Sincerely, Willis Wayde (2 page)

“You come from Colorado?” Mr. Barker said.

“Colorado and other places,” the fellow said, “and I could certainly do with a good cold beer.”

Those were his exact words, and Mr. Barker remembered them because he could have done with a beer himself, what with Prohibition and everything.

“Say,” Mr. Barker said, “you're working at the Harcourt Mill, ain't you?”

“Yes,” the fellow said, “as an engineer.”

“They tell me Mr. Harcourt's a nice man to work for,” Mr. Barker said.

“It seems that way, partner,” the fellow said. Those were his exact words.

“He must think a lot of you,” Barker said, “to send down his old Loco to meet your folks. He thinks a lot of that old Loco.”

The fellow did not answer. He took a bag of Bull Durham out of his coat pocket and rolled a cigarette and lighted a match on his thumb nail.

“How do you like it now you're here?” Mr. Barker asked.

“It's a friendly place,” the fellow said. “People here are interested in strangers.”

“You look as though you'd been around a lot,” Mr. Barker said.

“Yes,” the fellow said, “around a lot. If it helps you, my name's Alf Wayde, so you won't have to ask anyone.”

He didn't belong around there and he wasn't friendly, but at the same time he was common just like you or me. He raised his voice just when the train was coming in.

“She's got a bad bearing,” he said, “and her pistons need packing.”

It did not take a minute to get the chicken crates aboard the baggage car and there was nothing to come off except one light case for Fenwick's Dry Goods Store, so Mr. Barker could check on the passengers alighting. The first to get down was Miss Mamie Bowles, who was studying shorthand at the Lynn Commercial School, and after her came Charlie Wilson, who ran the drugstore, and after him, his sister, Minnie Wilson, the high-school teacher. Then a gawky boy of about fifteen, wearing a Western ten-gallon hat, got out of the rear coach lugging two straw suitcases so heavy for him that he came near to tripping, but he turned right around to help down a spry little lady who was on the steps behind him. Then this fellow Wayde shouted out, “Hello, honey,” and, “Hello, Willis.” Wayde kissed the little lady and shook hands with the boy; and Patrick Flynn didn't seem to know whether to treat the party like guests or like people just working for Harcourt.

“Willis,” the little lady said, just when Mr. Barker was rolling the truck down to the baggage room, “give the baggage man the trunk checks.”

The trunks weren't on the four-sixteen and that was a fact. “Willis,” the little lady said, “didn't they tell you the trunks would come with us?”

“Yes, Mom,” the boy said.

It didn't matter what anyone had said. The trunks weren't there and that was a fact.

“It will be all right, Madam,” Patrick said. “They'll be coming on the six-two, and Beane is coming down with the truck at six o'clock.”

“Let's get going,” Wayde said. “You sit in back with me, Cynthia, and Willis can sit up front. This is Mrs. Wayde, Pat, and this is Willis.”

Patrick looked startled when the little lady shook hands.

“It's nice to know you,” she said. “You shouldn't have hired this big automobile for us, Alf.”

“I didn't hire it,” Mr. Wayde said. “It's Mr. Harcourt's automobile. Why don't you take your coat off, Willis?”

“Oh, no,” the little lady said, “not in the automobile.”

Well, that was all there was to it. But anyway, Mr. Barker was the first one to lay eyes on Willis Wayde. You would never have thought that the young fellow would amount to much. You never would have thought that some day he would have his own Cadillac and his own chauffeur. He was just a hot, gawky, red-faced kid with big hands and a big nose and mouth, and he needed a haircut. The fact was that he was in what you might call the growing stage. His body hadn't caught up with his hands nor the rest of his face with his nose. There was no way of guessing then that Willis Wayde was going to come out well set up, almost handsome, and a snappy dresser too. But even then the boy did carry a pocket comb, which was a sign he was particular.

Later Willis came to realize that you could never tell whether Mr. Harcourt's chauffeur, Patrick Flynn, was sad or happy. You always felt that he was not at home in an automobile, which was understandable, since he had been the Harcourts' coachman until they had given up the carriage horses and the old stables had been turned into a garage. Behind the wheel of the Loco, which was a period piece in itself, Patrick sat up thin and straight, an immaculate, elderly man, with his long dish face as stern and watchful as though he were handling a skittish pair that at any moment might need a whip's corrective touch. Whenever Patrick reached for the gearshift of the Loco, you thought of him stretching out his hand to the whip socket.

Just as they were leaving the station Willis's father turned down the heavy plate-glass window that divided the chauffeur's seat from the occupants in back.

“Stop at Wilson's Drugstore, will you?” Mr. Wayde said. “I want a prescription filled. It won't take more than two minutes.”

“What sort of prescription, Alfred?” Willis heard his mother ask.

“For a pint of rye, Cynthia,” his father said.

“Oh, Alf,” he heard his mother say, and then the window turned up again, and Willis and Patrick were alone.

“It's an awful hot day, isn't it?” Willis said. “But it's hotter still in Kansas.”

“Don't talk when I'm driving,” Mr. Flynn said.

It was all like a foreign country. The street was lined with old-fashioned homes, all neatly painted and pretty close together. The trees were what impressed Willis most. He had seen elms before but never so many big ones looking like green feather dusters, and not a leaf of them was stirring. Outside of town they passed a few small farms in a mean-looking rocky country with fields bordered by stone walls. Then the road ran along the river for a piece, and all at once he saw a group of brick buildings and a tall factory chimney. There was a high wire fence all around them and a row of workers' houses on the other side of the road. They turned left near the factory and began climbing a steepish hill, and a minute later Willis saw the dressed-granite wall that marked the front of the Harcourt place.

When the Harcourt family, like other New England millowners, had become suddenly rich during the Civil War, William Harcourt, Mr. Henry Harcourt's grandfather, had built the Harcourt place. Though the war had added to the family fortune, the Harcourts were already well-to-do. In 1819 William Harcourt had married a Miss Rebecca Atwood, the only daughter of a Boston shipping family, and he had also inherited a substantial legacy from an English cousin. Furthermore he was gifted with sound business instincts that prompted him to build a cotton manufactory in 1850 upon the river frontage of what was then the old Harcourt farm.

William Harcourt had been an old man when he built the Harcourt place—not so much for his own enjoyment as from some vague desire for dynastic security. While on a business trip to England, he retained the services of a British architect, an Oswell Beardsley, whose specialty was country houses, and consequently the Harcourt place always had a slightly foreign flavor. This Mr. Beardsley selected for his site a knoll in almost the center of the old farm acreage that overlooked the mill buildings and the river; and, arbitrarily, he cut off a tract of about fifteen acres of forest and orchard and pasture, surrounding it by a low wall. It was Beardsley who decided which old trees would remain and who supervised all the planting of the new trees and shrubbery that shielded the house and outbuildings. Though the place was walled off from the farm proper, very consciously excluding the old farmhouse and cattle barns, the imported architect had considered all the three hundred acres of the old farm and the mill itself as a single unit, and the granite house he built—with its Gothic windows and Gothic verandas, with its stables and greenhouse, and walled gardens for flowers and vegetables—became the central adornment of the whole.

This vision had been somewhat altered when the land around the mill grew eventually into a small village and more foremen's and superintendents' houses were constructed. Yet anyone who faced the main entrance in the low granite wall and saw the stone gate cottage and the mansard roof and gables of the big house through the trees still understood that the Harcourt place owed its existence to the functional structures by the river. The wisteria vines on the porches and the growth of the trees had softened harder outlines. When Willis first saw the Harcourt place some sixty years had passed over it, and it had begun to have its own atmosphere.

When the Locomobile turned into the drive, the limbs of the beech trees that bordered it made a network of shadow over the freshly raked yellow gravel. Between their pale-gray trunks Willis saw the mowed green fields on either side, with a sheepfold in one space and then a duck pond and a summerhouse. It was quite a while before they came to the lawns and the terraced gardens. From there they turned down the back drive past the greenhouse and past the stable yard, and for the first time Patrick spoke.

“This is the big house,” he said, “and down there is the road to Mr. Bryson's house.”

“Say,” Willis said, “does Mr. Harcourt live there all alone?”

“He does,” Patrick said.

“Gee,” Willis said, “I don't see what he does in it.”

“That's his business,” Patrick said.

“I only mean it's so big,” Willis said, “with all those other buildings and everything.”

Patrick did not answer. The back drive had brought them past the kitchen garden, and Willis saw the garden house just at the edge of a grove of oaks.

“You get off here,” Patrick said.

“Gee,” Willis said, “is this where we're going to live?”

Patrick did not answer, but he jumped out of the Locomobile more smartly than he had at the station and opened the door formally for Mr. and Mrs. Wayde.

“That's all right, Pat,” Alfred Wayde said. “Willis and I can handle the bags.”

“Mr. Harcourt told me to tell you, Madam,” Patrick said, “that if there is anything you need, to call Mr. Beane on the house telephone. Selwyn has left some groceries to get you started, Madam, and MacDonald has brought a few vegetables.”

“That's very kind of Mr. Harcourt,” Mrs. Wayde said. “Everything looks lovely, and if we want anything Mr. Wayde can get it in his Ford.”

It was the first time that Willis had heard that his father had a car, but now he saw a Ford runabout standing in a small shed beneath the trees.

“Well, if that's all then,” Patrick said.

“Yes, that's all,” Mr. Wayde said. “Thanks, Pat.”

“Oh, just a minute,” Mrs. Wayde said, and she lowered her voice. “Alfred.”

“Oh, yes,” Mr. Wayde said, and he pulled a bill out of his trousers pocket.

“That isn't necessary, sir,” Patrick said, and Willis saw his glance fall, unintentionally perhaps, upon the straw suitcases.

“All the more reason to take it,” Mr. Wayde said.

“Well, thanks,” Patrick said. “Remember, if you want anything, Madam, call up Mr. Beane on the house telephone.”

All three of them stood for a moment on the path looking at the garden house. It was a small two-story replica of the big house, built of stone in the same Gothic style with leaded casement windows, and there was a flower bed filled with deep-purple petunias on either side of the front door.

“Why, Alfred,” Mrs. Wayde said, “it's like a picture. Is it furnished?”

His father stood with his hands in his trousers pockets.

“You come inside, Cynthia,” he said. “We've got a real place for once. There's sheets, blankets, china, and everything.”

Willis felt there must be some catch to it when they came into the small front entry with its flight of carpeted stairs and figured wallpaper. On the right was a sitting room with a big fireplace, all furnished with easy chairs, pictures, lamps, and everything. There was a big dining room on the left with a dark-oak gate-leg table and Windsor chairs, and there was a kitchen ell with a fire in the stove and a table covered with groceries and vegetables.

“Do you like it, Cynthia?” his father asked.

“Of course I like it, Alfred,” she answered, “only I can't believe it.”

There were two bedrooms upstairs, with curtains of shiny chintz, and there was even a chaise longue in one of them—a word that Willis learned later. His mother looked at it all doubtfully, as though she still could not believe it.

“What's the rent on it, Alfred?” she asked.

The corners of his father's wide mouth tightened.

“Twenty-five dollars,” he said.

“Well, maybe it's worth it,” his mother said. “But can we afford twenty-five dollars a week?”

“No,” his father said, “twenty-five a month.”

Willis heard his mother catch her breath.

“Why is he only asking that? I don't see …” Mrs. Wayde began, and her voice ended on a higher note.

“It's all right, Cynthia,” his father said.

“Gosh,” Willis said. “Mr. Harcourt must have an awful lot of money, Pa.”

“That's no way to talk,” Mrs. Wayde told him. “You mean he must be a very kind man, Willis, who thinks a lot of your father—unless there's something we don't know about.”

“There isn't anything,” Alfred Wayde said.

“Well, I certainly hope not,” Mrs. Wayde said, and she sighed. “I'll start things in the kitchen, and, Willis, you take a bath and put on a clean shirt, and be sure to wash the tub. Why, everything's all dusted.”

“That's right,” Alfred Wayde said. “Two women were here all last week.”

“I just can't believe it,” Mrs. Wayde said, “I really can't.”