My Personal Devil

My Personal Devil By Eva Navone I like to remember the buzz that went through the old of- fice at home when it became known that I, Darrell Williams, was being sent to the Pacific Coast as manager of the new plant. It was the first glory I had ever had. My promotion was so unexpected that I suppose it turned my head. My starveling soul dared to crawl up and look out of my eyes. At last I was somebody — after twenty years in the service of the company. I suppose it is a strange fancy, but I have never been able to get over the idea that when my soul ascended from its twenty-year-old prison, the dark cavern where it had languished had been too long filled for nature to endure a vacuum, and the devil was not long in slipping in. How else can I account for the surprising things I did? He urged me to be even with the world. I picked out honest, ambitious young men to work for me. I selected pretty girls, all of them young. Kathleen Riley I had to keep ; she had served some years while a small office was our sole representation in the West. She had done her work well, and I could not dismiss her, though I should have preferred to. She was not beautiful, she was not young, she knew too much, she looked at me in a way that made me squirm. How could the scratching devil within me expect to hide from such eyes? My office force — every one energetic, young, anxious to get ahead — I changed from employees who held their heads up and were proud of their house, to sneaking, clock-watching wage- slaves. All my life no one had expected more of me than that I should slide through my work with the smallest possible margin; and now, so long as my management passed muster, why should I concern myself about the added efficiency my clerks' good-will would have brought to the business? Such profit would never come into my pocket. Miss Riley I could not change. She stuck to her work as conscientiously as before. At first she tried to make things pleasant for me; something of the hospitality of the California pioneer must have come down to her, and she had the instinct of the West to welcome the East with kindly hands. But gradually I began to feel that she had a scorn for me which disdained words. She was the one fly in my ointment,

MY PERSONAL DEVIL 415 and I did everything I could to humiliate her. I found fault with her work ; I pounced on every trifling mistake as a flagrant attempt at dishonesty. It was then that she began to fight me, and her weapon was — a laugh. Confidential matters and heavy responsibilities had been left to her before I came along, and I knew that it hurt her to feel hat she was no longer trusted. I thought to break her through her woman's nerves, and I did succeed in staggering her so that her work became less reliable. I saw her flush, but she still laughed at me. Once she sighed, and said that Easterners were sometimes a plague which must be endured. The girls were as handsome a lot as you could get together. I had picked them for their various types, for here as elsewhere I was anxious to exercise my own volition. I had them thin and spiritual, plump and enticing, blue-eyed, brown-eyed, with faces of every appeal from the houris to the Madonnas. I let them see that to favor me with their smiles was to protect them- selves from my criticism, which I made as harsh as I well knew how. I liked best those who dissolved into tears under my re- bukes, for it gave me an excuse to put an arm about them or to console them by stroking their hands. Though she pretended to see nothing, Miss Riley sat and watched. After a time I noticed that in some indescribable way the girls relied on her for moral support; I received fewer sweet smiles, and there was less of a flutter when I went down the aisle — I overheard Miss Riley saying that I strutted. There was some excuse for me. How could she know that for a quarter of a century I had nourished a secret burning to be popular? And in leaving home I had escaped at the age of forty from the oversight of a prim mother and three Boston sisters. After that I went to work to undermine Kathleen Riley. In the meantime I luxuriated in a headstrong blindness. I regarded my workers as so many slaves toiling for me. I forgot that I myself was merely an agent. I could not see in those days that back of me they toiled for the company, and back of the company, for humanity. In good time I was ready for Miss Riley. I managed, in crafty ways, known to expert accountants, to trap her. I shall never forget the look in her eyes. Accountants prize a fastid- ious reputation for honesty, and she could not have said any- thing that I would have felt more than the few words she did say: "I have watched you," she said, "and I've seen much, but I didn't imagine until today that you could steal!" In vain I thundered at her that it was not I who was the thief, but she.

416 IMPROVEMENT ERA Stolidly she listened, and when I had finished she sat down at her typewriter. She wrote for a long time, and when the noise of her machine at last ceased, she sealed the sheets in a long envelope bearing the printed address of the home office! I had thrown enough work at her to keep her busy for the rest of the day, but she let it lie as if it had been so much blank paper. She took her long envelope, got her hat and coat, and without a word to me walked out of the office in the middle of the afternoon! I was a trifle uneasy about that letter to the home office. But I tried to feel secure in the thought that her word could not have much weight against mine. Next morning I had the grace to be ashamed of myself. I lingered over my breakfast, I looked out on a dismal rain, and reflected that my promotion had not brought me happiness. It was not until late in the day that I went down to the office. Miss Riley was not there; of course, she was not — she would not be again. I selected the most likely of the girls and set the book- keeper to train her for the vacant place. In exactly two weeks from the day Miss Riley had sat typing out I knew not what — no doubt about me — Mr. Mclntyre, the Big Chief, appeared. He came to the plant for me in a taxicab and took me to his hotel. I went with the sensation of being a dirty terrier grasped in its master's one hand, while in the other is carried a rawhide. He read every word of that letter to me. Then he instructed me to wait at the hotel until he returned. I knew what that meant. The Big Chief was down at the plant talking in that confidential way of his with my book- keeper, and with every blessed employee in the place. I could see it as plainly as if I was there. I smiled to think that all of them were sneaks and would say nothing for fear of their jobs. Thereupon I reflected that at bottom they were upright, and I trembled in the region of my spine. I cursed the Big Chief's friendliness, which could win from those simple people inform- ation that he would use against them or for them, as he saw fit. But, at least, I had Kathleen Riley. Mclntrye would have nothing for it but her word and mine. She was unknown to him personally; I had not dissembled a penny in twenty labor- ious years. Somehow I passed the time — striding about the room, look- ing out the window. There was nothing else I could do — except to think. From Mclntyre's room, in the Fairmont, I looked out on the varying blues of the San Francisco landscape. I idled over the sparkle of the brilliant sun in the chill freshness of the autumn day. I felt foreign and very far from my proper sphere.

MY PERSONAL DEVIL 417 It was not that I was longing for the old office. I was not home- sick for my mother and my three Boston sisters. The vagaries of a pleasure-loving and incorrigible West did not oppress me. It was rather that I was hungry for myself — for something that I had lost almost as soon as it had dared to assert that it ex- isted. I saw that I had been strangled and sapped by the devil that had made his way into my chest. I was alarmed to see how near he had come to killing my soul and himself crawling up and in his turn looking out of my eyes! After an interminable time the Big Chief came back, and with him was Miss Riley. As we stood in his sitting-room she appeared in some way to be the dominant figure. She was no longer an employee ; she was a woman. Even Mclntyre recog- nized that and waited. There was a sweetness about her that I had never seen before. Was there something else I had missed? Had I made a mistake in looking only for physical beauty in women? "Don't be harsh with him, Mr. Mclntyre," she begged, and he listened to her as to a mother pleading for a naughty boy. "Don't you see what his life must have been? I wrote that let- ter not to crush Mr. Williams, but to save those fine boys and girls before it was too late." It was / she was asking his clemency for! "You must understand that the business is my main consid- eration," said Mclntyre. "I should hardly have crossed the continent to right the wrongs of a handful of clerks." The Big Chief was used to reckoning his employees by the quantity. He had tons of them. Miss Riley smiled queerly. "I don't need to tell you, Mr. Mclntyre, that your employees are your business. You know that much better than I. And don't you see where injustice leads? It makes such men as Darrell Williams, and they in their turn go on blighting the young people under them." I had no desire to say anything. I was too absorbed in amazement. She thought me a victim, then — and such I was — and she defended me! "I don't know how Williams came to be sent," grumbled Mclntyre. "The board might have made a wiser choice." "Perhaps. But can you be sure? All your men have been trained in the same school. Mr. Williams had in him all these years a valuable thing — character. Your grinding mill could not grind it out of him. He was young, ambitious, he had abil- ity, he wanted to get somewhere in life, he found himself always thwarted. What must he have suffered! Think, Mr. Mclntyre, of twenty years of commands, complaints, exacting men over him, tedious hours and poor pay."

418 IMPROVEMENT ERA "How do you know?" I broke in. "No one ever understood before!" "A woman has a good opportunity to know," she sadly an- swered, but without reproach. "Her hope of climbing to the top in business is less than yours. She goes through the same years of apprenticeship, she bides her time as patiently, and, if she doesn't marry, the business becomes her life in a way a man doesn't think of." The Big Chief looked from her to me, and I could see that he was undecided. "Forgive me," she said. "Perhaps we of the West are a little too courageous — you may call it undisciplined. We can't get the breeze out of our blood. But I want to ask you not to recall Mr. Williams." She asked him not to recall me! Had she gone mad? "Your clemency and a kindly talk with him about his re- sponsibilities will turn him back to the days of his own youth," she went on. "He will remember in what ways he was injured; and he'll see that by helping instead of hindering his employees he will raise himself and them and the business." "Perhaps you're right," reflected Mclntyre, though with an air of unwillingness. "I know our company has been be- hind others in looking to the welfare of its people. But you have yet to account for his charge against your honesty." I dashed forward before she could speak. I did not stop to think — something propelled me. "It was a lie!" I cried. "This woman is as honest as sunshine!" The blood rushed to my face, and a sudden weakness trembled over me. I felt the devil wrench himself out of me, and I was happier than I had been since I had come West. There was much that I wanted to say, but my feelings choked me. "Thank you," said Miss Riley. And she smiled. It was like her smile when I had first known her, but kinder and more intimate. She went on speaking to Mclntyre. "As best I could I bolstered up the human fabric he was trying to destroy. I got in his way, and it was logical that he should want to rid him- self of me." Like an impatient leopard the Big Chief strode about the room. He thrust his hands into his pockets, took them out, waved them in front of him almost as if they were in his way. "Very well, Williams," he said at last. "You will stay." "Oh, thank you!" said Miss Riley. Searchingly Mclntyre looked at her, as if he could not un- derstand her strong emotion. She nervously flushed. Now that her battle was won, she

MY PERSONAL DEVIL 419 was merging once more into the ranks of the employed woman. "Shall I go?" she asked. A lump in my throat, I grasped the Big Chief's hand. He must have detained Miss Riley by a glance, for she came back from the door and stood waiting. "Miss Riley must also have her place again," I said. "No," said Mclntyre, with his slow smile that sits oddly on his nervous face. "I rather think Miss Riley is wasted on you. I'm going to take her back East and put her at the head of our Welfare Work." San Francisco, Cat. Will-Power in Quitting Tobacco By Will H. Brown William Hood, for thirty-five years the chief engineer of the Southern Pacific, who built the wonderful trestle work, known as the "Lucin Cutoff," over the Great Salt Lake some years ago, had smoked from the time he was a boy until 58, when he quit upon the advice of his physician, according to the American Magazine. When his doctor found Mr. Hood physically below par and advised him to give up tobacco, "Hood tossed his cigar away and has never smoked since," we are told. The Improvement Era, commenting upon this, says : "Is there a thinking young man with a will who cannot say, 'I will quit using tobacco,' after such an example?" When Mr. Hood followed his physician's advice he began to improve, and although then 75 years of age, was still active as chief engineer of the Southern Pacific. Some of the most astounding engin- eering feats of recent years have been accomplished by this man who had the will-power to face a deep-seated habit and rout it. The former editor of an Oakland, Calif., weekly paper, who had also used tobacco from the days of his youth, found his heart going back on him at 65, and "in the twinkling of an eye," made up his mind to quit tobacco, and did so. But he had a hard fight, for he had smoked as many as ten to fifteen high-priced cigars a day. He says he had spent $18,000 for the weed — four times the value of the home he now owns. It has been a year since he quit, and he says he feels like a new man, declaring: "I had actually forgotten what food tasted like. I used to think I could not eat without smoking. Why I never knew that food could taste so good as it does now. Tobacco had robbed me of the real taste, the delicious taste of food." Oakland, Calif.