HIS story is not a true story. If it were, I should shrink from the telling. It would harrow the sensibilities of too many eminently respectable people. Since it is merely a figment of the imagination—
The three were Jencks-Esq., Jencks-Jr., and B. Slufek. They all lived in and by virtue of Steelopolis. And they all worked in the Mammoth Mills. Jencks-Esq. and Jencks-Jr. toiled unremittingly in the offices. They considered that it was their duty to do so, which doubtless it was. For one of them owned the Mammoth Mills and the other expected to.
B. Slufek sweated profusely in the blooming-mill where the ten-ton ingots of steel weave to and fro like giants in the torture of a white heat and where, when you become torpid from over-exhaustion and have an arm burned off, a generous paternal management pays you $100 compensation—if you're lucky. B. Slufek worked there, not because he considered it his duty, but because he had to make a living. He didn't make it. Not in any real sense, that is.
Jencks-Esq. was a Highly Esteemed Citizen. All the newspapers said so. By this they meant that he was worth several million dollars. He employed five thousand men to make this sum for him, and deemed himself a benefactor of the human race.
"What would become of all these poor fellows if it were not for me?" he frequently said. His tone, when he said this, was the tone of a challenge.
Incidentally, he never thought to inquire what did become of the poor fellows. They worked. Dividends accrued. That was enough for Jencks-Esq.
Occasionally Jencks-Esq. made an after-dinner speech, expatiating upon the Proud Industrial Achievements of Steelopolis. Jencks-Jr. listened to these speeches with glowing affection. He believed of Jencks-Esq. all that Jencks-Esq. believed of himself. He was very young and warm hearted and unsuspecting.
B. Slufek never heard any of the Jencks-Esq. oratory. The Proud Industrial Achievements of Steelopolis wouldn't have interested him anyway. He was singly intent upon the Proud Industrial Achievement of getting three meals per day for self and family. Add to this, $11 a month for rent, and the problem looms large. Even at his princely wage of $1.65 for a twelve-hour day, with a periodic working shift of twenty-four hours on end, B. Slufek sometimes ran into debt. This, I suppose, was due to innate depravity somewhere. Obviously the innate depravity must have been B. Slufek's. It could hardly have been Jencks-Esq.'s. For Jencks-Esq. was a good Hun.
Everybody recognized the goodness of Jencks-Esq, He regularly went to church and worshiped God. At least, he worshiped his own idea of God. It was a somewhat peculiar idea. Nowhere in the records of religion could you find anything resembling the God of Jencks-Esq., not even if you went back to Greek Paganism. For, after all, the gods of the Greeks were a public sort of gods. They looked after everybody impartially. The Jencks-Esq. god (I shall no longer dignify it with a capital) was exclusively devoted to the interests of Jencks-Esq. As a matter of fact it was a pasteboard god, invented by Jencks-Esq.'s pastor in return for a new church. Every morning Jencks-Esq. piously thanked his god, who was not as other gods are, that he himself was not as other men were.
Jencks-Jr. also had a God, dimly visioned. His was the true God, whose altar is raised wherever a clean heart looks upward. Jencks-Jr. looked upward rather timidly; a little shamedfacedly, indeed, if the truth be known. He hadn't much of an opinion of himself in that respect, being at heart humble. He had a very great opinion of his father, being a loyal and unquestioning sort of son. When he consciously prayed, Jencks-Jr. thanked God for giving him such a father as Jencks-Esq.
B. Slufek had no God at all. He hadn't time for one. It sometimes happens that way when men work twelve hours every day in the week, with a periodic shift of twenty-four hours on end. Jencks-Esq.'s laborers were sunk in bestial slumber what time Jencks-Esq. was in his pew at church. Alas for the baseness of the human soul!
But had B. Slufek a soul? Something was there, inside, of course. But I am speaking now of a soul as we understand it; you and I, comfortable reader. A well-groomed, carefully considered, self-heedful sort of a soul; Jencks-Esq.'s sort of a soul, in point of fact. Jencks-Esq. presumably didn't believe that B. Slufek possessed anything of the kind. He never would have dared to work a man with a soul as he worked B. Slufek. He would have been afraid of meeting that soul—later.