We had known each other from the beginning in that smaller Harvard, but Rex had little time for friendship and less for butterflies, in which category he had obviously placed me. I might never have bridged our gap had I not called in his room one night, on the excuse of borrowing a book, and found him in such a funk that he was willing to talk to anybody.
“I’ve got to chuck it, the whole thing, college and all. I’ve got to go home and get a job. My baby sister has developed a spot on her lung, and Dad’s at his wit’s ends. She may have to be sent out west…”
“But I thought you supported yourself,” I interrupted.
“I do. But it’s a question now of my having to help out.”
“I never heard such a thing!” I exclaimed indignantly. “It’s bad enough that you should have to pay for your own education, but must you support your parents, too? Haven’t you got things just a bit topsy-turvy, my friend?”
“In your world I would have,” he snapped back with a ferocity that made me jump. “It’s dog-eat-dog on Fifth Avenue and Newport. But we poor don’t know any better. We honor our fathers and our mothers!”
“I’m sorry,” I said humbly. “Please tell me about it.”
Which he finally did. A Boston millionaire named Bennett had offered an annual prize of a thousand dollars (in those days a considerable sum of money and to Rex a small fortune) to the Harvard undergraduate who should submit the best paper on economics. The judge was a professor of history, and the prizewinner was selected in March. Rex had submitted a paper on the Sherman Act, for which he had high hopes, but now he did not see how he could afford to wait. It was only January.
“But all the papers are in?” I asked.
“Oh, yes, they’ve been in a month.”
“Then there’s no reason Professor Henderson couldn’t read them and let you know if you’d won?”
“What professor ever read a paper before he had to?”
“But he might, mightn’t he, if someone asked him?”
“Dream on, my friend.”
I sat with Rex another hour, but when I left, instead of going to my rooms, I went boldly to call at Professor Henderson’s house. I found him working in his study on the papers for the competition. He was a small, silent, wizened old fellow, surrounded by a terrible mess of books and papers, and though we had never met, he listened to my introduction and my story without apparent surprise. When I had finished, he thought for a while.
“I daresay most of my colleagues would regard your request as outrageous, Mr. Prime. But it happens that I don’t. I like friends who do things for each other. My trouble is simply this. I have already read Mr. Geer’s paper and been impressed with it. If I read the others now, will not your sad tale have prejudiced me?”
“I shouldn’t think you were so easily prejudiced, sir.”
“Nor would I. But people talk. What assurance have I that this matter will be a secret between the three of us?”
“My word of honor, sir!”
And indeed Professor Henderson did not rely in vain upon it. Only as I write now has our secret been communicated, three decades after his demise.
The professor sent for me in two days and told me that Rex’s paper was the winning one. My difficulty was in making Rex believe it. He thought at first that it was some hideous practical joke, and we came very near to having a fist fight. But when at last I took a Bible from his bookcase and solemnly swore on it, he was convinced. He threw his arms about me and let out a shout of joy. It was my first inkling of how much emotion this sober young man was capable of.
Celebration was my field, and I took him on the town, where I made another discovery. Rex was one of those men who find it impossible to stop doing anything they have started. If he was working or taking physical exercise, or arguing or playing cards or even drinking, his enormous energy and momentum would not allow of cessation. Rex was actually a man of great violence, if of great self-control. I remember him in the early hours of that next morning, as we finished off a fourth bottle of champagne, fixing me, still sober, with glittering eyes.
“Frankly, Guy, you amaze me. I thought I had you all figured out. The kind of plush New York snob who feels he has to booze his way through four years of Harvard and make an acceptable club before settling down in a brokerage house and waiting for his old man to kick the bucket. But, damn it all, you have a heart. As big as a mountain! Shall we have another bottle of champagne? Are you sure you can afford it? Are you rich? Oh, yes, you told me—the poor branch of a rich tree. Yet in your poverty you can buy champagne. Do you know this is the first time I’ve ever tasted it? But I won’t boast about that. I mustn’t be that kind of prig. Damn it all, Guy, shall we be friends?”
Basically, he needed a friend as much as I did. He had been too busy and too poor for college social life. From that evening on we saw each other daily. I induced him to relax, to go on hikes, to have a few drinks on Saturday night, even to go to an occasional party. He kept me from cutting classes and from going to New York on too many weekends. What it boiled down to was that he helped me to work and I him to play. There was always a grasshopper and cricket aspect to our relationship.
But I was a good deal more than a grasshopper. I planned for the future quite as intensely as he did, probably more so, for Rex was engrossed in the toil of his present. As spring approached, I opened a campaign to make him promise a summer visit to my family in Bar Harbor. He protested violently that he had neither the right clothes nor the right manners for such a swank resort, that he could not play the right sports or even dance, that my parents would be ashamed of him and, finally, that he could not afford the railway ticket. All was in vain; I tore down each excuse as he put it up. I had enough summer clothes for both of us; I exempted him from social life and promised that we would not play tennis or golf, but simply walk, swim and fish; Mother herself wrote to invite him; Father procured a railway pass. What could my poor friend do in the end but submit?
6.
MY WHOLE small Machiavellian scheme was simply to install Rex in the good graces of Mr. de Grasse. The great man had already offered me a job in his firm after graduation, and I intended that he should do the same for my friend. I knew my own limitations and Rex’s capabilities. I knew the fault of his stubbornness and the virtue of my flexibility. I knew the advantages of my connections and the indispensability of his industry. We were a team made in heaven. But I had sufficient acquaintance with my friend’s demonic pride to know that matters would have to be arranged so that Mr. de Grasse’s offer, if it came, should appear to have come spontaneously. It would not be easy.
Marcellus de Grasse, head of the banking partnership that bore his name, had been my parents’ summer landlord since I could remember. He owned a pine-covered hill, overlooking the village of Bar Harbor, with a magnificent view of the bay islands and sea, on the crest of which perched his big, stone, multi-porched, styleless mansion, “The Eyrie.” There were three much smaller shingle villas on the hillside abutting his mile-long driveway, one of which he leased to my family. Father was never one of his intimates, but as a contemporary of the large, shy, giggling de Grasse daughters I was frequently invited to the big house. In time, however, my invitations came from the master himself. The boy and the tycoon had formed an odd friendship.
He seemed on a first meeting almost effete. He was tall, thin and very languid, with ivory skin and brown, wig-like hair; one half expected him to raise snuff to his nostrils with a rustle of lace cuffs. He professed to despise everything that had happened since 1850, and he found New York and even poor little Bar Harbor hopelessly vulgarized by the stampede for wealth that, to his eyes, had blotted the fair and promising copy book of American history. Because his grandfather had owned a fleet of clipper ships, he always tried to identify de Grasse Brothers with the China trade and what he deemed the cleaner marine atmosphere of those earlier days. He had filled the little Doric temple at the corner of Wall and Pearl Streets, which housed the family bank, with
prints of sailing vessels and the harpooning of whales, with paintings of Chinese ports and of Chinese merchants, with cases of rare porcelains and golden dragons. Not for him were the spittoon, the ticker-tape, the dreary photographs of bearded, dead partners.
Yet the little airs and mannerisms by which the world makes its judgments and which should mean so little to the seeker of truth, meant even less in his case than in others. The essence of Marcellus de Grasse was in the speculative quality of his intellect and in his own delight in its exercise. He hated reference books and compendia of statistics. When a question arose, he liked to sit back, clasping the arms of his chair with his long white fingers, and seek the answer by pure deduction.
When I first struck his attention as something more than a friend of his daughters, we were sitting in his study after a de Grasse family Sunday lunch at which he and I had been the only males. He happened to apologize for speaking sharply to the butler, who had brought the wrong brandy. I suppose he was embarrassed to have shown his irritability before a boy.
“One should never be impatient with servants,” he told me when the man had gone. “They can’t talk back. Besides, one doesn’t pay them enough to abuse them. They’re not like lawyers or doctors.”
“But they have their commissions,” I pointed out. Father had made me worldly wise in such matters.
“Commissions?”
“They get a percentage in the village on everything you buy.”
“Dear me, is it as definite as that?”
“Oh, yes, sir. To be the de Grasse butler is a very great thing in Bar Harbor. Ida, our cook, told me he could retire after five years.”
“And what would you do about it if you were de Grasse? Fire him?”
“Oh, no, sir. But I might make him divvy up!”
Mr. de Grasse was amused. “I see you should be the banker, young fellow. You make me feel very naïve.”
“But it’s not your fault, sir. Father says it’s simple to steal a dollar from a man who is always thinking of millions.”
“Does he so? And if I was always thinking of dollars, I suppose somebody might pinch a million.”
“Yes, you have to be careful. Father says everyone thinks a man who was born rich must be a fool.”
Mr. de Grasse’s lips just parted in a thin smile. “I confess I have sometimes taken advantage of that very prejudice. On occasion it can be extremely valuable to be thought a fool.”
It amused him to find out what Bar Harbor thought of him, and I was very candid. From that time on he would invite me up of a rainy afternoon to read in the big library where he did his work and where there was a bookcase of excellent boys’ books that had belonged to his oldest son, who had died. Sometimes we would read silently to ourselves and sometimes talk. Mr. de Grasse was a novelist manqué. He could tell wonderful stories of his father and grandfather, of clipper ships and the Orient, of the West and wars with the Indians, of the building of railroads and the laying of cables. We were both romantics. And then, too, we were both nature lovers and kept bird lists and, despite his aversion to all forms of exercise, I once got him halfway down his own hill in quest of warblers.
As I grew older I began to anticipate the inevitable time when Mr. de Grasse would become bored with me. I had a sure instinct in such matters, and I knew that my youthful liveliness would not always make up to him for my lack of a genuinely philosophical mind. I kept him as much as possible on the particular and away from the general. In history I liked to talk about the kings, in religion, the martyrs and in economics, the great robber barons whom Mr. de Grasse had known. Not for me was the colosseum of general ideas. When I complained to him that I had been born too late in American history for true adventure, he chilled me a bit with the sarcasm of his sympathy.
“Yes, I can see, Guy, that you should feel that. The slaves have all been freed, and the West has been won. The railroads are built and every beggar has his flush toilet. But I think you may find, if you come to work for me, that there’s still some adventure left. You were born to the great age of the dollar, of the speculator, of high finance! It should take us a century to plunder our new land, and don’t worry, the banker will be in the vanguard. Ah, yes, you look askance at my levity. That’s right: young men should be serious. And it’s a very serious thing that no matter what virgin forest any pest of a speculator may wish to cut down or what stinking mill he may wish to put up on its site, he will always find a banker to give him his money!”
“But not you, sir!”
“No, Guy, not me.” He shook his head almost wearily. “But I am a privileged person. At de Grasse we are small enough and old enough to do our own picking and choosing. It is not really a moral choice. It’s more that life’s too bloody short not to do the worthwhile thing. That’s a rich man’s luxury.”
How he inspired me! The detached contemplation, the bemused induction, the ultimate decision taken in silence and calm; that was how I pictured him at work. A great, grave doctor by the bedside of our economy, finger on pulse, meditating a transfusion. Was it wrong of me to have plotted to share that with Rex? I never fooled myself that I was Mr. de Grasse’s intellectual equal, but I was convinced that Rex was. It seemed logical to suppose that if I brought him into my relationship with the older man, he might fill in its empty corners, and indeed for a time it worked out just this way. The start, however, was inauspicious.
We were asked to lunch at the big house on the first Sunday after Rex’s arrival. I persuaded my friend that this was not really “social life,” so he reluctantly went. Our host, unfortunately, was in one of his sullen, silent moods, and Rex plunged into a similar one in the unfamiliar atmosphere of the dining room with its yellow and brown clothed walls, its dark angry lithographs of bears and lions in their native habitats (Mr. de Grasse did not waste his taste on country abodes) and its bay window through which shimmered the glory of Frenchman’s Bay, but unreally, like the view from a prison castle in a child’s picture book. Mrs. de Grasse, Boston bred, whose father had built “The Eyrie,” presided benignly but uncommunicatively over our sparsely enjoyed meal, and the three girls, still shy but now grown sentimental, like so many of the daughters of intellectual men, giggled at private jokes among themselves. In desperation, I brought up a topic that Rex had forbidden me.
“It might interest you to know, Mr. de Grasse, that my friend here is the winner of the Bennett award.”
“Oh, for pity’s sake, Guy!” Rex hissed.
“And what, pray tell, is the Bennett award?”
“It is a prize for the best Harvard economic paper of the year,” I persisted. “Rex wrote his on the Sherman Act. You know, the law that’s putting the fear of God into all those highhanded tycoons you complain about?”
“I know the Act,” Mr. de Grasse said drily, “and I admit the complaints. But I wonder if the cure isn’t worse than the disease. It may be one thing to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous magnates, but it’s quite another to live in a police state where no man is allowed to distinguish himself from the mob.” He turned one eye now on Rex. “I suppose, Mr. Geer, as a young intellectual, and no doubt as a radical, you approve of this legislation?”
“I think the weak should have some protection from the strong, sir. If that makes me a radical, I suppose I must be a radical.”
“And the constitution, what of that?” Mr. de Grasse had flared a bit at Rex’s tone. “Or do you subscribe to Wendell Holmes’ theory that it is a mere barometer of public opinion, to be interpreted according to the whim of the prevailing majority?”
“I don’t understand that to be Justice Holmes’ theory, sir, but then I don’t claim to be an expert on constitutional law. Still, I can’t see why it should be wrong to save little businesses from being eaten up by big ones. Unless the founding fathers meant to codify the law of the jungle.”
“You don’t think a man should look out for himself? You think he should run to the government every time he takes a licking?”
“Do
you know what you put me in mind of, Mr. de Grasse?” Rex had by now lost what little awe and reticence he may have had. “An expert swordsman in an age of musketeers. You know there are bullies about, but so long as you can defend yourself, you don’t worry about those who can’t. And you oppose any ban on dueling on the ground that it will turn men into fops.”
“One can make a very good case for dueling…” I was beginning, but nobody listened to me. Mr. de Grasse and Rex were too thoroughly engrossed in their own fight.
“You would run society, Mr. Geer, for the benefit of its weakest members?”
“For them, sir, as well as the strong.”
This was Rex Geer speaking! Rex, who in another quarter century would be one of the principal critics of the New Deal, one of the last champions of laisser faire! But we should not be surprised. Such transitions are common enough. The twentieth century has moved much faster than its citizens.
“That attitude spells to me the end of everything exciting and colorful in the world,” Mr. de Grasse now protested. “I don’t say that I want a world populated only by Borgias and Medicis, but if you legislate them out of existence, don’t you lose your Da Vincis and your Michelangelos too? There must have been some connection between the two.”
“If there was, we’ve lost it today. I doubt if Saint-Gaudens makes up for Jay Gould.” Here Rex actually slapped his hand on the table as he moved into the offensive. “But the real point against the Borgias, Mr. de Grasse, is not so much that they rob us as that they corrupt us. You think, sir, that you can conduct a gentleman’s banking business in a world of swindlers. But you can’t. In a market place the lowest permitted standard is bound to become the prevailing one.”
Mr. de Grasse at this turned away from Rex altogether. “Of course, if you’re going to call a man a swindler in his own house,” he muttered, and then he said no more.
The Embezzler Page 5