Point of No Return

by John P. Marquand

  He must have forgotten that they should not look like a delegation because they all walked down the stairs of 76 Dock Street in a body and out into the hot summer sunlight.

  “It was so sweet of Jane,” Esther Gray was saying to Dorothea. “I’m glad she told me first and I’m glad I thanked her.”

  “Well, well,” John Gray said. “These wills. I wish the lawyers could write testaments in verse like François Villon.”

  “Father,” Charles said, “there’s something I’d like to talk to you about when we get home.”

  It was absolutely necessary to take up the subject of that money. The money which had been left them was a product of self-denial and steady planning, something which had been saved and earned, something to be treated with decent respect.

  “That is, if you don’t mind,” he said.

  It was a hot summer’s day and through the open windows of his father’s room he could hear the drowsy sound of a lawn mower in the Sullivans’ yard and the patient plodding of a draft horse and the rattle of one of the Mullins Company ice wagons on Spruce Street. The room, with its untidy collection of books and unrelated objects, was like his father’s mind. John Gray was already moving about, searching for something in much the same way he ransacked his memory for an apt and comfortable quotation.

  “Now wait a minute,” he said. “Where the devil is it? Oh, here it is.” He had found the case and the decanters of his port wine under a pile of newspapers. It was obviously an occasion for him.

  “I know it’s early in the day,” he said, “but I think I’ll have a glass of port. It’s sweet and sticky but I need some sort of mild stimulant to get over Hugh Blashfield. Will you join me, Charley?”

  “No, thanks,” Charles answered, “only don’t let me stop you,” but John Gray was absorbed in his own ideas.

  “All right,” he said, “I don’t blame you, Charley. Of course, Hugh Blashfield and all of this”—he waved his hand in a vague, expansive way—“doesn’t have the same effect on you as it has on me. Going to a lawyer is like going to a doctor. No matter how well or how long you know them personally, they always put you at a disadvantage because of their specialized knowledge. I’d rather have a good, dry chat with a clergyman. He may know about God and sin, but God and sin are a sort of public domain and no one knows definitely about them. But a lawyer always knows about law and a doctor knows exactly where your spleen is and there’s nothing whatsoever that one can do about them except sit respectfully and listen. Now I know all about Hugh Blashfield personally.”

  It was obvious that he was annoyed by Hugh Blashfield and that it would be impossible to divert him from the subject.

  “I couldn’t help thinking as I sat there this morning that Hugh Blashfield was a painfully small-minded man. I must have told him twenty times to sell that mill stock. He’s plodding and rudimentary, without a single broad, long thought. I used to help him with his Latin and his algebra, and he always has trouble with women. I know all his frailties, and yet there he was, reading my sister’s will. There’s something queer about a lawyer in his office, but never mind it,” and then a taste of the sacramental wine distracted his attention. “You know, I think it might be a good idea if we bought some Scotch whiskey. Mel Stevens keeps running it in. I don’t know why I shouldn’t go around and see Mel this afternoon—we ought to have electric lights, and we really ought to have a car, Charley. I don’t know why we shouldn’t have a car now.”

  He paused and in the silence Charles could hear the lawn mower.

  “Father,” he began, and John Gray sighed.

  “Oh, yes,” he said. “You wanted to ask me about something, didn’t you?”

  Charles cleared his throat, but even so his voice was hoarse.

  “Father,” he said again, “what are you going to do with Aunt Jane’s money? Are you going to play the market with it?”

  His father looked watchful. It was bluntly stated, but it was an issue, and his father had always been skillful in avoiding issues.

  “How about a cigar, Charley?” he asked. “Let me see. There must be some around somewhere. If there aren’t, I’ll have to go down to the news store, but they haven’t got Havanas.”

  “Father,” Charles said, “are you or aren’t you?”

  John Gray finally faced the issue, and as he did so a film of cloud passed across his sun.

  “It’s rather like the old question of whether you have stopped beating your wife, isn’t it?” he asked. “Everybody who makes an investment plays the market. I suppose I might tell you it’s none of your business. I’m tempted to, but I won’t.”

  There was another silence, a long, unpleasant silence.

  “I don’t like to talk to you this way,” Charles said, and his father nodded and his voice was warm and kind again.

  “I know you don’t,” he said. “That’s all right.”

  “You know it’s everybody’s business,” Charles began. “I don’t care about myself, but what about Mother and Dorothea?”

  He saw his father’s face flush and then he saw him fold his hands.

  “Well, go ahead and tell me why I shouldn’t. Do the best you can.”

  Charles could only say what anyone would have said. The market was like a wild river, that year, breaking through all the dams of prudence and common sense. Prices of common stocks had already discounted all conceivable earnings in any foreseeable future. The market might still go up, but it was already dangerous. It was time to invest in sound bonds, preferably governments. There was bound to be a break. It was only a question of when.

  “You put it very clearly, Charley,” John Gray said. “Do you know what I begin to think? You may be a good investment man someday. You’re dead right, but it’s all a matter of self-restraint. I know when to stop—but you don’t believe that, do you?” He was going to be careful. He was watching the market, and he knew the market. He was going to get in and out.

  Charles did not answer. There was no use saying aloud that he did not believe him.

  “Let’s leave it this way. You can watch me, and I’ll be careful, Charley.”

  When it came to money, everyone always promised to be careful. In fact, it often seemed to Charles that most of his subsequent life had been spent in a series of timid, hedging precautions, in balancing probable gains and losses in order to keep sums of money intact. The probity, the reliability and the sobriety that such a task demanded were to make his own life dull and careful. Except for a few brief moments, he was to face no danger or uncalculated risk. He was to measure his merriment and hedge on his tragedies. He was to water down elation and mitigate disaster, and to be at the right place at the right time, and to say the right thing with the right emphasis. Yet whenever he thought of himself as a dull, deluded opportunist, compared with other people, he always remembered the intensity of his own feelings when his father had been speaking. There had been a hideous sense of inevitable disaster, and no possible way to stop it.

  There was no point in pleading, because his father was growing angry, and Charles could hear their voices, each rising against the other.

  “All right, Charley,” his father said. “I understand you perfectly and you needn’t shout. How are you going to get anywhere if you never take a chance? What is life but a chance, Charley? After all, what is seventy-five thousand dollars? Do you expect me to live on the income, at four per cent?” He shrugged his shoulders. He opened his hands and closed them. Did Charles really want his mother to live on three thousand dollars a year? And what was it Samuel Johnson said?

  “A man who both spends and saves money is the happiest man, because he has both enjoyments.”

  That was what he was going to do, both spend and save. As soon as he made a profit, and any fool could make a profit in this bull market, he would put the original sum in a bank, he swore he would, and he would go on with the rest. And what was that quotation in Thomas Fuller’s Gnomologia about its being better to have a hen tomorrow than an egg today?
<
br />   “A hen,” John Gray said. “You can’t stop me, Charley. It’s the first chance I’ve ever had, the first real chance, to beat the system.”

  It was not worth while trying to stop him, now that he was talking about the system.

  “When is Jessica coming back, in October? All right, we’ll have a Cadillac by October. Don’t look as though I were hurting you, Charley. I’m going to spend and save and it’s perfectly possible.”

  There was no use in being angry, there was no use in being hurt.

  “There was always that pony,” Charles said.

  “Oh, yes,” John Gray said. “I’d forgotten about the pony. Well, he’s growing now, Charley. I’ve given this a great deal of thought, but it might be just as well if you didn’t mention this to your mother.”

  “Don’t worry, I won’t,” Charles said.

  “Come to think of it,” John Gray said, “I might as well go up to Boston tomorrow, and, Charley, I wonder whether you would do something for me now, that is if you don’t mind? Would you mind going downtown and seeing if the New York Times has come in yet and would you please stop at Southern’s and buy me a small account book? I’m the one who’s going to do the worrying, Charley.”

  Then, just before Charles reached the door, his father called him back. He had settled himself comfortably in his Morris chair, with one knee crossed over the other, and everything he had said seemed to have been erased already. The magnificence of his thoughts made him look like a New York customer of E. P. Rush & Company. He looked richer than Mr. Thomas at the bank and more distinguished than Mr. Laurence Lovell.

  “Charles,” he said, “I’ve just thought of another quotation, which won’t ever appear in a gnomologia. You’ll like this one. ‘Everybody’s doing it now.’”

  Charles must have known that morning that his aunt’s legacy was as good as gone. There was no use going to anyone for advice and it was pointless to tell his mother and Dorothea what he knew. He walked out of the front door and stared for a long while at Spruce Street, at the elms with their leaves drooping in the summer heat, and at the heat waves shimmering on the shingles of the Masons’ roof. While he stood there at the front yard gate, he conceived a fear and contempt for certain aspects of finance, but it was a respectful contempt. He was afraid of money and he never lost that fear, and it was not a bad attitude, either, if you had to deal with investments—caution and contempt held together by respect. He was thinking of his mother and Dorothea in the house. He was trying, for the first time in his life, to cut a loss. He was thinking of the five thousand dollars his aunt had left him, an immense sum in one way and so insignificant in another, and someone had to do something. At least he was sure that he knew when to stop.

  That was his only reason for playing the stock market that next year, a desperate and feeble reason. Circumstances forced him and he did it without satisfaction, as though he were engaged in a secret vice. It was interesting, sometimes, to imagine what would have happened to his mother and indirectly to Dorothea if he had not, or if he had not known when to stop, but it was hardly worth the time. Nothing could have altered what happened in Clyde, though he did not know it then.

  17

  If You Can Dream—and Not Make Dreams Your Master …

  —RUDYARD KIPLING

  Nearly everyone in Rush & Company was in the market and it may have been just as well that he was in it too, for it afforded a common ground on which to meet all those others who had come there to learn what was called finance. It was an era of apprenticeship, when most people preferred to pick up their knowledge by firsthand experience, backed only, perhaps, by a course in Economics I at Harvard. Finance still had the aura of a gentleman’s profession, particularly in Boston. All those young men in Rush & Company, whom Charles knew and whose manners he studied so carefully once, were there because gentlemen handled the broader aspects of money. They did not count it or set it down in figures as the tellers did and the book-keepers, who, whatever their abilities, could only by the most outside accident rise out of these departments to compete with the young men in the open spaces. In military terms, these latter were the officer class, who might be partners and bank officers some day.

  They were a class not trained to realities and they were not, he often thought, well fitted to cope with the depression. The early thirties made gaps in their ranks, as though they had been hit by round shot and canister, and he still knew the crippled casualties of those days, the limpers, the spiritually legless and the armless. The truth was that finance, using that inclusive term for partners, bond salesmen, and bank presidents, was not entirely a gentleman’s game, though it demanded as a rule the code of ethics and morality associated with a gentleman. However, all the temptations and spiritual stresses and strains which came later with the depression were negligible when Charles worked in E. P. Rush & Company with what Lawrence Stoker, the head of the bond department, called the Team.

  Football men and crew men were somehow the most desirable material at E. P. Rush & Company and it seemed to Charles that all of the team came from what were known as final clubs at Harvard. He only learned these facts gradually but later he realized that they were important in a business way and he faced them without rancor. He had nothing in common with the team, except the market and the routine of the office, but he was sufficiently one of them so that he might listen when they talked to each other and about each other. His position on the team reminded him of the story of the man who maintained that the Harvard crew was democratic because after three years everyone in the boat spoke to him except number seven.

  They were nice—the boys on the team at E. P. Rush—and they seemed to accept cheerfully the fact that he had to be more ambitious and brighter than the rest of them, much as Charles himself had accepted the same thing with a Chinese or a Japanese student in a college class. They even seemed pleased that he was getting on. There was none of that sense of competition and knifing in the back that he was to know later. They were nice boys and they began calling him by his first name—after a decent period.

  Although he looked like most of the team, he knew that he would always stand out from them, and it had been just as well, even in E. P. Rush. He was not too different from the rest to have that difference disturbing, but he was different enough sometimes to be noticed. If he had not been a little apart, Arthur Slade would never have noticed him that time when Mr. Slade came on some errand from New York, and he told Charles so long afterwards.

  “I saw you right away,” he said, “and I said to myself, how did he ever get in here? But I said it in a very nice way. I wondered if you could be a Yale man, but that could not have been possible in E. P. Rush. It explained everything when you said you came from Dartmouth.”

  There was every reason to remember his first meeting with Arthur Slade, for had it not occurred he might never have gone to New York. Certainly he would never have been given his chance in the Stuyvesant Bank at the time when banks were firing instead of hiring. There would have been no Nancy, no children, no house in Sycamore Park. Instead, he might have stayed on in Rush & Company and married some girl in the Newtons, perhaps, and have been living now in one of those tapestry-brick Colonials, forgotten by people like E. P. Rush partners after business hours. Finally he would have been like all those other useful Boston wheel horses who knew the business like the palms of their hands and came through in a pinch and who disappeared daily behind a curtain of suburban life. He would have been Charley Gray, an agreeable and reliable person, whom you could trust to do anything. Mr. Rush would have invited him to his lunch club now and then, but never in the world would he have become a member. It would have been a pity that he did not have quite the background or connections to have made him partnership material. There was every reason why he should have remembered every detail of his meeting with Arthur Slade.

  Charles’s desk was about midway in the center of the open office and one September morning when he was reading market letters he heard Mr. Rush spea
king, but he did not look up.

  “It will only be what you’ve seen already,” Mr. Rush was saying. He had brought a stranger with him to the investment advisory department.

  “Oh, Gray,” Mr. Rush called. “Mr. Slade wants to see everything we have on—” and he gave the name of that foreign stock which later was to make so many people poorer. “Gray will get you everything, and you can read it here if you want to.”

  “Yes, sir,” Charles said, and he hurried to the files for the folders.

  “I think there are a few rather frank office notes on it,” Mr. Rush said. “Go ahead and read them, but don’t quote us.”

  Mr. Rush walked away, leaving the stranger from New York. Mr. Slade must have come in from New York on the “Owl” but he did not show it. He was, of course, an imitation of Tony Burton, like everyone else in the Stuyvesant Bank. His dark hair, appropriately gray at the temples, was closely clipped, like Tony Burton’s. His dark gray flannel suit had the style of Tony Burton’s tailor. His face had Tony Burton’s authoritative alertness. His whole appearance was like that song parody which Charles wrote later about walking and talking and dressing like Tony Burton. The Stuyvesant Bank was printed on Arthur Slade, indelibly, magnificently, an imprint distinguishable from anything in Boston.

  “Wouldn’t you like to use my desk, sir?” Charles asked.

  “Oh no,” the stranger said. “Go on with what you’re doing,” and he sat beside the desk reading, while Charles went back to the market letters. Mr. Slade did not speak again for three quarters of an hour.

  “Dear me,” he said, when he had finished, and Charles saw he was holding a memorandum in Mr. Rush’s handwriting, “you certainly have a personalized investment service.”

  “Yes, sir,” Charles answered.

  “Well,” Mr. Slade said, “I’m much obliged to you. You’d better put that away and lock it up.” He was smiling and Charles did not like the suggestion because it somehow seemed to reflect on Rush & Company.