Sincerely, Willis Wayde (15 page)

“I've been intending for some time to speak to you frankly, Willis,” Mr. Harcourt said, and his voice was measured and soft, but in the closed room it had a resonant, chimelike quality. Then Mr. Harcourt smiled one of his quick formal smiles that only went so far as to curve his mouth and immediately disappear.

“In a way I am going to throw myself on your discretion and say one or two things of a highly personal nature, which I shall rely on you not to repeat.”

“Yes, sir,” Willis said.

“You see, I have to rely on people,” Mr. Harcourt said, “and I haven't gone wrong often. Hand me that box of cigars, please, Willis, and the cutter.”

Mr. Harcourt selected a cigar and the cold snip from the cutter sounded so unnaturally loud that Willis felt his muscles tense.

“Well,” Mr. Harcourt said, “I was speaking about you to Bess the other evening. Hand me the matchbox please, Willis.”

Willis reached quickly for the silver box that stood at the end of Mr. Harcourt's work table, but his fingers closed on it clumsily.

“Thanks,” Mr. Harcourt said. “I wish she were a boy. She has the family ability, I think, and Bill hasn't got it. Do you agree?”

“I don't know, sir,” Willis said.

“Of course you know,” Mr. Harcourt said. “Some people have a commercial instinct and some haven't. Bill's like his father—not that I'm not fond of them. They're loyal to me.”

He paused as though he expected Willis to say something.

“Commercial instinct may not be the proper phrase. It's something I have and something they haven't. It isn't only an ability to make money—that's an incidental part. At any rate I think you have it.”

Mr. Harcourt paused again, and Willis felt a strange tingling in his spine.

“Well,” Mr. Harcourt said, “if the family hasn't got the instinct, we must find it elsewhere, Willis. Henry Hewett's a good man, but he's too old for any long-term planning. Briggs is all right in sales, but he's too nervous to take on anything else. It's a mistake to think you're going to live forever. Well … I'm calling in a management firm—Beakney-Graham in New York. I'm asking them to go over the office setup and to make general recommendations. You don't know why I'm telling you this, do you?”

“No, sir,” Willis said, “I don't.”

Mr. Harcourt stared at him for a moment without speaking.

“Because I'm thinking of taking you into my office as a sort of assistant, Willis. I'm going to need someone in about two years who is loyal and who knows me and knows the family. Bill is going to the Harvard Business School in the fall. I want to send you there too.”

Mr. Harcourt's measured voice stopped, and probably it was time. At any rate Willis needed time to put what Mr. Harcourt had said into any sort of order.

“Well, sir,” Willis began.

“Just a minute,” Mr. Harcourt said. “I haven't finished yet. I want you to meet customers who come to see me. You must get to know the stockholders and learn to get me information when I want it. Before you can be what I'm thinking of, I want your rough edges smoothed off. Bill can teach you a little. I know you've been watching him, and I can help you myself, but most of it is going to be up to you. I hope you see what I mean.”

Willis cleared his throat, but his voice was still hoarse when he answered.

“I see what you mean, sir,” he said, “but I don't know as I'd be able to do it.”

Mr. Harcourt tapped his finger several times against the end of his cigar.

“Maybe you won't,” he said. “I'll have to see.”

“You're being mighty kind to me, sir,” Willis began, but Mr. Harcourt stopped him.

“No,” he said, “I haven't the slightest intention of being kind to you.”

He stopped and still kept his glance on Willis.

“Have you talked to my father about this, sir?” Willis asked him.

“Why under the sun should I?” Mr. Harcourt said.

“He wouldn't like it, sir,” Willis said, “and he wouldn't send me to any business school.”

Mr. Harcourt coughed gently.

“He isn't going to,” he said. “I'm paying for this party, Willis.”

There was something arrogant in the way he said it that Willis did not like even then.

“No,” Willis said, “I couldn't do that, sir.”

At least for once he had looked Mr. Harcourt in the eye and had laid it on the line.

“All right,” Mr. Harcourt said. “All right, if that's the way you want it, Willis.”

Willis pushed back his chair and stood up.

“But thank you very much for offering this to me,” he said.

Mr. Harcourt placed his cigar on his ash tray.

“Sit down,” he said. “We haven't finished yet. Suppose we put it this way. It takes two years to go through the Harvard Business School. I am prepared to lend you three thousand dollars for your expenses, Willis, and you can give me your note for it at six per cent. You'll be working in the summer. I'll have it amortized out of your salary. I'm taking a calculated risk, but I do that every day. Do you like that better, Willis?”

“Yes, sir,” Willis said. “But it's a lot of money.”

“I suppose it is, from your point of view, but these things are always relative,” Mr. Harcourt said. “Will you do it, Willis?”

It was the first decision that Willis Wayde had ever been obliged to make, and he liked to think that he did it rather well.

“Yes, sir,” he said, “I'll do it, and thank you very much,” and then he cleared his throat again, “and I'll always try to do the best I can, Mr. Harcourt.”

He meant every word of it, and it was easier to be nice in those days than it was later. Mr. Harcourt laughed softly.

“You'd be a damn fool if you didn't,” he said, “and I've never set you down as one. Well, that finishes our conversation. Let's go out and join the ladies, Willis.”

His first instinct was to thank Mr. Harcourt and to say he should be going home, but instead Willis followed him down the hall to the living room. Even on that short walk he began to be vaguely aware that he had lost some sort of freedom which he could not name exactly and which he had not valued until he lost it.

He was not surprised when he saw Mrs. Harcourt and Bess seated on the living-room sofa, and it was a suitable ending for that evening.

“Well, Harriet,” Mr. Harcourt said, “Willis is going to the Harvard Business School.”

He was surprised, although it did not seem unnatural, that Mrs. Harcourt took his hand in both of hers.

“Oh, Willis,” she said, “I'm so glad for you, and I'm glad for us. I know you're going to be a great help to Mr. Harcourt.”

There was a great deal more to her words than met the ear. She seemed relieved and happy, and Bess seemed happy too.

“I'm glad too,” Bess said, “but you certainly took an awfully long time talking about it.”

“Not so long,” Mr. Harcourt said. “There'll be some more details tomorrow, Willis. I want to see you and Bill at the office at ten o'clock.”

“I'd better be going home now,” Bess said, and she smiled in a quick way like her grandfather. “You'll walk home with me, won't you, Willis?”

It was more like an order than a question.

“Yes, of course, Bess,” Willis said.

“He says it just like a yes man, doesn't he?” Bess said, and everybody laughed.

“Willis, dear,” Mrs. Harcourt said, and he was startled. It was the first time she had ever called him “dear.” “We want you to feel that you are a part of the family now, don't we, Henry?”

Mr. Harcourt put his hand on Willis's arm.

“He knows that already,” he said, “or he ought to, Harriet.”

Willis knew that it was true. In some way, without the words being spoken, he had sworn some sort of allegiance in Mr. Harcourt's study. He had traveled a long way since he had stepped off the train with his suitcases and his Stetson hat one summer afternoon, and he was sure that Mr. Harcourt had planned it. Mr. Harcourt had always planned everything.

VII

What had the world been like when Willis had attended the Harvard Business School? He could explain it in terms of graphs and curves. He knew on paper many pertinent details of that time, but when he had lived it he had, of course, been too young for any balanced appreciation. He had only lived through it emotionally and it was still a part of his youth.

What had he been like in those days? He could not tell exactly, any more than he could recall the facts and theories he had absorbed under the famous Case System. He could only recall a sense of general excitement and well-being. He had suddenly become a bright boy at the Harvard Business School. He had begun to absorb a picture there which he had never lost of the broad forces behind trade and organization. He had even gained, perhaps, the beginnings of a philosophy, yet he could not for the life of him remember much about himself. He had begun to gain an assurance with the high marks they gave him. He was brighter than most of the young men around him, and he had ceased to be afraid of money and he had begun to learn its uses. There was no wonder that he had a warm spot in his heart for the Harvard School of Business Administration in spite of some of the confusions of its theories.

This was the only picture he could give of himself or of his attitudes when Bill Harcourt had introduced him to a girl named Sylvia Hodges and her family in his final year at the Business School. He was not impressed by this event at the time, which indicated, of course, that he had developed a rudimentary sort of social life. There were not only the usual smokers and get-together teas, but several members of the faculty had asked him to tea or supper. After all, he was presentable. He had learned to return hospitality in a small way by taking several girls to tea dances at the Copley-Plaza in Boston and occasionally to the theater. Also, Mr. Harcourt had asked him to dinner several times and so had the Bryson Harcourts, and he saw Bess occasionally, but never as often as he saw her in the summer. Thus he was not surprised when Bill asked him to go with him to see the Hodgeses on Craigie Street.

It had been on a Friday, when he was helping Bill with a course on marketing, that Bill brought up the subject. Willis could still see Bill's room with his photographs and his neckties and his framed club invitations from his undergraduate days and his evening clothes flung over a chair waiting for the valet service and the small wine keg in the closet in which Bill was endeavoring to manufacture claret. Willis could still see the papers on Bill's desk, always in disorder, and he could see Bill himself in his gray slacks and his soft shirt.

“You know I did the damnedest thing the other night,” Bill said. “I went to one of those dances in Brattle Hall. Honestly, I thought I'd outgrown that sort of thing.”

“Why did you go if you didn't want to?” Willis asked.

“There was a dinner,” Bill said, “and the family wanted me to go. I haven't any character. I'm always nice to everybody.”

Bill stretched his arms above his head. Whenever he had to study, he always wanted to put the moment off.

“Some day I'm going to stop being nice,” Bill said. “Now take the other night. I was introduced to a girl and I was stuck with her for about an hour. She's somebody Steve Decker knows, and now she's written me a note.”

He rustled through the papers on his desk and handed Willis a letter written in a girl's precise, small hand.

Dear Mr. Harcourt,

I remember your saying the other evening, though perhaps you have forgotten it, that you never can find much to do on Sundays. We always have a pickup supper every Sunday night and we play pencil-and-paper games, or something like that. Steve Decker, who says he knows you, is coming next Sunday, and I hope you can come too, at half past six o'clock, and bring a friend, if you would care to. It's just an informal family pickup supper, but it will give you something to do on Sunday.

Sincerely,

Sylvia Hodges

Sometimes it seemed to Willis that he had been born with an instinctive faculty for recognizing and respecting the motives of other people. When Bill Harcourt invited him to call on the Hodges family in Cambridge that Sunday afternoon, Willis knew very well that Bill would not have asked one of his closer friends to share in this ordeal, but it pleased him that Bill had asked him, because it indicated that Bill thought him adequate.

In fact Bill was disarmingly grateful when they walked along the wintry sidewalks of Brattle Street. There was something about Cambridge people, especially professors, Bill said—and this girl's father was a professor—that made him nervous. He had taken a course in geology under this Professor Hodges. It had been highly recommended as impossible to fail in and had consisted of a series of lectures supplemented by several trips to nearby places in the country to look at rocks. Old Man Hodges had given him a “C,” and the professor even had a sort of a sense of humor. Nevertheless, in Bill's opinion professors and their families were hard to understand.

Without ever having been to the Hodgeses', Bill knew what it would be like. Mr. and Mrs. Hodges would be trying to have their daughters meet some nice young people, and he and Willis were elected. The other guests would be Radcliffe girls and graduate students that no one had ever heard of.

The Hodgeses lived in a beige-colored Victorian house that stood on a small lawn dotted with spindly bushes. It was cold inside because the hot-air furnace was giving trouble. There were a lot of young people in the large Victorian parlor and in the dining room behind it. As Mrs. Hodges said, the latchstring was always out on Sunday evening for the children's friends, and Cambridge, if it was nothing else, was a town of young people. The hall was full of overshoes and rubbers, and the umbrella stand and the chairs beside it were piled with overcoats. Mr. and Mrs. Hodges seemed ill at ease with the young people. They stood in front of the parlor fireplace with Sylvia's sister, Laura, a pale girl of about sixteen, who also looked uneasy.