools!" This time he spoke his thought aloud. A hurrying broker's clerk smiled superciliously, recognizing a stock-market loser talking of himself to himself, as they all do. But Hendrik really had in mind bank clerks who, instead of striking off their fetters, caressed them as though they were the flesh of sweethearts; or wept, as though tears could soften steel; or blasphemed, as though curses were cold-chisels! And every year the fetters were made thicker by the blacksmith Habit. To be a bank clerk, now and always; now and always nothing!
He now saw all about him hordes of sheep-hearted Things with pens behind their ears and black-cloth sleeve-protectors, who said, with the spitefulness of eunuchs or magazine editors:
"You also are of us!"
He would not be of them!
He might not be able to change conditions in the world of finance, not knowing exactly how to go about it, but he certainly could change the financial condition of Hendrik Rutgers. He would become a free man. He would do it by getting more money, if not from the bank, from somebody else. In all imperfectly Christianized democracies a man must capitalize his freedom or cease to be free.
He returned to the bank. He was worth thousands to it. This could be seen in his walk. And yet when the cashier saw Hendrik's face he instantly rose from his chair, held up a hand to check unnecessary speech, and said:
"Come on, Rutgers. You are a damned fool, but I have no time to convince you of it. You understand, of course, that you'll never work for us again!"
"I shall tell the president."
"Yes, yes. He'll fire you."
"Not if he is intelligent, he won't," said Rutgers, with assurance.
The cashier looked at him pityingly and retorted: "A long catalogue of your virtues and manifold efficiency will weigh with him as much as two cubic inches of hydrogen. But I warned you."
"I know you did," said Hendrik, pleasantly.
Whereupon Coster frowned and said: "You are in class B—eight hundred dollars a year. In due time you will be promoted to class C—one thousand dollars. You knew our system and what the prospects were when you came to us. Other men are ahead of you; they have been here longer than you. We want to be fair to all. If you were going to be dissatisfied you should not have kept somebody else out of a job."
Hendrik did not know how fair the bank was to clerks in class C. He knew they were not fair to one man in class B. Facts are facts. Arguments are sea-foam.
"You say I kept somebody out of a job?" he asked.
"Yes, you did!"
The cashier's tone was so accusing that Hendrik said:
"Don't call a policeman, Mr. Coster."
"And don't you get fresh, Rutgers. Now see here; you go back and let the rise come in the usual course. I'll give you a friendly tip: once you are in class C you will be more directly under my own eye!"
Instead of feeling grateful for the implied promise, Hendrik could think only that they classified men like cattle. All steers weighing one thousand pounds went into pen B, and so on. This saved time to the butchers, who, not having to stop in order to weigh and classify, were enabled to slit many more throats per day.
He did not know it, but he thought all this because he wished to go fishing. Therefore he said: "I've got to have more money!" His fists clenched and his face flushed. He thought of cattle, of the ox-making bank, of being driven from pen A into pen B, and, in the end, fertilizer. "I've got to!" he repeated, thickly.
"You won't get it, take it from me. To ask for it now simply means being instantly fired."
"Being fired" sounded so much like being freed that Hendrik retorted, pleasantly:
"Mr. Coster, you may yet live to take your orders from me, if I am fired. But if I stay here, you never will; that's sure."
The cashier flushed angrily, opened his mouth, magnanimously closed it, and, with a shrug of his shoulders, preceded Hendrik Rutgers into the private office of the president.
"Mr. Goodchild," said Coster, so deferentially that Hendrik looked at him in surprise for a full minute before the surprise changed into contempt.
Mr. Goodchild, the president, did not even answer. He frowned, deliberately walked to a window and stared out of it sourly. A little deal of his own had gone wrong, owing to the stupidity of a subordinate.
He had lost money!
He was a big man with jowls and little puffs under the eyes; also suspicions of purple in cheeks and nose and suspicions of everybody in his eyes. Presently he turned and spat upon the intruders. He did it with one mild little word:
"Well?"
He then confined his scowl to the cashier. The clerk was a species of the human