Cash shook his head. “I haven’t that excuse. I’ve thought about it enough—maybe too much. But it’s been the kind of thinking that’s hard to translate into words. That’s one of the troubles with living alone—you do all your thinking to yourself and there’s no need for words. When you do need them—”
He had made the self-conscious discovery that there was nothing but ice in his glass and Lory caught up his smile.
“Here, let me have that,” she demanded, taking the glass from his hands, refilling it and handing it back to him.
“All right,” she laughed, bridging the long gap of silence. “Now you can tell me all the awful things you’ve done in your life.”
To herself, Lory’s brightness seemed recognizably false, but it did appear to have eased the tension. Cash smiled as he said, “It isn’t only the things I have done, it’s the things I haven’t done.”
“Like not staying put in the wallpaper business?”
“What did Mrs. Atherson tell you about that?”
“Nothing much—except that you’d been in it for a while and then left.”
“Did she tell you why?”
“I don’t suppose she knew. She said she thought you were bored with it—but that Mr. Atherson thought it was because of your father.”
The shake of his head came quickly but there was a long reflective pause before he spoke. “No, it wasn’t because of my father’s death—except in the sense of that being the precipitating incident. I would have left in any event. I just didn’t belong. I suppose I should have realized that before I ever started, but somehow I hadn’t—and it hit me hard when I finally woke up. You see, I’d always taken it for granted that I’d work for Conestoga Wallpaper.”
“Is that what you wanted to do?”
“I thought so. But maybe I was only drifting down the path of least resistance. Looking back now, I realize that it was never any real burning desire—never anything that meant as much to me as research work means to Dr. Bergmann—or cooking to Max—or as Conestoga Wallpaper meant to my father. There was never anything that aimed my life in any particular direction. I suppose that’s hard for you to understand—you were born with a talent—”
“Not a very big one.”
“But big or little, still it gave point and purpose to your life. Isn’t that true? Didn’t you know from the time you were a child that you were going to be an artist?”
“Yes, I suppose I did,” Lory said, remembering that first time her father had taken her to Eloise Tassman’s studio at Chester Springs.
“There was never anything like that for me,” Cash said. “No particular talent, not even an aptitude. I didn’t have an engineering mind, or a research mind, or a legal mind, or any other special kind of a mind. I don’t think I ever thought it through in exactly that way—I’m sure I didn’t—but, anyway, I wound up in the college of business administration. I got there in the same way most of the other boys got there, not because we had a special talent or aptitude for business, but just because that was what was left. Oh, there were exceptions, of course—boys of the Gil Clark type—but the rest of us were the small potatoes that were left after the big ones had been picked out.”
Lory laughed. “There were an awful lot of people in art school who weren’t there because they had any special talent.”
“But at least they thought they had it,” Cash argued. “And I suppose I thought so, too. I left college with—well, actually, by the time I graduated I was pretty much steamed up about a business career. This was ’36, the depression was still on, but I’d had a reasonable scholastic record and I got a half dozen job offers. One of them was with Conestoga, of course. Dad had been there all his working life—his sun rose and set right over the plant roof—so there’s where I went.”
“Your father owned the company?” Lory asked, trying to confirm a parallelism that would account for the concern for her own father that Cash had shown before lunch.
“No, he was just the plant manager—Conestoga was a division of the Columbia Furnishings—but it couldn’t have been any more a part of his life if he’d owned every brick of the factory. No, that’s wrong—it wasn’t a part of his life, it was all of it. Actually, I think he was more totally absorbed in it than if he had owned it. That made it something even more detached—inanimate—no, that doesn’t say it.”
“I believe I know what you mean,” Lory said, but by no means certain that she did.
“When I was in India I lived for a while in a little village in Rajputana. I asked a group of people who owned their temple. They were horror-stricken at the idea of my imagining that anyone could own a temple. I think that’s more or less the way my father felt. I’m sure he never thought of the plant as something that anyone owned. It was an institution—”
“His temple,” she suggested.
“That’s it,” Cash said gratefully. “Conestoga Wallpaper was his religion and the plant was his temple, his shrine, his place of worship. He’d do anything for the company—anything! No personal consideration could ever be superior to that.”
“It sounds a little like what you were saying about Dr. Bergmann and the Foundation.”
“Of course,” Cash said with a wry smile. “And there are a million other men just like that. It’s a popular religion, Lory—this company worship—and maybe it’s the right one, I don’t know.”
“But not for you?”
“No, not for me. I couldn’t accept the gospel. I tried—two years on my knees—but I was still an infidel, still the heathen in the temple. I didn’t belong. I just couldn’t generate the blind faith that you have to have. And you do have to have it, Lory. That’s what business demands today. If the high priests lose their faith, the temple walls start to crumble.”
Lory nodded, accepting her father as an example.
“And of course it has to carry down the line,” Cash went on. “The low priests, the altar boys, everyone. There’s no place in the temple for the non-believers. Every religion has a curse for the infidels—and this one does, too. My father shouted it at me once. I’ll never forget it.” Cash paused, a bitter smile quickly softening to tolerance. “He accused me of not being a company man—and he said it as if he’d just looked into my soul and seen all the devils of hell writhing around in there.”
“I’m sure he didn’t mean it that way,” Lory said, but conviction was tempered by the recollection of those nights in the library when her father had talked about men at Suffolk Moulding. There was no greater compliment he could pay anyone than to say he was a company man, no greater fear than that someone might not turn out to be one.
“It was over such a little thing, too,” Cash reminisced. “But it was typical. This was in the late thirties and there was a home-furnishings style trend that was more or less away from wallpaper—painted and textured walls were coming in—and my father had made a speech at the sales convention. He really went overboard—if this horrible trend wasn’t stopped, civilization was doomed. I remember one of his lines—imagine if you can, a whole generation growing up without their cultural heritage of artistic wallpaper!”
“And he probably believed it,” Lory said with a smile.
“Oh, he did. But when he asked me in all seriousness what I thought of what he’d said, I couldn’t resist saying what I really believed—that I couldn’t see that it would make a great deal of difference in the future of civilization, one way or another. I shouldn’t have needled him but—”
“I know,” Lory broke in without intention, then forced to go on as Cash waited. “It’s been like that with my father, too. The plastics business was no subject for humor. I remember how terribly upset he was once when he heard the wife of one of his men say that she hated plastic dishes.”
“Yes, that was disloyalty,” Cash agreed. “One of my father’s assistants built a new house and paneled the living room—no wallpaper. I don’t think Dad ever really trusted him after that. To him, it had to be one hundred per cent or nothing. A
man had to give everything, his whole life. And that’s what he did himself—literally.”
Cash sat for a moment, lost in thought, but she was certain that he would go on without prompting. And he did. “It was a horrible thing—at least it seemed so to me at the time. They were working on some wonderful new machine—all it did, actually, was put a spray-gun effect on the background before the design was printed—but, of course, right then that was the most important thing in the world. There’d been a memo from the New York office about it—and that was a stone tablet right from Mount Sinai. The machine had to be operating in time to get samples in the new line. Dad went out in the factory himself and worked on the thing. He drove himself like a madman, day and night—and then a heart attack.”
“How awful,” Lory whispered.
“The awful part was still to come. They took him to the hospital. Somehow, after midnight when the nurse was out of the room for a minute, he sneaked out and went back to the plant. We found him there a couple of hours later—dead.”
“Oh, no.”
“Men die—I could accept that,” Cash said gravely. “But what I couldn’t get over was the terrifying fanaticism that would make a man offer up himself as a human sacrifice—and all for something no more consequential than a gadget to spray ink on wallpaper. Of course, I was still pretty much of a kid—I was only seeing one side of it—but I couldn’t accept the philosophy that that should be the end-point of a man’s life. It seemed horrible.”
“It was,” Lory whispered.
“But not to the other men. I remember the funeral—all the big brass down from the main office in New York. To them, my father had done something very noble. What more could any man want than a chance to lay down his life for a great company?”
“It really is something like a religion, isn’t it?”
Cash hesitated. “Maybe I’m a little overboard in calling it that, but I’ve been trying to make you understand the way I felt at the time.”
“And I think I do.”
“Anyway, I couldn’t accept the philosophy. I couldn’t believe that the individual didn’t matter, that it was only the company that counted—always the group, never the man—always the individual must submerge himself in the mass.”
“And you wouldn’t submerge?”
“I couldn’t. You see—but there was another side of it, too. How important it was, I don’t know—I can’t look back now and re-create everything that was in my mind then—but I was a depression product, college during the Roosevelt years, and I suppose I’d been inoculated with the anti-business virus. That must have been true because if it hadn’t been, the rest of the world wouldn’t have hit me the way it did. I’d left the United States with the idea that the American businessman was a pretty awful character—cold, materialistic, nothing but a money-grubber. But when I stacked him up against what I found around the rest of the world, he looked like a fairly decent character. The longer I went, the more I began to feel that same way about the whole American idea. All right, maybe we had turned company worship into something like a national religion, but could anyone argue that it didn’t work? Look at the results. Could anyone say that we hadn’t created the best way of life that the world had ever known? Anyway, I came home a convert and headed right down the sawdust trail, looking for a job.”
“You didn’t go back to Conestoga Wallpaper?”
“No. That was the past and this was a new start. I thought I might get into aviation. I’d started flying when I was in college and liked it. All over Europe and Asia, I’d hung around airports, grubstaking myself now and then with a mechanic’s job. I knew what conditions were like abroad so I thought I’d have something to offer some manufacturer in the aviation field who was interested in export. I landed on the West Coast—this was the spring of ’39—and started looking for a job. I found three companies that had openings. But they all turned me down—one, two, three. No reason, just thank you very much but no go. The last company I talked to had the job that I really wanted—assistant export sales manager—so I kept going back. Finally, I got to the president. At first he wouldn’t talk either, but in the end I managed to nag him into telling me what the score was. I’ll never forget the look on his face when he did. He acted as if he were pronouncing a death sentence.”
“But what did he say?”
“That I was one of those most displaced of all persons—an individualist.”
“How silly.”
“No, not silly at all. He said that he was afraid I’d never be a real company man. And he was right. I wouldn’t have. I’d rationalized away all my instincts, but that didn’t change the essential me. I was still the infidel, still the heathen in the temple, still the guy that couldn’t accept the gospel of allowing myself to be completely swallowed up.”
Cash sipped his drink. “I came back to Philadelphia and then something happened that—well, anyway, that was the start of the kind of a life I’ve led ever since. I happened to run into a man named Allen Ranson. He was a very personable character and didn’t seem to have too much of a prejudice against individualists. He was out to buy a little company that made airport equipment—runway lights and that sort of thing—and he offered me a job managing the company, providing that he could close the deal to buy it. It was a family business, the old man had died and the three boys who had inherited it couldn’t get together on what they wanted. I suppose I should have suspected something—why had Ranson picked me?—but I was green, trusted him completely, and plunged into the thing, head over heels. I worked twenty hours a day, reading corporation law and tax manuals, trying to work out some deal that the heirs would accept. Finally, at midnight one night, we shook hands on an agreement. When I went to Ranson the next day, he welched, claiming that he hadn’t given me the authority to act. I found out later what he’d done—used me for a catspaw to keep this company I’d bought from selling out to someone else and spoiling another deal he had on the fire. You can see the spot that left me in—I’d made the deal, given my personal word, and somehow I had to go through with it. But I didn’t know how. Operating the business was out of the question—I couldn’t possibly have financed it—but I was positive that the company was worth more than I’d agreed to pay. Somehow, I talked Will Atherson into loaning me the option money—and then I remembered the president of this company in California.”
“The one who had called you an individualist?”
“That’s right. He’d mentioned something about his company wanting to diversify with supplementary lines, so I packed up a bunch of samples, bummed a ride across the country with a pilot I knew, and finally wound up selling him the company.”
“This same man who wouldn’t give you a job?”
Cash nodded. “In nine days, I made a profit of over a hundred thousand dollars. I was flabbergasted. It just didn’t make sense. A month ago, this same man wouldn’t give me five thousand a year to work for him. Now he’d handed me twenty years’ salary for a month’s work.”
“It would have been cheaper to have hired you.”
“Much! But the strange thing was that it didn’t bother him. He was actually pleased. You see, I’d confirmed his judgment about me.”
“No, I’m afraid I don’t understand.”
“I’d proved I wasn’t a company man. If I had been, I’d never have done such a crazy thing as to jump in and buy a quarter million dollar business with no money to pay for it, and no idea what I was going to do with it after I’d bought it. Furthermore, I’d done it all on my own—no consultations, no committees, no group action.”
Assured by Cash’s ironic humor, Lory laughed. “But you made a hundred thousand dollars.”
“It wasn’t only the money, Lory. Oh, I don’t mean to say that wasn’t important—when you’ve been flat broke for a year or two, a hundred thousand dollars can look like a first-class miracle—but it was more than that. For the first time, I’d really gotten a wallop out of something. That experience—first buying the company an
d then selling it—was the most exciting thing that had ever happened to me.”
“I can easily believe that.”
“Probably sounds ridiculous to make the comparison, but it was something like mountain climbing—all the preparation, every detail so important, knowing that if you slip once you’re done. Then you make it and you’re up there on top. Once that’s happened, you’re never quite the same again—you never get it out of your system. I don’t suppose that makes any sense but—”
“Oh, but it does! Of course it makes sense.”
Cash looked at her almost as if he was finding it difficult to accept her understanding, pausing before he continued. “Afterwards, I kept trying to tell myself that it was a freak case—one lucky break—something that could never happen again. But I had enough money to live on for a while so I started looking around, prospecting for another company that could be bought and sold. Luckily—or maybe unluckily, I don’t know—I did stumble into another one. In less than two years, there were five of them. By the fall of ’41, I had a million dollars. Then came the war and India again—Burma—and the Hump. I’d sit there in the cockpit and tell myself that when it was over I’d buy some good company and not sell it, settle down and run it myself. But I didn’t. Oh, I tried—more than once. It’s just no go, Lory. There’s a wallop in it for the first six months—bracing up a shaky outfit, reorganizing it, taking it apart and putting it back together again so that it runs. But then the fun’s over so far as I’m concerned. For me, that’s the end. From there on out, I don’t belong—I’m not a company man.”
There had been a curtaining quality in his last words, a tone of finality, as if this were the end of the story. Puzzled, Lory looked up at him.
“That’s it,” he said. “That’s all I’ve ever done.”
Lory felt herself completely bewildered. What was the point? He had started out to tell her why he had never married. Was there something she had missed, some significant meaning that slipped past her realization?
Cash was frowning as if to criticize her lack of understanding. “Don’t you see what it means, Lory—the off-beat kind of life, no solidity, no security, nothing like that. Can’t you understand what I’m trying to say?”
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