“Well,” Bess said, “as long as no one robbed Peter.”
Willis smiled carefully and looked at Mrs. Harcourt.
“I just meant robbing Peter to pay Paul,” Bess said.
There was an undercurrent in her voice that puzzled him. “Paul is going to get along all right,” Willis said, “without anybody doing any robbing for him.”
The edginess in his own voice made Willis uneasy. It was not the way one should sound, considering the Rahway-Harcourt merger, and Willis turned quickly back to Mrs. Harcourt and to little Al and Paul and Sylvia’s ideas of decoration and nurses and hospitals, all subjects which Mrs. Harcourt understood and commented on intelligently.
And yet, he was thinking, could anyone in Mrs. Harcourt’s position really know about himself or Sylvia? There was luck in everything, but people like the Harcourts scarcely needed it. The money their family had accumulated had been increased by the clever management of other people, until the Harcourts were free from the Harcourt Mill itself. Mrs. Harcourt could give her dinners, Mr. Harcourt could sail his yacht races, and Bess could send her boys to Groton School, or some such place, no matter what happened to the Harcourt Mill.
Of course, Willis was thinking, he had been lucky, but he had worked to earn his luck. What did the Harcourts know about scrimping to pay insurance policies and saving for new clothing, let alone a new car?—absolutely nothing. What would happen to the Harcourts if they were thrown into the world? Bill Harcourt could not have held a clerical job and Bess could not be a secretary or a switchboard operator.
“You’re quite right, Mrs. Harcourt,” Willis said, “Orange is hot for Sylvia and the children in the summer, but she and the children do get off to Lake Sunapee for a month. The Hodgeses have a little camp there by the lake.…”
It was lucky for the Harcourts that they did not have to earn their living. Willis stood up when he had finished talking about Lake Sunapee.
“It’s been delightful renewing old associations, Mrs. Harcourt,” he said, “and thank you for asking me to dinner. I’ve enjoyed every minute of it, but I must go now so that I can be ready for Mr. Harcourt in the morning. I think—at least I hope—that we are going to have a busy and worthwhile session.”
He shook hands with Mrs. Harcourt. Then he squared his shoulders, assuming the alert posture that he had learned at Beakney-Graham.
“Good night, Bess,” he said. “It’s been a real pleasure seeing you again. It’s been just like old times.”
Bess had assumed her most tantalizing expression—at least it had been tantalizing once.
“Well, not quite like old times,” she said.
“Well, no,” Willis said, “not quite, Bess.”
She dropped his hand but she was still smiling.
“If you finish all this business,” she said, “that you have to be so fresh for in the morning, would you like to come and have tea with me or something stronger? You’ll need it after a day with Cousin Roger.”
“Well, I wouldn’t quite say that, Bess,” Willis said, “but it would be a great pleasure to have tea and to talk over old times with you and Edward.”
“Edward won’t be there,” Bess said. “He has to have his squash at teatime. It will be just you and me. The children never come to tea.”
“Well, that will be all the better, Bess,” Willis said, and he laughed. “Tea for two is a wonderful idea. As soon after four-thirty as possible. By the way, I don’t think I remember where you’re living.”
Willis whipped out his notebook and his Eversharp pencil. Dinner at the Harcourts’ was over and he was feeling more tired than he had expected.
XXI
In those hectic years before and during the war Willis did not have much time for non-business reading except for his fifteen minutes a day with the Harvard Classics. There was no time for reading during the day, and frankly he was pretty tired by the time he got home before supper for his play hour with the children. Usually, in the evenings he and Sylvia dined out with some of their new friends at the country club or had a couple in at home to play a rubber or so of bridge. Briefly, like most men he knew, Willis did not have much time to read. Yet some of the best people Willis knew gave serious thought to reading. Joe McKitterick, for whom Willis had a deep respect and a warm spot in his heart, always knew about the best plays and latest best sellers if only because he read the book-review section in the Sunday New York Times. In fact nearly all the other topflight people whom Willis met could cope intelligently with talk about the international situation, the columnists, Broadway hits, and best sellers.
These things helped form the interests of a well-rounded man, and some of the best-rounded that Willis contacted frankly gave every appearance of enjoying this sort of talk. Almost in self-defense Willis began doing a little reading when he was laid up with a cold or on Sunday mornings when Sylvia was servicing the children. Even when he was rushed he skimmed through the New York Times Book Review, and finally at the suggestion of Ted Perlman, one of the new salesmen he had hired at Rahway, Willis bought a useful periodical called The Book Review Digest. It was a relief to Willis that he already had acquired a certain literary background. The Dickens and Thackeray, the Scott, the single Austen, and the Brontë which his mother had read to him in his childhood began to pay real dividends by the time he reached forty. Also he discovered that there were ways of knowing about a book without having read it. For example, book reviewers, especially in the Sunday supplements, usually told you what it was all about.
Besides reviews and condensations, Willis also read several full-length novels, simply because Sylvia had talked so much about them. He read Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis only because Sylvia had once said, playfully, that he would get to be like Mr. Lewis’s Babbitt if he did not keep in touch with a few intellectual things. He also read The Prodigal Parents, and he got through half of Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, but could not finish it because of its manifest unfairness. Somehow or other these other novels, which, he thought, might have had a few cheerful thoughts in them, always left a bad taste in his mouth. Frankly, Willis preferred a plain down-to-earth writer like Dale Carnegie. It was shocking to Willis, but he had to face it, that the men who wrote these books really did not seem to like America. They did not like their country in spite of all the fine things America had done for them, such as the education it had given them and the chance to sell their books and motion-picture rights for enormous prices. They did not like America in spite of the opportunity American gave them to acquire lovely homes and have their pictures in Life and Time. These people were constantly sneering at solid institutions, snapping at the very hand that fed them. When they wrote about business, they looked upon people who earned an honest dollar by selling products, running banks or production lines as crass materialists, devoid of ideals and social conscience. Businessmen in all these novels were ruthless and very dumb. Willis often wished that he might have a talk with some of these writers. He wished that he could show them that men who ran factories and sold the products and dickered with bankers, tax examiners, and labor-union organizers were not as dumb as a lot of novelists who always seemed to be at Palm Beach with some blonde.
It was the American businessman and not the novelist who had created Palm Beach, and Willis was willing to bet that any top-flight businessman, like old P. L. Nagel for instance, could take any blonde away from any novelist. The truth was that businessmen had a lot of good ideas outside their fields. They understood, for one thing, a lot about human relations. Anyone who ran a big office force was naturally a better judge of character than a novelist. Businessmen could also put their thoughts succinctly into a few sentences, without writing pages and chapters.
In this regard Willis never forgot the advice of old P. T. Green, president of the Green Gauge and Roller Company, who once did him the real honor of asking him to come over to Green Gauge. When you are out on a business trip, old P.T. used to say, whether or not you had been playing with other gals on the road, be sure
to come with a present for the wife and kids. Willis recollected that homely advice when he took the midnight home from Boston—not that he had anything whatsoever for which to reproach himself. He had gone to Boston for an important piece of negotiation, and he had succeeded far better than he had hoped. By four o’clock the next afternoon it had been obvious that he and Mr. Bryson and Mr. Roger Harcourt had talked the whole deal into being and that all the dangerous corners had been rounded. It was a great relief to go and have tea with Bess.
He and Bess had had tea entirely by themselves, sitting side by side on a sofa. Bess had asked him in a rather pointed manner to close the door to the hall. The Ewings were living in one of those old houses on Chestnut Street, and Bess had said that the house was very draughty, particularly in March. The only way you could keep warm was to close every door possible. It seemed to Willis that Bess, in spite of all her joking, was impressed by him, and in all modesty, he could see why, considering Edward Ewing—not that Bess had not spoken of Edward Ewing with warmth and affection. You always knew where Edward stood, she had said, and that was something. Edward was just as easy as an old shoe, Bess had said, that never pinched you, and strangely enough, she could occasionally do with a pinch.
By the time Bess had made this remark she had opened a small cupboard and had produced some of Edward’s Scotch. Then they sat in a relaxed way on the sofa while Willis gave her a few highlights about Rahway Belt and the Harcourt Mill. It had been a friendly worthwhile visit and a useful one, because Bess had been right on his side from the very beginning.
“Well, it will be like old times if you’re to be at the mill,” Bess said.
It was an improvement over old times, but Willis had not forgotten Sylvia for a single minute. When Bess had suggested that he stay for dinner, he had refused at once, because he had promised to go to the Hodgeses’ for supper. He had to bring Sylvia the news about her family.
After an early breakfast in the Grand Central Station Willis began to look for something to bring home, and it was a real pleasure to be thinking of Sylvia. It was so early that the gift would have to come from the Liggett’s, and fortunately this store contained a large selection of articles which had nothing to do with drugs. When one of the salesladies asked if she might help him, Willis smiled at her disarmingly.
“Frankly,” Willis said, “I can’t go home without some little gift for my wife and the two babies.” It always paid to take someone into your confidence. In half a minute he had bought a Teddy bear for Al and a rattle for little Paul.
“We’ve got some cut-price electric hair dryers,” the saleslady said.
“Oh, no,” Willis said, “not a hair dryer.”
“Bath salts?” the saleslady said. “We have some very nice geranium bubble-bath salts.”
It was close to half past nine o’clock, and he could only stay at home for a few minutes, but there was nothing like that sense of homecoming. Little Al was in his play pen and he was very glad to get the Teddy bear.
“Yoo hoo,” Willis called at the foot of the stairs. “Are you up there, honey?” He felt an indescribable sense of relief when he heard Sylvia call back. Of course he knew that she would be up there but, at the same time, there was a shade of doubt, which perhaps other husbands shared.
“Come on up,” Sylvia called. “I’m giving Paul his breakfast.”
Willis knew enough about child rearing to understand perfectly that a breast-fed baby had a far better chance in later life than a bottle-fed baby. Breast-fed babies were less subject to adenoids; their teeth came in straighter because their jaws were better developed. There was no real substitute for mothers’ milk.
“Maybe I’d better wait until Paul is finished, honey,” Willis said.
It did not help the situation any to have both Sylvia and the trained nurse laugh.
“Now, Willis,” Sylvia said, “it’s time you learned the facts of life. Sit down and tell me everything.”
It was not the time or place to tell Sylvia everything and besides he had to get to the office.
“I brought you a little present, honey,” Willis said.
“Oh, Willis,” Sylvia said, “how sweet. What is it?”
“Bath salts. Geranium effervescent tablets.”
“Oh, God,” Sylvia said, “not geranium!”
Sylvia was putting Paul through a process technically known to young mothers as bubbling. The resultant digestive sounds from Paul interrupted Willis’s train of thought.
“How’s Mother?” Sylvia asked.
“She’s wonderful,” Willis said. “And so is your father. It is always a real pleasure to have a talk with him. Laura was away, of course.” Willis glanced nervously at Paul. “You’re not going to keep on feeding him, are you?”
“Why, he’s only started,” Sylvia said. “What else?”
“Well,” Willis said, “everything is going even better than I hoped.”
“Oh, I don’t mean that,” Sylvia said. “I mean about Father and Mother and Laura and Tom and everybody.”
“Oh, Willis said. “Well, frankly I wasn’t there long enough to learn everything—but I did gather from your mother that Laura has an admirer.”
“Did Mother call him an admirer?” Sylvia asked. “What’s he like? Who is he? Please try to remember.”
It went to show how far women were removed from reality, that Sylvia should have expected him to remember details about a young man whom he’d never seen.
“His name just came up for a minute in the conversation, honey,” Willis said. “The only thing I can remember is that he goes to the Harvard Business School.”
“Oh, no,” Sylvia said, “not the Harvard Business School!” She began to laugh; and until she did the connection had never occurred to Willis.
“Honey,” he said, “I’m sorry if you look down on the Harvard Business School.”
“I don’t, dear,” Sylvia answered, “but you must admit it’s a coincidence.”
“Honey,” he said, “I know this house is sort of tacky and it is a little small for two babies. I don’t honestly blame you if it makes you restless, and certainly a Harvard Business School graduate ought to do better. I promise to do something better as soon as I can.”
“Why, Willis, I don’t know what put that into your head,” Sylvia told him. “I love this house and I keep asking you not to do extravagant things. Just tell me everything that happened up in Boston.”
It was obviously neither the time nor place for giving any account of what had happened, and besides he had to get down to the plant. And he also wanted to call on Mrs. Jacoby at the earliest possible moment. Yet in spite of all his preoccupation, that talk with Sylvia had given him a new idea. It was time they moved into a home of their own, and if you kept your eyes open there were some pretty good real-estate buys around the Oranges.
Sylvia had asked him to tell her everything—a familiar but vague expression. Willis was only thirty-three, but his business experience was beginning to approximate, in many respects, that of someone close to forty, and he knew already that you never could tell anyone everything about anything, even yourself. For instance, there was one story which had to be prepared for the Rahway stockholders and another story for Mrs. Jacoby and still another one for the negotiating lawyers. These stories all differed in detail, not because concealment was advisable but because certain people were more interested in certain facts than in others.
When everything was over and the final agreements for the merger of Rahway Belt with the Harcourt Mill were signed, Willis had attended a small dinner that the new company—now called Harcourt Associates—tendered to the new officers, directors and to some of the key personnel; and the various negotiating lawyers were also present. Among the latter was Mr. F. Augustus Tremaine, who had always handled Mrs. Jacoby’s affairs and who had negotiated in behalf of the Rahway interests. Then there had been Mr. Tom Bolsen, Sr., and his son T. Bolsen, Jr., of the Boston firm that represented the Harcourts. Mr. Earl Decker had also
been present in his capacity as general counsel for the Harcourt Mill. It had been a happy and friendly dinner. Even Mr. Tremaine, who had never missed a trick that Willis could remember, had been in a pleasant glow and had referred to Mr. Decker handsomely in his after-dinner speech as his learned friend and advisor.
Willis, as first vice president of Harcourt Associates, had made one of the main speeches of the evening, speaking not only as an officer but as a stockholder, since he owned personally 15 per cent of the common shares of the new company. Willis had given much time and thought to its preparation, and had been assisted now and then by a bright young Harvard Law School graduate who had recently entered Mr. Tremaine’s office. This assistance, however, was of a very minor nature, consisting of a little brushing up of paragraph and sentence structure—more of a clerical service than otherwise, and one which any executive expected from his organization when he had to make a speech. But all of the ideas the speech contained were original with Willis. It was highly gratifying that the speech made an even better impression than he had hoped. He had started slowly but he had built up to a real climax.
“What is an idea?” he asked in the beginning, adding facetiously, “I ought to know, after the last three months, when Mr. Tremaine and Mr. Bolsen and Mr. Decker have tossed around so many good ones.” It was a relief to feel that his dinner audience knew what he meant by tossing ideas around.
Willis was never quite sure whether he or the Harvard Law School graduate had set up these sentences, but it made no difference, because Willis was positive that the general conception was basically his own.
“I may as well face the fact,” he continued, “that I may have been responsible in the beginning for the idea of merging Rahway Belt with Harcourt into our new strong company. But seriously, gentlemen, let us never forget that no idea can stand by itself. It must be activated to have value. A team must be behind it, and I think tonight we all know we have a real team.
“Yes, gentlemen, an idea must be activated, and to achieve this end patience is necessary and an ability to understand what the other fellow has on his mind, but above all else, good fellowship and team play are the true ingredients of success.”
Sincerely, Willis Wayde Page 36
