Теодор Драйзер - The Genius

"No," replied Eugene, "nothing except what I learned by casually going over it with Mr. Colfax."

"Do you know much about Colfax as a man?"

"Very little. I've only met him twice. He's forceful, dramatic, a man with lots of ideas. I understand he's very rich, three or four millions, someone told me."

Kalvin's hand moved indifferently. "Do you like him?"

"Well, I can't say yet absolutely whether I do or don't. He interests me a lot. He's wonderfully dynamic. I'm sure I'm favorably impressed with him."

"And he wants to give you charge eventually of all the magazines and books, the publishing end?"

"So he says," said Eugene.

"I'd go a little slow if I were saddling myself with that responsibility. I'd want to be sure that I knew all about it. You want to remember, Witla, that running one department under the direction and with the sympathetic assistance and consideration of someone over you is very different from running four or five departments on your own responsibility and with no one over you except someone who wants intelligent guidance from you. Colfax, as I understand him, isn't a publisher, either by tendency or training or education. He's a financier. He'll want you, if you take that position, to tell him how it shall be done. Now, unless you know a great deal about the publishing business, you have a difficult task in that. I don't want to appear to be throwing cold water on your natural ambition to get up in the world. You're entitled to go higher if you can. No one in your circle of acquaintances would wish you more luck than I will if you decide to go. I want you to think carefully of what you are doing. Where you are here you are perfectly safe, or as nearly safe as any man is who behaves himself and maintains his natural force and energy can be. It's only natural that you should expect more money in the face of this offer, and I shall be perfectly willing to give it to you. I intended, as you possibly expected, to do somewhat better for you by January. I'll say now that if you want to stay here you can have fourteen thousand now and possibly sixteen thousand in a year or a year and a half from now. I don't want to overload this department with what I consider an undue salary. I think sixteen thousand dollars, when it is paid, will be high for the work that is done here, but you're a good man and I'm perfectly willing to pay it to you.

"The thing for you to do is to make up your mind whether this proposition which I now make you is safer and more in accord with your desires than the one Mr. Colfax makes you. With him your eighteen thousand begins at once. With me sixteen thousand is a year away, anyhow. With him you have promise of an outlook which is much more glittering than any you can reasonably hope for here, but you want to remember that the difficulties will be, of course, proportionately greater. You know something about me by now. You still—and don't think I want to do him any injustice; I don't—have to learn about Mr. Colfax. Now, I'd advise you to think carefully before you act. Study the situation over there before you accept it. The United Magazines Corporation is a great concern. I have no doubt that under Mr. Colfax's management it has a brilliant future in store for it. He is an able man. If you finally decide to go, come and tell me and there will be no hard feelings one way or the other. If you decide to stay, the new salary arrangement goes into effect at once. As a matter of fact, I might as well have Mr. Fredericks credit that up to you so that you can say that you have drawn that sum here. It won't do you any harm. Then we can run along as before. I know it isn't good business as a rule to try and keep a man who has been poisoned by a bigger offer, and because I know that is the reason why I am only offering you fourteen thousand dollars this year. I want to be sure that you are sure that you want to stay. See?"

He smiled.

Eugene arose. "I see," he said. "You are one of the best men I have ever known, Mr. Kalvin. You have constantly treated me with more consideration than I ever expected to receive anywhere. It has been a pleasure and a privilege to work for you. If I stay, it will be because I want to because I value your friendship."

"Well," said Kalvin quietly, "that's very nice, I'm sure, and I appreciate it. But don't let your friendship for me or your sense of gratitude stop you from doing something you think you ought to do. Go ahead if you feel like it. I won't feel the least bit angry with you. I'll feel sorry, but that's neither here nor there. Life is a constant condition of readjustment, and every good business man knows it."

He took Eugene's extended hand.

"Good luck," he said, "whatever you do"—his favorite expression.

The upshot of Eugene's final speculation was that he accepted the offer of the United Magazines Corporation and left Mr. Kalvin. Colfax had written one day to his house asking him what he thought he would do about it. The more he had turned it over in his mind, the more it had grown in attraction. The Colfax company was erecting a tremendous building, eighteen stories high, in the heart of the middle business district in New York near Union Square, to house all their departments. Colfax had said at the time Eugene took dinner with him that the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth floors would be devoted to the editorial, publication, circulation, art, and advertising departments. He had asked Eugene what he had thought would be a good floor arrangement, and the latter, with his usual facility for scheming such things, had scratched on a piece of paper a tentative layout for the various departments. He had put the editorial and art departments on the topmost floor, giving the publisher, whoever he might eventually prove to be, a commanding position in a central room on the western side of the building which overlooked all the city between the Square and Hudson River, and showed that magnificent body of water as a panorama for the eye to feast upon. He had put the advertising and some overflow editorial rooms on the seventeenth floor, and the circulation with its attendant mailing and cabinet record rooms on the sixteenth. The publisher's and editor's rooms he laid out after an old Flemish scheme he had long had in mind, in which green, dark blue, blood–red and black walnut shades contrasted richly with the flood of light which would be available.

"You might as well do this thing right if you do it at all," he had said to Colfax. "Nearly all the editorial offices I have ever seen have been the flimsiest makeshifts. A rich–looking editorial, art and advertising department would help your company a great deal. It has advertising value."

He recalled as he spoke Summerfield's theory that a look of prosperity was about the most valuable asset a house could have.

Colfax agreed with him, and said when the time came that he wished Eugene would do him the favor to come and look the thing over. "I have two good architects on the job," he explained, "but I would rather trust your ideas as to how those rooms should be laid out."

When he was considering this final call for a decision he was thinking how this floor would look—how rich it would be. Eventually, if he succeeded, his office would be the most sumptuous thing in it. He would be the most conspicuous figure in the great, new building, apart from Colfax himself.

Thoughts of this kind, which ought to have had but very little share in any commercial speculation, were nevertheless uppermost in Eugene's mind; for he was not a business man—he was primarily an artist, and for all his floundering round in the commercial world he remained an artist still. His sense of his coming dignity and standing before the world was almost greater than his sense of the terrifying responsibility which it involved. Colfax was a hard man, he knew, harder even than Summerfield, for he talked less and acted more; but this did not sink into Eugene's consciousness sufficiently to worry him. He fancied he was a strong man, able to hold his own anywhere.