Sincerely, Willis Wayde (46 page)

Willis discovered that he suddenly had a warm spot in his heart for Edward Ewing.

“Of course the plant is small in a modern sense,” he said slowly, “but still it has real possibilities. I remember that Bess used to be sentimental about it.”

“Sentimental is right,” Edward said. “Her family is always quarreling about the mill.”

It was just as well to assume that Edward Ewing might not be as dull as he looked. It was not a time to show undue eagerness or a time to be fishing for information. It was better to drop the subject of the Harcourt Mill.

“How's the tennis?” Willis asked.

“Tennis?” Edward repeated, and it was clear that he had entirely forgotten.

“I don't suppose you remember,” Willis said. “No reason that you should. We played a set at the Harcourts' one summer when I was working in the mill office.” He laughed easily. “I was lousy, perfectly lousy.”

“Oh,” Edward said, “yes, I remember, and we had a swim in the pool. I've given up tennis and taken up golf.”

“Is that so?” Willis said. “Well, I'll take you on at that sometime. I'm not so lousy at golf.”

It would be a compensation, a squaring of the circle, if he could play golf and beat Edward Ewing.

“Not that I'm any good,” Willis said, because it was never correct to say that one was good at golf. “But I get a whale of a lot of fun out of it.”

Edward Ewing nodded and Willis had the pleasant feeling one always has when a difficult conversation ends on a common ground of interest.

“How much do you go around in?” Edward asked.

“Oh, just a beginner's score,” Willis said. “In the middle nineties or perhaps a stroke or two below.”

“Oh,” Edward said. “Well, we must have a game.”

Since Edward had not mentioned what he could go around in, he was, of course, a better player. It was ridiculous that Willis should have had a faint feeling of frustration. It was a relief when Mr. Bryson returned to the dining room. He was like the map of a familiar country, although the map had been stored away for many years.

“Don't get up,” Mr. Bryson said, “please. I'm sorry to have taken so long, but Roger wouldn't let me go. He hopes we can both be down at State Street at half past nine tomorrow morning. I hope that isn't too early.”

“Oh, no,” Willis said. “It will be a real pleasure to see Mr. Roger again.”

“I can drop by and pick you up,” Mr. Bryson said. “I forgot to ask where you were stopping, Willis.”

“Thank you very much, sir,” Willis said. “I'm at the Ritz.”

“Well, that will be no trouble at all, if you're at the Ritz,” Mr. Bryson said.

It seemed to Willis that there had been a shade of surprise when the Ritz had been mentioned.

“I usually stop at the Ritz when I'm in Boston,” Willis said. It was a little crude, he thought the moment after he said it, and not quite accurate, perhaps, because he had never stopped at the Ritz before.

“I suppose if we don't go upstairs we will be criticized,” Mr. Bryson said.

“That's right,” Edward said. “Bess gave me the word for us to come up as soon as possible, and you know Bess.”

“Oh, yes,” Mr. Bryson said, “we all know Bess.”

“Come here and sit beside me, Willis,” Mrs. Harcourt said, “and please tell me some more about the children.”

“Well,” Willis said, “there isn't much to tell about Paul except that he's a pretty hefty youngster, Mrs. Harcourt, but Al's quite a boy—just in what I think is called the toddling stage. I wish I had a snapshot of him here. You know I really have a pretty warm spot in my heart for Al.”

“Of course you have,” Mrs. Harcourt said. “I'm sure you're a very good father. Doesn't—er—Sylvia think so?”

“Why did you name the second one Paul?” Bess asked. Her voice came to him from across the room, showing that she had been listening all the while.

“Sylvia named him after her grandfather,” Willis said.

“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.