Point of No Return

by John P. Marquand

  Charles was obviously not expected to answer. He was wondering whether Mr. Stanley had picked up the wonderful-town phrase from Malcolm or whether everybody who came to Clyde and settled there thought that it was a wonderful town, and Mr. Stanley was going on.

  “If I were young and had to start all over again, I’d want to live in a place like Clyde and never get out of it. I can talk all night when I get started on Clyde, but then we know it, don’t we, Charley?”

  “Yes, sir, I guess we do,” Charles said. He thought that Mr. Stanley looked at him sharply. He almost thought that Mr. Stanley guessed what he was thinking—that Mr. Stanley was an outsider who did not belong in Clyde.

  “We ought to get together and talk about this again sometime,” Mr. Stanley said. “I’ve been meaning to tell my boy Norman to ask you up to the house sometime. Well, we’ll make a point of it now it’s getting on to summer and things are easing up. By the way, what’s all this that Dickie Howell’s been in here telling me about you, Charley?”

  Mr. Stanley smiled, picked up a silver letter opener from his desk, and stared straight at Charles. It was obvious that Mr. Stanley wanted him to stay.

  “What’s he been telling?” Charles asked. Even then he had the right instincts. It was always better to let the other person talk when possible.

  Mr. Stanley laughed indulgently.

  “You’ve got Dickie Howell all upset. You don’t want to do that, Charley. There’s no one more valuable to this plant than old Dick. You and I mustn’t stir him up.”

  “I’m sorry if I stirred him up,” Charles said. Mr. Stanley smiled and shook his head.

  “All this talk about your leaving us. You’re not leaving us, are you, Charley?”

  “Yes, sir,” Charles said. “I told Mr. Howell I was.”

  “Well,” Mr. Stanley said, and he laughed but Charles saw that Mr. Stanley still watched him carefully. Then he stopped laughing but he still smiled and tapped the letter opener softly on the desk. “We’ve got to have a little talk about this, Charley. Maybe you think I don’t watch you boys when you come in here. Well, I do. That’s my business. We have to have young blood here. Now Dickie Howell—this is between you and me—Dickie isn’t as young as he used to be. He needs someone to take the weight off his shoulders. We need a new system here and something besides Boston ledgers.” Mr. Stanley laughed again. “Now I’ve been turning over an idea in my mind. I’d like to send you to a school of accountancy for six months, Charley.”

  Mr. Stanley stopped but Charles did not answer. Mr. Stanley hitched himself forward in his chair and lowered his voice.

  “Confidentially, Dick Howell and I have been talking about this. How would you like to head the accounting department of Wright-Sherwin in about two years? How do you think that sounds?”

  It was necessary, Charles knew, to pretend that he was thinking.

  “It’s very kind of you, sir,” Charles said.

  “Kind of me?” Mr. Stanley looked grave and shook his head definitely. “I’m never kind when I do business. My job is picking people, and maybe I know more about you than you think, Charley. You’ve got a good mind and you keep your mouth shut. I’ve never seen you when you haven’t been working. How about it, Charley?”

  It was time to say no, but he did not want to say no in the wrong way.

  “Thank you, but I’d rather not,” Charles said.

  “Why not?” Mr. Stanley had laid down the letter opener and sat motionless. It was better to answer frankly.

  “If I got the accounting department, I’d always stay there,” Charles said. “I don’t think I’d be useful anywhere else.”

  “Wouldn’t you want to stay there?” Mr. Stanley’s voice was gentle but it had changed.

  “No, sir,” Charles said. “I’d like to get higher in the business than that someday.”

  “Let’s see.” Mr. Stanley picked up a small sheet of paper. “You’re getting twenty-five dollars a week. How would you like it if I gave you fifty?”

  “No, thank you, sir,” Charles said. He would have been delighted a little while ago at such an offer. If it had not been for Jessica Lovell, he might have stayed in Wright-Sherwin.

  “You’re pretty ambitious, aren’t you?” Mr. Stanley said.

  “Yes, sir, I suppose I am,” Charles answered.

  “It doesn’t pay to be too ambitious. There’s much more to life than money. Fifty dollars here is the same as a hundred and fifty in New York. Money isn’t everything. Have you got any other reason, Charley? Any personal reason?”

  Mr. Stanley watched him intently and smiled in a warm, engaging way. If Mr. Stanley had heard so much about him, he wondered if he had heard about Jessica Lovell.

  “Yes, sir,” Charles said, “but I can’t very well discuss it.”

  Mr. Stanley was silent for a moment. Then he straightened his heavy shoulders and cleared his throat and Charles knew that the interview was over.

  “Well, we’ll be sorry to lose you,” Mr. Stanley said. “What are you going to do?”

  “I think I’ll go to Boston,” Charles said, and he rose.

  “Well, we’ll be sorry to lose you,” Mr. Stanley said. “If you change your mind come around and see me.”

  Sometimes Charles considered that interview a model of its kind. Neither Mr. Stanley nor he had said too much but they had said enough. He often wondered whether he had learned more of Mr. Stanley than Mr. Stanley had of him. He often wondered whether Mr. Stanley had thought of offering him anything more, but this was hardly possible because he was too young. He often wondered whether he would have stayed if he had known Mr. Stanley better.

  14

  The Gambling Known as Business Looks with Austere Disfavor upon the Business Known as Gambling

  —AMBROSE BIERCE

  Charles had often heard his father speak at length on the old days of downtown Boston. Those were the days, he used to say, when Boston’s alleys all led to dignified bars and secluded restaurants which served the best food in the world. In those days, Boston had a respect for the male, particularly in the State Street district, and Boston was a comfortable, civilized town. Woodrow Wilson and the income tax had begun to send it downhill, John Gray used to say, and the World War and prohibition had done the rest. The old places were closing, like the New England House, with its fat dog and its gray African parrot in the upstairs dining room. The bars with their free lunches had vanished. The old oyster houses around the market were not what they used to be, now that there was no ale. You could still get tripe at the Parker House, but no Parker House punch in the spring. To put it another way, Boston was becoming contaminated by New York and the rest of America. It was, John Gray hated to say it, losing its fine isolation and its proud provincialism. Even the shoes of Boston women were not as sensible as they used to be.

  John Gray repeated all this to Charles on that Tuesday morning in 1928 but Charles was too concerned with the future to bother with the past. The narrow sidewalks of Washington Street and the old State House, the Old South Church, Milk Street, and Congress Street seemed to Charles completely modern that morning. He could only accept Boston in a contemporary way, as one accepted everything when one was twenty-four. He never dreamed that the time would come when he, too, would speak of the old Boston he had known in the bond department of E. P. Rush & Company, the old pre-depression Boston of marble corridors and black walnut woodwork, of leisurely elevators moving upward through their shafts like giant spiders on webs of looped cables, the Boston of trustees and real estate trusts and well-trained barbers who came to clip the gray hair of trustees and lawyers as they sat in their offices gazing at the tombs in the Old Granary Burying Ground or into the dingy streets off Post Office Square.

  “Dear, dear,” John Gray said. “There used to be a time when everything was static here. I hate this sense of change.”

  He was always cheerful when he was back in Boston after a longish absence. He was wearing his best tailored suit, which he very seldom wore i
n Clyde, and his newest brown felt hat.

  “It makes me feel old and even sordid to be taking a son of mine down here, but I suppose we have to start sometime.”

  As they turned left on Congress Street he began to whistle a snatch of an old waltz.

  “Did you say this place is on Congress Street?” Charles asked.

  “Yes,” John Gray answered. “Congress Street, and on a third floor. Old E. P., the father of the present Mr. Rush, Charles, said an upstairs office stopped the riffraff from dropping in.”

  “Don’t you think,” Charles said, “if you’re going to introduce me to Mr. Rush you’d better tell me a little more about him?”

  “I’m not introducing you to E. P. Rush,” John Gray said. “E. P. Rush is dead and perhaps it’s just as well because I’m afraid he didn’t approve of me. It’s his son—not E. P. Rush—whom I met during my brief sojourn at Harvard University. We played poker and did other things together.”

  “I know, you’ve told me that”—his father was in one of his most exasperating moods that morning—“but you haven’t told me what he’s like.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” John Gray said, “because he’ll probably make a different impression on you from any he has made on me. I wonder how the market’s opening.”

  E. P. Rush & Company occupied half of the third floor of a building on Congress Street. It was a curiously planned office which seemed to have grown like a living organism, producing small clusters of desks and typewriters, throwing out new railed enclosures and rearing new counters and pieces of grillwork and acquiring, as an afterthought, a few leather armchairs and cuspidors grouped in front of a board on which were listed in abbreviations some but not all of the stocks on the New York Exchange. Two tickers near the board stamped quotations upon reels of tape which poured into tall wicker baskets. The exchange had not opened yet so the tickers were almost silent. The bookkeepers were already at work and the young men in the bond department were reading prospectuses and making their morning telephone calls. Charles did not know then that the studied, dusty carelessness of E. P. Rush & Company was an effect deliberately cultivated to create a sound atmosphere.

  This impression of casualness was also reflected in the clothing of the young men in the outer office. They wore soft shirts and their clothes were not aggressively pressed. They slouched easily in their swivel chairs, and yet they were always ready to come courteously to attention. The secretaries, who were still called stenographers at E. P. Rush & Company, were gathered in a small paddock of their own, and they, too, fitted perfectly with the spirit, most of them approaching middle age, none of them endowed with disturbing beauty.

  Behind this outer office, which smelled of creosote and paper and stale cigar smoke, was a railing guarding the ground-glass doors of the partners’ rooms. A switchboard operator, a plump, cheerful looking girl, guarded the railing gate. John Gray, with Charles following him, walked across the room and bowed to her and she said that Mr. Gray was quite a stranger lately.

  “Yes,” John Gray said, “lately, but my thoughts are often here, Miss Swift. Is Mr. Rush in yet?”

  “Oh, yes,” Miss Swift said. “He’s just reading the papers. I know he’ll be glad to see you.”

  Mr. Rush sat at a shabby roll-top desk working on a crossword puzzle by the light from a single unwashed window. Mr. Rush was wearing a blue serge suit, which was shiny at the knees and elbows. The morning mail, opened and in a neat pile on the desk before him, was weighted down by an Indian hatchet head. In the corner behind him, like a leafless tree, stood a mahogany hatrack on which hung Mr. Rush’s leghorn hat. The lenses of his horn-rimmed spectacles gave his light blue eyes a surprised look which did not fit with his mouth.

  “Hello,” he said. “Where did you drop from?”

  “Don’t let me interrupt your train of thought, Moulton,” John Gray answered. “This is my son Charles.”

  “He looks the way you used to,” Mr. Rush said.

  “But he isn’t like me,” John Gray said. “Charley wants to get on.”

  “What class were you in?” Mr. Rush asked Charles.

  John Gray sighed and spoke before Charles could answer.

  “My sister Jane wanted him to go to Dartmouth. Don’t hold it against him, Moulton. It’s a small place but we love it.”

  “Does he want a job?” Mr. Rush said.

  “Why, Moulton,” John Gray answered, “why do you think we’re here?”

  Mr. Rush pulled a thick gold watch from his waistcoat pocket.

  “It’s five minutes after ten,” he said. “Why don’t you go out and see the opening, Johnny?”

  After John Gray had left, Mr. Rush looked at Charles for a moment without speaking.

  “Your father is a remarkable man,” Mr. Rush said.

  “Yes, sir,” Charles said, “I suppose he is.”

  Mr. Rush stood up.

  “Well, I suppose I’d better introduce you to Mr. Stoker. He runs our bond department.”

  They walked down the partners’ row to Mr. Stoker’s office. Mr. Stoker was younger, a barrel-chested man who looked like a football coach. In fact Charles learned later that Lawrence Stoker had once been a line coach for Harvard.

  “Lawrence,” Mr. Rush said, “this is Charles Gray. He comes from Dartmouth but I’d like you to find something for him to do.”

  It astonished Charles that Mr. Rush had not asked him a single question, but later when he knew the office better he approved of that method. Mr. Rush had known who he was and had passed on his personal appearance and this was about all that was necessary. As in Victorian England younger sons once rushed to join the Church and the army, so in those days on America’s eastern seaboard they crowded into reputable investment houses. There were so many nice young men in those days that they were expendable material. Their energy and resilience could be used to the limit until almost inevitable disillusion made it evaporate. Not one in twenty of these young men, Charles heard Mr. Rush say later, ever developed a permanent value. They entered the Boston offices, in the late twenties, only to disappear eventually no one knew where. It was not the policy of Rush & Company to expend much time on their education. It was a matter of sink or swim, and there were always lots more waiting.

  That was how he started with E. P. Rush & Company and though he sometimes wondered what would have happened to him if he had gone to sea or into publishing or if a little later he had gone with Malcolm Bryant to the Orinoco, he found the order and the relentless flow of forces at E. P. Rush & Company satisfying and congenial. Besides, as his father had said, he wanted to get on. He wanted to wear the right clothes and do the right things. He wanted to do well as quickly as he could, because he was in love with Jessica Lovell.

  He had been a very nice boy, that day when he went up to Boston, devoid of disillusion, indoctrinated in all the right creeds. He had believed everything that Mr. Stoker told him. He was entering the finest investment house in Boston, a firm whose backing meant that any issue in which it participated was as sound as a nut. Everybody who worked for E. P. Rush was hand-picked. It was like being in a club to be in Mr. Stoker’s crowd. Everyone had a chance to earn his letter. E. P. Rush & Company was a gentlemen’s firm, with gentlemen’s ethics. There was money enough in the firm to build an office that would look like an Italian palace, but E. P. Rush did not want the type of customer who was attracted by upholstery. Its partners were broad-gauge public-spirited men who were there not for window dressing but because they understood the investment business and were personally interested in most of the companies whose securities they handled. In fact it was all one big happy family and now Charles was in the family. Charles already realized that it might be just as well if he did not talk much about Dartmouth.

  When Charles returned to Clyde at six o’clock, his manner was already changing. He was in the old-line house of E. P. Rush & Company and someday he would be a partner. The prospect was a long way off but already its charm was working. If he had not been
in E. P. Rush he would not have called up Jessica Lovell that evening after supper. As a matter of fact, he might not have telephoned her if the family had not been so pleased.

  “The funny thing about it was,” his father said, “that I’ve never known Moulton Rush very well, Esther. It was Charles who did it. Moulton just took one look at him.”

  Charles saw his mother take one look at him too, a proud, possessive look.

  “I don’t see how Charles ever got in it,” Dorothea said.

  “Through accident, Dorothea,” Charles told her. “They weren’t thinking what they were doing.”

  “Well, see you stay in it,” Dorothea said. “At least they must think he’s honest, Mother,” but she said it kindly. She even said it as though she were proud of him.

  “I think I’ll go over to see Jessica,” he said. He was fully aware, from the pause at the supper table, that this was the same as announcing to the family, as it was said in Clyde, that he was attentive to Jessica Lovell.

  “Why, Charley,” his mother said, “I think that would be very nice, but don’t stay too late.”

  Of course they were all listening when he went into the hall to telephone—but then he was in E. P. Rush & Company.

  “Why, Charley,” Jessica said over the telephone. “Of course I’m not doing anything. We’d love to see you.” He was disturbed by the coolness of her voice until he remembered that the Lovells’ telephone, too, was in the hall.

  It was eight o’clock though it was still light and all of Johnson Street was bathed in a misty, mysterious afterglow that gave the Lovells’ house a remote look, but a sense of never having been there before vanished when Jessica opened the front door herself. Her silk afternoon dress was a grayish-green color very much like the color of the new leaves in the fading light. The hall in back of her was dark and the light from the open door of the wallpaper room made it hard to see her face. She clasped his hand very tightly, and her own hand felt cold.

  “I’ve been wondering where you’ve been,” she said. “We’re all in the wallpaper room.” He walked slowly in behind her and shook hands with Miss Lovell and Mr. Lovell.