This is a very typical story of the era in its themes: that a young man, or even a boy, could make a success of himself simply with a new idea and hard work, and that city living was bad for your soul.Harold Drake stretched his wiry body along the counter of the Frank D., one hand resting idly on the tiller, the other trailing in the water. His thin face, covered with a network of wrinkles, and his forehead, tied in a hard knot of worry, seemed to belong rather to an old man than to a boy of fourteen.
"I guess I could make some money if I went to New York, Mr. Stewart."
Mr. Stewart turned from the sunset glow, reflected in the flooding tide, and smiled quietly at the barefooted boy before him.
"What would you do, lad?"
"What did you do?" Harold asked in reply.
"I? Oh, well, I worked as office-boy for two years at four dollars a week—and I worked hard, too. Would you like that?"
"Four dollars is more than I can make here, and mother has to go out to work, too. Yes, I should."
For several minutes Mr. Stewart gazed over the quiet bay as the Frank D. slipped quietly toward the river's mouth. Now and again he lifted his eyes to the rugged outline of the hills and mountains which rose beyond the broad stretches of field and woodland. A man of sixty at least, browned by a month on the water, he seemed scarcely to bear in his face the signs of care and work which seamed Harold's cheeks and brow.
"Harold, boy, you are much better off right here."
Harold turned his face toward the ocean to hide his disappointment.
"If I could only stay here, too! Boy, do you know I 'd give up business gladly, if I could, just to settle down here to your life? I would n't loaf, for no man has a right to do that; nor has any man in business, as I am, a right to leave the responsibilities and supervision of it. There are too many dependent upon him. But to fish, to have a little garden like yours, to live out of doors, even though I were tired at night and could n't have all the luxuries I do in the city, to see this beautiful stretch of water and those hills—"
Mr. Stewart stopped suddenly, apparently lost in the contemplation of those joys which success had not brought to him. Harold headed the Frank D. a little closer to the wind, trimmed his main-sheet, and settled back upon his elbow, his face still drawn downward with disappointment.
"I know you want to make money, Harold. I did at your age. Nearly every man who has a healthy mind does. And it is right that you should. I have made money—not a great deal, but a lot more than I have needed; but I have n't lived right. I 'd give more to look out on this water mornings, and on these hills at sunset, to breathe this air—you don't know what the city means. You see all this every day, and you can't realize how it shapes your life. The distances and the peace ought to make you a strong, sincere man, and that is worth more than all the money you can make. You live in God's presence."
Harold stirred a trifle impatiently, his face set and worried.
"I guess you would n't think much about all of that if your mother had to go out to work and you did n't know whether the fish were going to bite, or whether you 'd get any lobsters. I 'd like it if I did n't have to worry."
The thought of this little boy of fourteen bearing the burden left by a dead father, staggering, almost, under the load of a grown man, pained Mr. Stewart.
"Yes, boy, I know. But you are getting older now, and you will soon be able to make a good living. Lobsters are plenty, are n't they?"
"There are some, but you can't get much for them."
Mr. Stewart was silent again for a long time, seemingly as far away as the peak which loomed above the broken line of hills on the shore. Out of all this he had gone as a boy, rilled with the ambition which had burned as hot in him as it did now in Harold. Only within a few years had he known what the cost had been, what the city did for a man. He spoke aloud at last, just as they reached the end of the breakwater which kept the shifting sands from the river channel.
"If you could only know how the crowded, irregular life of the city, the swarms of hurrying, selfish people, roughen and harden a man's nature. They take all the humanity out of him. I went away from here forty years ago, and it was n't until I had lived thirty years in New York that I knew what it did to men and was doing to me. When you are there you scarcely think any more of the people about you, unless you know them, than you do of the fish you catch. We are all fishing there for something that belongs to other people."
The flame of ambition was not to be quenched in Harold's breast by such a course. Mr. Stewart knew it—and knew, too, that he liked his sailing companion of the past month the more for his earnest devotion to the life problem before him. It was out of this line of thought, however, that an idea came to him which was to solve the problem. There had been another of the long pauses when the sweet simplicity of the country held the city man's mind, while the boy's heart, fixed on the golden tints of the city's promise, raced away to the crowds, cruel as they might be, and the opportunities, boundless and obtruding as he felt they were. The Frank D. was almost at the little dock, under the bank which sloped from Harold's house to the river, when Mr. Stewart spoke again.
"I 've always thought, lad, that money could be made anywhere, if sound business methods were employed. Of course you could hardly do as well here as in a big place with more people and more money. But your life does n't require so much. Suppose we two go into business here and try it for a year? If it succeeds, you stay here. If it does n't, we 'll see what can be done in New York."
There was little of eagerness in Harold's answer.
"I don't see what we can do. Everybody here has something, and there does n't seem to be anything for anybody else."
"You said lobsters were fairly plenty?"
"Sometimes; but we don't get much for them."
"How much? About ten cents a pound, on the average?"
"Yes, summers. A little more, winters."
"In a big city competition develops all business. Men have something to sell, and they work to make it cheaper, so that they can sell it for less, or give a better quality for the same money. In our linen-mills we have two or three men studying all the time to increase the output and lessen the expense. Do you know that if you should study lobsters so that you could have more of them in the dull seasons of winter,—more of them and better ones,—you could make a lot of money?"
Harold's face lighted for the first time.
"I 've thought of that sometimes. I read about a man who raised strawberries in the winter, when they were scarce, and made a lot of money."
The beginnings of "The Champion Lobster Company" were very small. For two weeks, until business demanded Mr. Stewart's return to New York, they worked and studied together,—Mr. Stewart reading in the books he had procured from New York, and fitting the observations of natural historians to the shrewd ideas of a fisher-boy who knew the lobsters as only one can who has lived by catching them all his life. For a beginning Mr. Stewart wanted only to learn how they could be caught as fast as possible, which Harold knew without books—and how, too, they could be made more plentiful and more safely and comfortably caught throughout the cold stretches of winter.
A new boat came first, heavier in construction than Harold's cat, with broad bilges for rough weather, and more storage-room for lobster-pots. Systematically they tried new ideas for feeding a few lobsters which they gathered in the Pool, as the little basin which formed in back of Harold's house was called, fencing it off with heavy netting sunk deep in the mud. If lobsters could reason, those about the mouth of the Pentock River would have grown suspicious, as voters do when a district leader in politics grows friendly and obliging with the approach of a caucus.
Mr. Stewart's plan was simple. He told Harold how expensive, yet how highly prized, good lobsters—really large, fresh lobsters—were in New York, especially in the winter. He told him, too, how many well-to-do men there were who would pay well for selected lobsters, just as they bought strawberries and grapes in the winter season. If Harold could learn how to get lobsters, to grow them systematically as a farmer would his hens, and to keep them alive, above all, in the Pool until winter, there was an opportunity—an opportunity which Mr. Stewart made all the more attractive by pointing out that the city's wealth, in some degree, would be turned toward the Champion Lobster Company, without exposing Harold to the hardening influences of the life itself.
Perhaps the little package of paper and envelopes which came to Mr. Stewart, neatly printed with the name of the concern, and up in one corner, "Harold Drake, Manager," gave the boy greater joy than the promises which Mr. Stewart held out.
Harold threw himself into his new life as many a country boy does when he reaches the office of a great city firm, but as very few do when, bred in the routine of a quiet village, they tackle a new phase of life's problem in old surroundings. For a time Mr. Stewart insisted on paying him a small salary,—as much as Harold had been earning before,—so that he could devote his days to preparations for winter. Daily Harold's stock grew ; daily, too, his watchfulness taught him how to prevent the losses which came from death, sometimes at the claws of other lobsters, sometimes perhaps because the food was wrong or scarce. Harold soon learned that there must be separate pens, so that all of his stock would be sure of food, and, too, so that there might be less danger of a wholesale slaughter when some bloodthirsty old warrior went out on a marauding trip. Long before the trees began to turn, there were hundreds of lobsters living the quiet, undisturbed life which nature had mapped out, but had not planned under exactly these circumstances, with more to eat and less of strife than they had ever known.
Neighbors—regular fishermen generally— scoffed a little.
"Water ain't deep enough. They 'll all freeze the first cold snap," Captain Thomas said.
Captain Dean had a more intimate interest.
"You just take my advice, boy, and sell 'em now. You 're just stowing them up here, and when the fishing gets hard other fellows will come along and steal them. Sell 'em to the next smack that comes along. What 's Jim Stewart know about fishing, anyhow?"
Harold consulted the president of the company (Mr. Stewart preferred to be called the "New York representative"), and received advice as to the manner of dealing with thieves and encouragement to hold all of the stock until the "season was on in New York."
There were plenty of troubles in the day-to-day routine. One day a lot of lobsters escaped through a large hole which appeared in the outside netting.
"Driftwood, probably," Ben Tarbox said. "A piece of an old wreck."
Harold thought it more likely that the driftwood was some malicious rival, but he kept his peace. Only to Mr. Stewart did he explain the danger from such marauders, and in reply Mr. Stewart sent a huge Danish bloodhound from his kennels, a brute so ferocious that Harold was uneasy at first; but there was a marked and permanent decrease in the number of inquisitive loafers about the Pool. Day and night the great dog lived in a little kennel back of the house, not a hundred feet from the "Lobster Beds," as they were called; and ponderous and undemonstrative as he was, he seemed to grow into a sense of his guardianship over the premises.
The months until fall were crowded with work. Somehow, the life came to mean more and more to Harold ; and the broad ocean, very blue in the crisp air, and the hills, now turning into golden mounds, came into his mind even in the busier days. He began to feel sure, too, that he could raise lobsters as well as store them—if only they would sell. This little "if" was the cause of so many knots in his forehead. Some days he would stop for a minute, as he was pulling the lobster-pots, or working about the "beds," his face wrinkled into lines of worry, like that of an old man. Perhaps, after all, Mr. Stewart could not sell the lobsters. Mr. Stewart, however, buoyed his hopes with the promises he had received from various men.
"About November 1st," Mr. Stewart wrote, "I 'll send some trial orders. Fill them from the pots if you can; but if you can't, take them from the beds. With the venture so new, we can hardly hope to get a sufficient supply this year, to last all winter; but your last weekly-report shows such a splendid gain in numbers and so much decrease in deaths that I am much encouraged."
These neatly type-written letters, addressed to "Harold Drake, Manager, The Champion Lobster Company," made the business very real to Harold, and filled him with the zest which comes to men when they are first assigned to a roll-top desk with a revolving chair.
Perhaps the Champion Lobster Company had an unusual advantage in its New York representative. Certainly he never lost an opportunity to tell business associates, friends at his clubs, and all whom he met in a casual way, of the new venture. He confessed that he felt almost as much interest in it as he did in anything he controlled, and certainly, for a business that was still all investment, he devoted a great deal of time to it. He clung steadfastly, however, to the idea of withholding all lobsters from the market until the season of "great public dinners" was on. Then, one day early in November, he sent Harold the first order, as briefly and concisely phrased as if he had been instructing a great and long- established business house. Harold has that order tacked up over his desk now, and he confesses that he has a little glimmer of the great joy of that day, even now, as he reads it over.
Harold Drake, Manager,
The Champion Lobster Co.,
Renton, Maine.
Dear Sir: Ship at once, by Adams Express, fifty selected lobsters, to the Calumet Club, New York. Mail bill to the same address, charging them at forty cents a pound. Wire me the date of shipment.
Very truly yours,
(Signed) James Stewart,
N. Y. Representative.
There was a friendly little postscript underneath:
Dear Harold : We shall be lobsters if we can't make money out of this idea. Don't work too hard, and don't forget to look at the ocean, the hills, and the sky for me.
Beside this letter, on the wall, there is a gilded menu card, at the bottom of which Mr. Stewart had printed, "Lobsters supplied by the Champion Lobster Company." He made it a rule, that winter, that every club and public dinner for which he supplied the lobsters must print this notice. The very fact that there were not a tenth enough lobsters in the beds to supply the demand only made them the more highly prized. Mr. Stewart told about the work at his first dinner, and nobody suspected him of advertising.
The skill with which the whole plan was executed made "Champion lobsters" famous. A lobster, previously, had been good or bad; but now there was a brand the very name of which became synonymous with sound, fresh shell-fish. There might be a hundred other fishermen sending in the best of lobsters, but "Champion lobsters" were known to the public, and no other lobsters would do.
Every neighbor in Benton, Maine, had a pool the next season, and many another town. tried to push a brand upon the market. In the second year, after a summer of work together, Mr. Stewart and Harold had several pools, larger and better constructed, and into these they placed the finest specimens of shell-fish which they could catch. And it was not long after the opening of another winter that Harold found his rivals glad to sell their fish at a slight advance on the regular market prices. Practically he controlled the output of Benton.
The business is a fine one now, with a New York office, and a Boston office, too; and both Harold and Mr. Stewart are working on a plan to ship the lobsters alive all over the country.
Yet in all the triumphs of the Champion Lobster Company, Harold has never known a day like the one which brought the first order. It makes his heart beat a little faster to think of it; to think of how he worked, preparing the shipment and sending it to the express office. Somehow, he had no confidence in express companies; nothing but absolute conviction that somebody, somewhere, would fail. He wanted to go to New York with the lobsters. Two days later there was a telegram from Mr. Stewart announcing the satisfactory arrival of the shipment, with one word, "congratulations," added. For the first time Harold gave way to the boyish joy of it all, running into the house where his mother sat, he waved the telegram and yelled like a madman:
"They got there, mother! They got there!" Mother's heart answered the yell in its own quiet way. Together they went out on the porch overlooking the river; and somehow, that day, Harold felt what the ocean meant, and the hills, too, and he felt sorry for Mr. Stewart, the New York representative.
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