She looked somewhat relieved. “So did I expect it,” she said. “I was dreading it most on Alice’s account: it might have—well, young men are so easily influenced and all. But so far as the business is concerned, what if Mr. Lamb did talk? That wouldn’t amount to much. It wouldn’t affect the business; not to hurt. And, besides, he isn’t even doing that.”
“No; anyhow not yet, it seems.” And Adams sighed again, wistfully. “But I WOULD give a good deal to know what he thinks!”
Before his surrender he had always supposed that if he did such an unthinkable thing as to seize upon the glue process for himself, what he would feel must be an overpowering shame. But shame is the rarest thing in the world: what he felt was this unremittent curiosity about his old employer’s thoughts. It was an obsession, yet he did not want to hear what Lamb “thought” from Lamb himself, for Adams had a second obsession, and this was his dread of meeting the old man face to face. Such an encounter could happen only by chance and unexpectedly; since Adams would have avoided any deliberate meeting, so long as his legs had strength to carry him, even if Lamb came to the house to see him.
But people do meet unexpectedly; and when Adams had to be downtown he kept away from the “wholesale district.” One day he did see Lamb, as the latter went by in his car, impassive, going home to lunch; and Adams, in the crowd at a corner, knew that the old man had not seen him. Nevertheless, in a street car, on the way back to his sheds, an hour later, he was still subject to little shivering seizures of horror.
He worked unceasingly, seeming to keep at it even in his sleep, for he always woke in the midst of a planning and estimating that must have been going on in his mind before consciousness of himself returned. Moreover, the work, thus urged, went rapidly, in spite of the high wages he had to pay his labourers for their short hours. “It eats money,” he complained, and, in fact, by the time his vats and boilers were in place it had eaten almost all he could supply; but in addition to his equipment he now owned a stock of “raw material,” raw indeed; and when operations should be a little further along he was confident his banker would be willing to “carry” him.
Six weeks from the day he had obtained his lease he began his glue-making. The terrible smells came out of the sheds and went writhing like snakes all through that quarter of the town. A smiling man, strolling and breathing the air with satisfaction, would turn a corner and smile no more, but hurry. However, coloured people had almost all the dwellings of this old section to themselves; and although even they were troubled, there was recompense for them. Being philosophic about what appeared to them as in the order of nature, they sought neither escape nor redress, and soon learned to bear what the wind brought them. They even made use of it to enrich those figures of speech with which the native impulses of coloured people decorate their communications: they flavoured metaphor, simile, and invective with it; and thus may be said to have enjoyed it. But the man who produced it took a hot bath as soon as he reached his home the evening of that first day when his manufacturing began. Then he put on fresh clothes; but after dinner he seemed to be haunted, and asked his wife if she “noticed anything.”
She laughed and inquired what he meant.
“Seems to me as if that glue-works smell hadn’t quit hanging to me,” he explained. “Don’t you notice it?”
“No! What an idea!”
He laughed, too, but uneasily; and told her he was sure “the dang glue smell” was somehow sticking to him. Later, he went outdoors and walked up and down the small yard in the dusk; but now and then he stood still, with his head lifted, and sniffed the air suspiciously. “Can YOU smell it?” he called to Alice, who sat upon the veranda, prettily dressed and waiting in a reverie.
“Smell what, papa?”
“That dang glue-works.”
She did the same thing her mother had done: laughed, and said, “No! How foolish! Why, papa, it’s over two miles from here!”
“You don’t get it at all?” he insisted.
“The idea! The air is lovely to-night, papa.”
The air did not seem lovely to him, for he was positive that he detected the taint. He wondered how far it carried, and if J. A. Lamb would smell it, too, out on his own lawn a mile to the north; and if he did, would he guess what it was? Then Adams laughed at himself for such nonsense; but could not rid his nostrils of their disgust. To him the whole town seemed to smell of his glue-works.
Nevertheless, the glue was making, and his sheds were busy. “Guess we’re stirrin’ up this ole neighbourhood with more than the smell,” his foreman remarked one morning.
“How’s that?” Adams inquired.
“That great big, enormous ole dead butterine factory across the street from our lot,” the man said. “Nothin’ like settin’ an example to bring real estate to life. That place is full o’ carpenters startin’ in to make a regular buildin’ of it again. Guess you ought to have the credit of it, because you was the first man in ten years to see any possibilities in this neighbourhood.”
Adams was pleased, and, going out to see for himself, heard a great hammering and sawing from within the building; while carpenters were just emerging gingerly upon the dangerous roof. He walked out over the dried mud of his deep lot, crossed the street, and spoke genially to a workman who was removing the broken glass of a window on the ground floor.
“Here! What’s all this howdy-do over here?”
“Goin’ to fix her all up, I guess,” the workman said. “Big job it is, too.”
“Sh’ think it would be.”
“Yes, sir; a pretty big job—a pretty big job. Got men at it on all four floors and on the roof. They’re doin’ it RIGHT.”
“Who’s doing it?”
“Lord! I d’ know. Some o’ these here big manufacturing corporations, I guess.”
“What’s it going to be?”
“They tell ME,” the workman answered—“they tell ME she’s goin’ to be a butterine factory again. Anyways, I hope she won’t be anything to smell like that glue-works you got over there not while I’m workin’ around her, anyways!”
“That smell’s all right,” Adams said. “You soon get used to it.”
“You do?” The man appeared incredulous. “Listen! I was over in France: it’s a good thing them Dutchmen never thought of it; we’d of had to quit!”
Adams laughed, and went back to his sheds. “I guess my foreman was right,” he told his wife, that evening, with a little satisfaction. “As soon as one man shows enterprise enough to found an industry in a broken-down neighbourhood, somebody else is sure to follow. I kind of like the look of it: it’ll help make our place seem sort of more busy and prosperous when it comes to getting a loan from the bank—and I got to get one mighty soon, too. I did think some that if things go as well as there’s every reason to think they OUGHT to, I might want to spread out and maybe get hold of that old factory myself; but I hardly expected to be able to handle a proposition of that size before two or three years from now, and anyhow there’s room enough on the lot I got, if we need more buildings some day. Things are going about as fine as I could ask: I hired some girls to-day to do the bottling—coloured girls along about sixteen to twenty years old. Afterwhile, I expect to get a machine to put the stuff in the little bottles, when we begin to get good returns; but half a dozen of these coloured girls can do it all right now, by hand. We’re getting to have really quite a little plant over there: yes, sir, quite a regular little plant!”
He chuckled, and at this cheerful sound, of a kind his wife had almost forgotten he was capable of producing, she ventured to put her hand upon his arm. They had gone outdoors, after dinner, taking two chairs with them, and were sitting through the late twilight together, keeping well away from the “front porch,” which was not yet occupied, however Alice was in her room changing her dress.