MacVeagh furnished his guests with chairs. Then he said, “To what am I indebted and such?”
“Mr. Hasenberg has a problem, John, and it’s mine too. And it’s yours and everybody’s. Go on, sir.”
Mr. Hasenberg spoke in a dry, precise tone. “Bricker’s called a strike. We don’t want to strike. We don’t like or trust Hitchcock, but we do trust the arbitration committee that Father Byrne’s on. We’ve accepted their decision, and we still hope we can get the management to. But Bricker put over the strike vote with some sharp finagling, and that’ll probably mean the Army taking over the plant.”
“And I know Bricker . . .” said MacVeagh. “But where do I come in?”
“Advice and publicity,” said Father Byrne. “First, have you any ideas? Second, will you print the statement Mr. Hasenberg’s preparing on the real stand of the men, without Bricker’s trimmings?”
“Second, of course. First—” he hesitated. “Tell me, Mr. Hasenberg, if you were free of Bricker, do you think you could get the management to come to terms?”
“Maybe. They ain’t all like Hitchcock and Phil Rogers. There’s some of them want to get the stuff out and the war won as bad as we do. Now, ever since Mathers went to Washington, the post of general manager’s been vacant. Suppose, now, Johansen should get that appointment—he’d string along with the committee’s decision, I’m pretty sure.”
MacVeagh pulled a scratch pad toward him. “Johansen— First name?”
“Boss! You aren’t going to—”
“Sh, Molly. And now, Father, if you could give me an outline of the committee’s terms . . .”
So Ingve Johansen became general manager of the Hitchcock plant, and Mr. Hasenberg resumed control of the union, after evidence had been uncovered which totally discredited Tim Bricker, and the arbitrated terms of the committee were accepted by labor and management, and the joint labor-management council got off to a fine start—all of which the burghers of Grover read with great pleasure in the Sentinel.
There was another important paragraph in that Friday’s issue: an announcement that starting in another week the Sentinel was to become a daily.
“We’ve got to, Molly,” MacVeagh had insisted. “There’s so much we can do for Grover. If we can settle the troubles at Hitchcock, that’s just a start. We can make this over into the finest community in the country. And we haven’t space in one small weekly edition. With a daily we can do things gradually, step by step . . .”
“And what, boss, do we use for money? That’ll mean more presses, more men, more paper. Where’s the money coming from?”
“That,” said John MacVeagh, “I don’t know.”
And he never did. There was simply a small statement in the paper:
ANONYMOUS
BENEFACTOR
ENDOWS SENTINEL
Mr. Manson was never able to find a teller who remembered receiving that astonishingly large deposit made to the credit of the Sentinel’s account; but there it was, all duly entered.
And so the Grover Sentinel became a daily, printing the truth.
V
If it’s all right with you, we’ll skip pretty fast over the next part of the story. The days of triumph never make interesting reading. The rise and fall—that’s your dramatic formula. The build-up can be stirring and the letdown can be tragic, but there’s no interest in the flat plateau at the top.
So there’s no need to tell in detail all that happened in Grover after the Sentinel went daily. You can imagine the sort of thing: How the Hitchcock plant stepped up its production and turned out a steady flow of war materiel that was the pride of the county, the state, and even the country. How Doc Quillan tracked down, identified, and averted the epidemic that threatened the workers’ housing project. How Chief Hanby finally got the goods on the gamblers who were moving in on the South Side and cleaned up the district. How the Grover Red Cross drive went a hundred percent over its quota. How the expected meat shortage never materialized . . . You get the picture.
All this is just the plateau, the level stretch between the rise and the fall. Not that John MacVeagh expected the fall. Nothing like that seemed possible, even though Molly worried.
“You know, boss,” she said one day, “I was reading over some of the books I used to love when I was a kid. This wish—it’s magic, isn’t it?”
MacVeagh snapped the speaking box on his desk and gave a succinct order to the assistant editor. He was the chief executive of a staff now. Then he turned back and said, “Why, yes, Molly, I guess you might call it that. Magic, miracle—what do we care so long as it enables us to accomplish all we’re doing?”
“I don’t know. But sometimes I get scared. Those books, especially the ones by E. Nesbit—”
MacVeagh grinned. “Scared of kids’ books?”
“I know it sounds silly, boss, but kids’ books are the only place you can find out about magic. And there seems to be only one sure thing about it: You can know there’s a catch to it. There’s always a catch.”
MacVeagh didn’t think any further about that. What stuck in his mind were phrases like those he heard down at Clem’s barber shop:
“Hanged if I know what’s come over this burg. Seems like for a couple of months there just can’t nothing go wrong. Ever since that trouble out at the plant when they got rid of Bricker, this burg is just about perfect, seems like.”
Those were fine words. They fed the soul. They made you forget that little, nagging, undefined discontent that was rankling underneath and threatening to spoil all this wonderful miracle—or magic, if you prefer. They even made you be polite to H. A. Hitchcock when he came to pay his respects to you after the opening of the new Sentinel Building.
He praised MacVeagh as an outstanding example of free enterprise. (A year or so ago he would have said rugged individualism, but the phrase had been replaced in his vocabulary by its more noble-sounding synonym.) He probed with man-to-man frankness trying to learn where the financial backing had come from. He all but apologized for the foolish misunderstanding over the butler’s crime. And he ended up with a dinner invitation in token of reconciliation.
MacVeagh accepted. But his feelings were mixed, and they were even more mixed when he dropped into the office on the night of the dinner, resplendent in white tie and tails, to check up some last-minute details on the reports of the election for councilman. He had just learned that Grizzle had had some nasty semi-Fascist tieups a year earlier, and must not be allowed to be elected.
“I don’t know what’s the matter,” he confided to Molly after he’d attended to business. “I ought to be sitting on top of the world, and somehow I’m not. Maybe I almost see what the trouble is: No heavy.”
“What does that mean, boss?”
“No opposition. Nothing to fight against. Just wield my white magic benevolently and that’s that. I need a black magician to combat me on my own level. You’ve got to have a heavy.”
“Are you so sure,” Molly asked, “that yours is white magic?”
“Why—”
“Skip it, boss. But I think I know one thing that’s the matter. And I think, God help me, that you’ll realize it tonight.”
Molly’s words couldn’t have been truer if she had printed them in the Sentinel.
The party itself was painful. Not the dinner; that was as admirable as only H. A. Hitchcock’s chef could contrive. But the company had been carefully chosen to give MacVeagh the idea that, now that he was making such a phenomenal success of himself, he was to be welcomed among the Best People of Grover.
There were the Mansons, of course, and Phil Rogers, and Major General Front, U.S.A., retired, and a half dozen others who formed a neat tight little society of mutual admiration and congratulation. The only halfway human person present seemed to be the new general manager of the plant, Johansen; but he sat at the other end of the table from MacVeagh, in the dominating shadow of Mrs. Manson’s bosom.
MacVeagh himself was loomed over by Mrs. Front, who
gave her own interpretation of the general’s interpretation of the plans of the High Command. He noddeci dutifully and gave every impression of listening, while he saw and heard and felt nothing but Laura Hitchcock across the table.
Every man dreams of Helen, but to few is it ever given to behold the face that can launch a thousand ships. This is well. Life is complicated enough, if often pleasantly so, when we love a pretty girl, a charming girl, a sweet girl. But when we see beauty, pure and radiant and absolute, we are lost.
MacVeagh had been lost since he first arrived in Grover and old Jonathan Minter sent him to cover Laura’s coming-out party. After that she had gone east to college and he had told himself that it was all the champagne. He couldn’t have seen what his heart remembered.
Then she came back, and since then no moment of his life had ever seemed quite complete. He never knew how he stood with her; he never even knew what she was like. He would begin to get acquainted with her, and then she would be off to visit her aunt in Florida or her cousins, before the war, in France. Since the war she had stayed in Grover, busy with the various volunteer activities entailed by her position as H. A. Hitchcock’s daughter. He was beginning to know her, he thought; he was beginning to reach a point where—
And then came the murder and the quarrel with Hitchcock. And this was the first time that he had seen her since then.
She smiled and seemed friendly. Evidently, like her father, she looked upon MacVeagh with a new regard since he had begun his mysteriously spectacular climb to success.
She even exchanged an intimate and shuddering glance with him after dinner, when Mrs. Manson began to sing American folk ballads in the drawing room. MacVeagh took courage and pointed to the open French window behind her.
His throat choked when she accepted the hint. He joined her on the lawn, and they strolled quietly over to the pond, where the croaking monotone of the frogs drowned out the distant shrilling of Mrs. Manson.
“What gets me,” MacVeagh grunted, “is the people that call all that wonderful stuff‘ballads.’ They’re just plain songs, and good ones. And where they belong is a couple of guys that love them trying them out with one foot on the rail and the barkeep joining in the harmony. When the fancy folk begin singing them in drawing rooms with artistically contrived accompaniments—”
“I guess I’ll just have to do without them then,” said Laura. “I can’t see myself in your barroom.”
“Can’t you?” There must have been something in the moon that stirred MacVeagh’s daring. “Why not? There’s a good, plain, honest bar not a mile from here that I like. Why don’t we ditch the party and go—”
“Oh, John. Don’t be silly. We couldn’t. We’re not bright young people, and it isn’t smart to be like that any more. Everybody’s serious now; this is war. And besides, you know, you have to think more of the company you’re seen in now.”
“Me?”
“Of course, John. Father’s been telling me how wonderfully you’re coming on. You’re getting to be somebody. You have to look out for appearances.”
“I’m afraid”—MacVeagh grinned—“I have congenitally low tastes. Can’t I be a big-shot editor and still love the riff and the raff?”
“Of course not.” She was perfectly serious, and MacVeagh felt a twinge of regret that such perfection of beauty was apparently not compatible with the least trace of humor. “You have to be thinking about settling down now.”
“Settling down—” he repeated. This was so pat a cue, if he could get that lump out of his throat and go on with it. “You’re right, Laura. At my age—” His voice was as harsh a croak as the frogs’.
“What’s the matter, John?”
He harrumphed. “Something in my throat. But it’s true. A man needs a wife. A man—”
“Marriage is a wonderful thing, isn’t it? I’ve only just lately been realizing how wonderful.”
He leaned toward her. “Laura—”
“John, I feel like telling you something, if you’ll promise not to go printing it.”
“Yes—”
“It’s a secret yet, but—I’m going to be married.”
There was a distant patter of applause for Mrs. Manson, and the frogs croaked louder than ever. These were the only noises that accompanied the end of the world.
For a moment there was a blankness inside John MacVeagh. He felt as though he had received a harder blow than any taken in the fight with Hitchcock’s stooges. And then came the same reaction as he had known to those blows: the lust for battle. The lump in his throat was gone and words were pouring out. He heard the words only half-consciously, hardly aware that his own brain must be formulating them. He heard them, and was aghast that any man could lay bare his desires so plainly, his very soul.
They were pitiful words, and yet powerful—plaintive, and yet demandingly vigorous. And they were finally stopped by Laura’s voice cutting across them with a harsh “John!”
“John,” she said again more softly. “I— Believe me, I never knew you felt like this. I never would have—You’re nice. You’re sweet, and I like you. But I couldn’t ever love you. I couldn’t ever possibly marry you. Let’s go back inside, John. Mrs. Manson must be through by now. What’s the matter? Aren’t you coming? John. Please.”
But John MacVeagh stood motionless by the pool while Laura went on back to the big house. He listened to the frogs for a while and then he went to the good, plain, honest bar not a mile away and listened to some “ballads.”
After the third whiskey the numbness began to lift. He began to see what he had to do. It must be Phil Rogers she was marrying. But he was her cousin, wasn’t he? Oh, no—he was her aunt’s husband’s nephew. That made it all right.
But there was a way out. There was the one sure way. All right, so it was selfish. So it was abusing a great and mysterious power for private ends. But the custodian of that power had some privileges, didn’t he? And if he had one and only one prayer on earth—
After the seventh whiskey he went back to the office. It took him three tries to turn out legible copy. He hadn’t written a word for the Social Notes since Molly had joined the staff, and besides, the machine seemed to resent the drunken pawing of his fingers.
But he made it at last, and it appeared in the next day’s Sentinel, and H. A. Hitchcock said to his daughter, “Wish you’d told me, first, Laura. But I must say I think it’s a fine idea. He’s a comer, that boy. And maybe if you can use a little influence with him— Useful thing, having a newspaper editor in the family. You can keep him in hand.”
What came next is more plateau that we don’t need to examine in detail. At least, apparently plateau; a discerning eye might see the start of the fall already. Because lives don’t make nice, clear graphs. The rise and the fall can be going on at once, and neither of them noticeable.
So we can accept as read all the inevitable preparations for such an event as the wedding of H. A. Hitchcock’s daughter to the most promising young man in Grover. We can pass over the account of the white splendor of the wedding day and the curiously anticlimactic night that followed.
That was the night, too, when Molly, who never drank anything but beer, brought two fifths of whiskey to Luke Sellers’ boardinghouse and sat up all night discussing them and other aspects of life. But the scene would be difficult to record. Most of what she said wouldn’t make any sense to a reader. It didn’t make much sense to Luke, nor to Molly herself the next morning.
We can skip by the details of how Grover solved the manpower shortage in the adjacent farming territory, and of how liberalism triumphed in the council election. We can go on to a Saturday night three months after Whalen Smith departed, leaving a wish behind him.
John MacVeagh had been seeing quite a bit of Ingve Johansen since the Hitchcock dinner party. He was a man you kept running into at the luncheons you had to attend, and as your father-in-law’s general manager he was a man you had to have to dinner occasionally.
And MacVeagh’s first im
pression was confirmed: he was a good guy, this Johansen. A guy you’d be happy to have in a cracker-barrel session, only those sessions never seemed to come off any more. Running a daily was a very different job from being editor of the old weekly Sentinel. And when so much responsibility rested on your slightest word—you didn’t have time for a good bull session any more.
But Johansen would have belonged, just as Mr. Hasenberg would. Sometime he must get the two of them together away from the plant. For an executive like Johansen no more deserved to be judged by H. A. than Mr. Hasenberg did to be rated like Bricker.
Besides all the lines of race or religion or country or class, MacVeagh was beginning to feel, there was another basic dividing line among men: There are the good guys, the Men of Good Will, if you want to be fancy about it, and there are—others.
Ingve Johansen was of the first; and that’s why it hurt MacVeagh, when he dropped in that Saturday at his good, plain, honest bar for a quick one, to find Johansen reduced to telling the bartender the story of his life.
MacVeagh stayed in the bar longer than he’d intended. He steered the manager over to the corner table and tried gently to find out what was eating him. For this was no ordinary drinking, but some compelling obsession.
“Look,” MacVeagh said finally, “I know it’s none of my business, and if you want to tell me to go jump in a lake I’ll try and find one. But you’ve got something gnawing inside you, and if there’s anything I can do to help you—” You can’t tell men that you have the power to ease their troubles, but if you can once learn the troubles . . .
Johansen laughed. His heavy shock of blond hair hobbled with his laughter. He said, “How do you expect me to feel after you stole my girl?”
MacVeagh sat up straight. “Your girl? You mean you’re the one that she—”
“We were going to be married. Hadn’t sounded out H. A. yet, but it was all set. And first thing I know I read that piece in your paper—”
The Compleat Boucher Page 74
