Sincerely, Willis Wayde (6 page)

“Don't run,” a voice behind him said. The swan still hissed and spread its wings, and Willis turned around and saw Mr. Harcourt.

“Jupiter always loses his temper if you go too near the edge,” Mr. Harcourt said. “Get back in the water with the girls, Jupiter. Behave yourself, behave.”

Mr. Harcourt walked briskly toward the swan.

“Get back in the water, Jupiter,” Mr. Harcourt said, “and you needn't expect a gratuity every time you see me.”

“I didn't mean to stir him up, sir,” Willis said.

“The next time you come, throw him a piece of bread,” Mr. Harcourt said. “He's like certain members of my own family. He expects something and loses his temper if he doesn't get it. Even the rector is that way if you don't give enough. I've just been talking to Mr. Bowles on the telephone for half an hour about the parish hall. That's why I'm late, and just when I was driving out I saw you.” He nodded toward the driveway, and Willis saw that the Locomobile was standing waiting.

“I was just walking around, sir,” Willis said. “I was up in the vegetable garden and then I came down here.”

“Landing in a place like this must be a little difficult,” Mr. Harcourt said. “Of course I'm used to it, having been brought up here. My father always kept swans in the pond. I suppose that's why I do. Was MacDonald in the garden?”

“Yes, sir,” Willis said.

“I suppose he talked to you about insects,” Mr. Harcourt said. “He always does to me. If you haven't anything to do, why don't you come down with me and see the mill?”

Mr. Harcourt could always put anyone at ease. It was not charm exactly. It was his being the same with everyone.

He told Willis not to sit with Patrick but in back with him, because, he said, he wanted the pleasure of his company. It was only a long while later that Willis came to learn that there was a reason for Mr. Harcourt's interest when Mr. Harcourt asked him where he had lived and where he had gone to school. He was really asking about the life of Alfred Wayde, and it was not such a bad way to gather information, as Willis realized later, when he learned the same technique. If you talked to someone, even a boy, there had to be an exchange of confidence, and you had to tell about yourself in return for what you got, and this required a deceptive sort of guile. It was a form of art which very few could master, and Willis never could be the artist that Mr. Harcourt was.

When Mr. Harcourt was a boy, he said, he used to drive with his own father to the mill—in a buggy drawn by a dappled gray. There were more workers' houses along the Sudley Road now, but he had tried to keep to Mr. George Harcourt's plan when new houses were being built during the First World War. A war, Mr. Harcourt said, had always made the factory grow. It was during the Civil War that Mr. Harcourt had started riding down there with his father. It was quite a place in those days, more picturesque than now. The mill had been run by steam instead of electricity, and coal barges were unloaded at the dock by gangs of Irish workmen. The houses made a little village of their own now. There was a general store, and the general manager's house had been built in the eighties just where Mr. Harcourt's father had wanted it to be. Mr. Harcourt touched on these matters casually, as though Willis knew about them already, and that was the best way to learn about the mill, by a sort of osmosis.

The Harcourt Mill was running at full blast that morning. The hum and the clatter that came from its open windows and the pungent smell of rubber from the vats combined to make it into a great machine, and all the people behind the wire fence that surrounded it were moving according to its discipline. That was the best way to envisage any industry.

The machine was running smoothly, as it always did while Mr. Harcourt was alive. When the Locomobile pulled up in front of the mill, the gates swung back, but Mr. Harcourt shook his head.

“No, no,” he said to Patrick, and he had to raise his voice above the noise. “I'll walk around for a while, but come back for us at lunchtime, Patrick.”

He stepped out of the Locomobile lightly and quickly and nodded to the gateman.

“Stay close behind me, Willis, or you may get lost,” he said, and he hurried past the trucks by the loading platform. No one seemed to notice Mr. Harcourt and Willis as they walked by. Mr. Harcourt always prided himself on never interrupting anything, and everyone there accepted his presence as a piece of everyday routine. Mr. Harcourt never stopped, he never gave Willis an explanation, no matter how strange the sights were they encountered, but still a picture of the Harcourt process unrolled scroll-like for Willis as he followed Mr. Harcourt.

The Harcourt process was an accumulation of skills that had begun when the Harcourt Mill itself had started spinning yarn back in 1850. The durability and strength of Harcourt belting had given it a reputation in the trade of which the mill was proud. Though the process was largely mechanical, it was one that demanded care and precision. You talked about workmanship in sales conferences, but the morale of workmanship was something different. Later Willis learned subconsciously to estimate this morale, and he felt its presence on that first walk past the noisily accurate machinery. The labor in the Harcourt Mill was good skilled Yankee labor. Everyone in the Harcourt Mill was as good as everyone else, in his own way. The elderly foremen did not bother to look up as Mr. Harcourt moved past them, and every motion that the men made was lazily casual but at the same time beautifully precise. Mr. Harcourt walked through Sheds 1, 2, and 4 and through the pump shed and through Warehouse No. 1 to the shipping shed and then to the newer brick building, Unit No. 3, where they were installing new machinery. Except for sounds of hammering and the clicking of chain hoists, Unit 3 was quiet. A section of a boiler was being lowered to its foundation, and Willis saw his father in his shirt sleeves standing among the workmen, and for the first time in their walk Mr. Harcourt paused to watch.

“Easy, Joe,” Willis heard his father saying. “Hold it.” Alfred Wayde raised his voice to a shout. “Did you ever see an elephant set his foot on a man's head in the circus? Well, he's got to put his foot down easy. Good morning, Mr. Harcourt.”

“Is it coming down all right?” Mr. Harcourt asked.

“The boys are doing fine,” Alfred Wayde said.

“Then don't stop on my account,” Mr. Harcourt said. “I brought Willis along with me this morning.”

“Oh,” Mr. Wayde said, “hello, Willis. Let her down, Joe.… Easy, easy.”

His father had no time for anything except for the problem in front of him. He was always at his best when he was facing mechanical fact.

“We'd better go to the office now. I don't think we'll be able to help them, Willis,” Mr. Harcourt said.

The mill office building had been designed by the Boston architectural firm of Wentworth and Hynde, early in 1916. Representatives from a number of industrial plants had begun to visit the mill at that time, and Mr. Harcourt had been the first to see the sales value of an impressive place in which to receive customers. Though the general spirit of the building was in keeping with the older mill construction, a considerable sum had been spent on nothing but appearance. Its large arched doorway and its small-paned windows with green shutters gave the mill office the appearance of a Federalist dwelling, as it stood by itself at the northwest corner of the plant on a carefully tended plot of lawn. It looked, as Mrs. Blood had once said—because she and some other family stockholders had been opposed to the extravagance—like a headmaster's overgrown house in a boys' school, but at the same time it indicated without words the solidity and prosperity of the whole establishment.

The interior also looked more like a house than an office. There was a fine hallway, and a broad staircase rising to the sales and plan departments. There was a large waiting room with a comfortable open fireplace—almost like a room in a men's club, as Mrs. Blood said—and there were a directors' room and rooms for all the chief executives. Instead of contracting with an office-supply house for the necessary desks, chairs, and tables, Mr. Harcourt had called in an interior decorator, who had furnished the main office with antique reproductions and often with genuine pieces of English Chippendale. The walls of the main hallway were hung with a collection of sailing-ship pictures, and the table in the directors' room was a Duncan Phyfe. As Mr. Harcourt said, the office building was the one place in which he had been allowed ever to express his own taste. If none of it had anything to do with commercial belting, it gave an impression of quality, which was the basis of the Harcourt product.

Mr. Harcourt's mind was on this subject now, as he walked into the main hall with Willis and nodded to Miss Minton, the receptionist, who sat behind a flat Georgian desk.

“How does this strike you, Willis?” he asked. “I've never seen why business should not be conducted in agreeable surroundings or why people should suffer when they talk over costs and figures. Is Mr. Hewett in, Miss Minton?”

“Yes, Mr. Harcourt. He was asking for you,” Miss Minton said. “Shall I tell him you're in?”

“Oh, no,” Mr. Harcourt said, “I'll stop in and see him.”

Mr. Hewett's door was open. It was one of the rules at the Harcourt Mill that every one of the key officers should keep his door open except when he was in a private conference, and also that every officer should be ready to see any employee whatsoever, without appointment; and it was not a bad rule either for a small organization. Except for his neat brown suit and for his age—he was in his sixties then—Mr. Hewett reminded Willis of Mr. Beane at the Harcourt place. He had the same broad heavy shoulders and the same broad face, but unlike Mr. Beane he wore horn-rimmed spectacles. He was seated at his desk reading a report when Mr. Harcourt entered.

“Hello, H.H.,” Mr. Harcourt said.

“Hello, H.H.,” Mr. Hewett answered.

It was one of the old Harcourt jokes, that they both had the same first name and the same initials.

“This is Willis Wayde,” Mr. Harcourt said.

“Oh, he's Alf's son, is he?” Mr. Hewett said. “Mary's been planning to pay a call on Mrs. Wayde, but she said it was only fair to let her get settled first. Well, how do things seem to you, Willis?”

Willis cleared his throat, and his voice broke slightly.

“It's pretty big to get an idea of it all at once,” he said.

“Some people around here never do,” Mr. Hewett said. “Will you draw up a chair and sit down, H.H.?”

“No, thanks,” Mr. Harcourt said. “Is there anything I ought to know about, Henry?”

“Nothing this morning,” Mr. Hewett said. “Decker is coming in this afternoon. Do you want me to sit in with you?”

“It might be just as well,” Mr. Harcourt said. “Is Bryson in?”

“He's upstairs going over sales,” Mr. Hewett said. “Bryson's got a new chart.”

“No doubt I'll hear about it later,” Mr. Harcourt said. “Henry, Number Five is working all right now, isn't it? At least it sounded right.”

“Old Man Avery was sick that you noticed it yesterday,” Mr. Hewett said. “He's breaking in two new cutters, you know. Anything else on your mind, H.H.?”

Mr. Harcourt pinched his lower lip gently.

“I saw them testing out that yarn, and I still wouldn't call it long-staple Egyptian. They ought to know better than to send us a shipment like that, and I wish you'd tell them so from me. And the skylight's still out at Unit Three.”

“You're right it is,” Mr. Hewett said, “but the boys are setting the new glass now.”

Willis followed Mr. Harcourt further down the hall, and Mr. Harcourt stopped at another open door.

“Go in, Willis,” he said. “This is where I stay when I'm here.”

Willis was surprised by the simplicity of Mr. Harcourt's office. It was larger but its appointments were much simpler than those in the room of any other executive, but there was a reason behind everything with which Mr. Harcourt was connected. The battered desk, the old-fashioned carpet, the wooden chairs around a bare pine table, the grate, the tongs and shovel, the coal bucket by the fireplace had all come from the old office of William Harcourt. Then they had been used, with only a few additions, by Mr. George Harcourt, whose portrait, with that of Mr. William—both replicas of the ones in the Harcourt dining room—stared somberly from the walls. The furnishings indicated dramatically that Mr. Harcourt, as the head of the Harcourt Mill, could dispense with elaborate settings.

“These things here,” Mr. Harcourt said to Willis, just as though Willis were a distinguished visitor, “were bought by my grandfather when he started the mill in 1850. A lot of business has been done across this desk. Sit down there, won't you, Willis?”

He pointed to a chair beside the desk and sat down himself on the swivel chair behind it, first glancing out of the window behind him and then out of the window to his left. Then he examined some papers in front of him without bothering to put on his spectacles.

“Excuse me just a minute, Willis,” he said, and he read the office memoranda with a concentration that made Willis think that an invisible curtain had fallen between them.

“Miss Jackman,” he called, “will you come in, please?”

Miss Jackman had been his secretary for twenty years, and she had been in the accounting department for some years previously. She was gray-haired and straight-backed, with steel-rimmed glasses that made her look like a schoolmarm. She opened the door of her own office at the end of the room, strolled across the threadbare carpet and halted in an almost military way in front of Mr. Harcourt's desk. Mr. Harcourt smiled at her, but she did not return his smile.

“You've got me down for a pretty tight schedule this afternoon, Miss Jackman,” Mr. Harcourt said. “I'm getting old and I like time to turn around in.”