“Well, that’s very nice, I’m sure. Thank you, Mr. Tilney.”
“Thank you, Mrs. A!”
And everything would have been all right; everything would have been, in fact, quite “dreamy,” to use Lois Grimshawe’s favorite adjective, except for one wretched little circumstance. As Mrs. Abercrombie passed between the two desks, in the anteroom outside his office, of Miss Clinger and Mr. Webb’s secretary, she distinctly saw out of the corner of her eye, the former lean forward over her typewriter to cast a quick wink behind her back. So that was it, she breathed to herself as she quickened her pace, as if to flee from the smothered giggle that might follow before she was out of earshot. She had been fixed. She, Annabel Abercrombie, had been “coped with,” a poor old shabby piece of baggage which could, with some extra string, be used for one final load, one last trip. And if it burst in the station and cast its goods shamefully over the platform, what did it really matter? It was only the junk bag, anyway.
It was inevitable under the circumstances—and she was even a bit ashamed of it herself—that the first person to test the force of her resentment should be Rutherford Tower. He had certainly never asked, poor man, that Mrs. Abercrombie should replace Miss Bruney; he was simply the baser nature that had come within the pass of mighty opposites. When Mrs. Abercrombie came in the next day and sat sedately down for the morning’s dictation, a good forty minutes after his ring (forty minutes, she claimed, that were necessarily dedicated to his aunt’s mail) and held up her pad as if it were some strange, faintly comic gadget that she had never seen before, he kept his eyes directed down at the desk to avoid the embarrassment of revealing either his irritation or his timidity. Whenever Mrs. Abercrombie asked him to repeat a word or phrase, which was frequent, he would do so with a loud, clear, patient articulation of each syllable. “I’m not deaf yet, you know,” she reminded him cheerfully, and then, when he had recommenced dictation and was going too fast, she would hold her pencil suspended until he had finished a paragraph and lost forever his beginning before observing: “I’m afraid I shall have to ask you to go over that again.” If he dared so much as give an answering cough to show his dismay, she would follow up with: “Now, now, Mr. Tower, this isn’t some sort of a speed contest, is it?” and settle back in her chair with a rumbling laugh. But the simplest way, she soon found out, to bring him to the slippery edge of distraction was to find a piece of Tower Foundation business to place ahead of every letter or document that he had dictated. If he loomed up in her doorway after lunch, with a hunted look, to ask if the letter to Standard Trust Company which he had given her at ten o’clock was ready, she would reply, with a mocking shake of her head and a serene smile: “Ready? Why, bless you, I haven’t even started it. Do you realize I have six more students’ applications to finish before I can even get to the memos you gave me yesterday?” It might have been a bit hard on him, but was not the whole catastrophe attributable to his cowardice? Why did he not stand up for his rights? Had not his Tower ancestors been leaders of the bar when the Tilneys were selling newspapers in the streets of Ulrica?
But it was Tilney himself, of course, and not Tower who would have to bear the full force of her reproach, and she had selected the Christmas party as the occasion for this. After receiving her gift she w’ould undoubtedly be asked to say a few words, and then she would be able to point up the contrast between the gracious past and a present without values, between the polished but profound gentleman scholars of yesteryear and the legal hucksters of today. She would not do it crudely, or even bitterly. She would do it with a high, dry, faintly wistful humor, with little smiles cast about among the partners, smiles that would contain, in addition to a proper gratitude and affection, the least hint of reproach, forgivable in a long-faithful servant, at their lowered standards and an invocation to remember the splendid old things that had made the firm great. It would be dignified, tasteful, moving—and devastating. It would give Clitus Tilney a lesson that even his bland capacity for wishful thinking would not quite be able to brush off. She spent her evenings now composing the speech and trying portions of it out on Mr. Abercrombie, who was never to have the good fortune of hearing the finished version as the Christmas party was strictly limited to the office. He listened with his usual pipe and his usual patience, but he ruffled her by suggesting that she “sugar” it up with a sprinkle of Yuletide spirit.
“Why not come right out and ask me to recite ‘The Night Before Christmas’?” she asked frostily. “After all, it would be perfectly appropriate. The Surrogate used to say that it was his grandfather who had suggested the names of the reindeer to Mr. Moore.”
The finished draft, which her husband had found too sarcastic and she too mild, she began to have misgivings about on the day of the party itself. She had never taken much notice of these parties, at least since the Surrogate’s day when he had used to open them with a lively and merry address, full of sly references to the younger lawyers, congratulating some for their past year’s industry and exhorting others, though always with a Christmas twinkle in his eye, to greater efforts in the year to come. Mrs. Abercrombie in recent years had usually stayed but half an hour, sitting apart with Mrs. Grimshawe and consuming a small glass of ginger ale and a single watercress sandwich. When she took her leave she made her farewells only to Messrs. Tilney and Webb, the two senior partners, unless she happened to pass close to Rutherford Tower in which event she would shake hands with him as well. But this year, when she saw the office slowly assembling in the stenographic department where the party was held, and realized, as indeed was manifest in the splendid orchid that drooped from her shoulder and which had been sent by Tilney himself, that she would have to address that multitude, she became suddenly tense.
The desks had been pushed back to make a circular area for dancing in the center of which a lone accordionist was playing “White Christmas.” On top of the green file cabinets that jutted out from the walls various decorations had been strewn: small trees, paper hats, a sleigh with a Santa Claus and rather too many big red tissue-paper bells. Plates of hard-boiled eggs and turkey sandwiches covered Mrs. Grimshawe’s desk, and on a long table with a green cloth cover the office boys mixed bourbon and ginger ale. It was generally supposed among the partners that the girls had a “field day” getting the place ready and that it was only right to let them have one afternoon a year in which they could turn a dreary masculine world into something more festive. But Mrs. Abercrombie knew better. Everybody was bored by the party. As the wise old Surrogate used to say, “We have to give the damn thing, not because anyone likes it, but because if we don’t, they’ll call us Scrooge & Marley.” Looking about the room, Mrs. Abercrombie concluded that it was more than ever like a children’s party. The lawyers crowded together on one side of the bar, the girls on the other. A respectful group of the former listened to Mr. Webb’s jokes. Mr. Tilney alone circulated, beaming to left and right. After the first forty minutes some of the younger stenographers started dancing with each other. Mrs. Abercrombie, realizing at last to the full that these were the people who would hear her speech, felt the sagging weight of depression in her legs and stomach.
“What’s that you’re drinking, Lois?” she asked.
“Vodka, dearie. And it’s just the thing for you. Let me put a swig in your ginger ale.”
Mrs. Abercrombie allowed her to give her a swig and, after she had finished it, she allowed her to go to the bar to get her an even stiffer one. Perhaps it was indiscreet, but on the whole she thought not. She felt better already, and quite a bit better when she was halfway through her second. The depression inside remained, but it was lighter. In fact, it was not altogether disagreeable. She felt less irritated as she thought of the shabby present, more resigned, more philosophical. She even felt a swelling in her heart of something like affection for the good old firm that had planned to honor her that day.
“I’ll bet that’s better now, isn’t it?”
“Yes, Lois, I think it is. I honestly
think I can say it is.”
“That’s one thing we owe the Russians, anyway.”
Mr. Tilney now raised a long arm over his head, and silence followed a ripple of warning buzzes to the corners of the room.
“Ladies and gentlemen of Tower, Tilney & Webb, if you please, if you please!” he exclaimed, and when the room was still he continued, in the leisurely, stately manner of one who knows that interruption is impossible and applause to be assumed: “It is once again my happy privilege to wish you all the greetings of the season.”
As he went on, smiling in the direction of each person to be honored with an individual greeting, Mrs. Abercrombie lost track of his words. She had fallen into a listless reverie, with a sense of being surrounded by snow, infinite snow, great silent soft banks of snow on the ground and more snow still descending, relentlessly, in slanted lines. It was the vodka, she vaguely supposed, and the vision which it had evoked of old Russia and now of temples with strange cupolas and men in fur hats in sleighs and grand duchesses in court dress with tiaras as they appeared in the illustrations of court memoirs at her lending library. But it was all suddenly blotted out by a present of marching feet, millions of marching feet, and rude laughs and horrid rough men and the ghastly vision of the poor czarina and her lovely daughters slaughtered in that cellar. And it seemed to Mrs. Abercrombie as she gazed about the room that the green file cabinets poking their sharp corners out from under the absurd incongruity of the hastily assembled, jerry-built pile of Christmas decorations were like the guns and rockets of Soviet military might poking their barrels and noses out from under angels’ robes and doves of peace in a cartoon that mocked the sincerity of Russia’s aversion to war. She was shocked by the sudden rude poke that Mrs. Grimshawe gave her.
“Annabel,” the latter whispered fiercely, “he’s talking about you.”
And so he was.
“Mrs. A was my first impression of Tower & Strong, as the firm was then somewhat formidably named,” he was saying, and his cold, friendly eyes were turned on Mrs. Abercrombie with a twinkle. “I had come down to New York, fresh out of law school, and was trembling at the prospect of my interview with Judge Tower. Mrs. A came out to meet me in the lobby, took in my situation in a moment and smiled a merciful smile. ‘Just remember,’ she warned me gently about her boss, ‘we hate F.D.R., we hate the NRA; we think McKinley was the last great American, and we lunch promptly at twelve-fifteen.’”
The roar of laughter that followed this startled Mrs. Abercrombie, and she gazed about, frightened, at the suddenly raucous throng. And then everything went very fast, and Mr. Tilney was praising her for four decades of devotion and people were clapping as loudly as if their hands were wooden slats, and Mr. Tilney was facing her, holding up a small golden eagle that seemed to be a paperweight, and then she was on her feet and there was a sudden silence, thunderous in its expectancy.
“Forty years,” she began in the high, clear meditative tone that she had rehearsed so many nights at home. Then she cocked her head as if the words were a piece of statuary that she was contemplating from a different angle. “Forty years,” she repeated musingly. “To many of you, to most of you perhaps, it is a lifetime. At least it encompasses your lifetime. To all of us it embraces what we think of as modern times. For the world, our world, was born with the end of the first war.”
As she paused she heard distinctly, from somewhere behind her, a high, plopping sound like a pebble falling into a still pond: a hiccup. There was a sudden startled ripple of laughter from the younger girls, followed by a tense hush.
“But there was a world before our modern world,” Mrs. Abercrombie continued, raising her chin to counter the vulgarity and insolence of that interruption. “The thing that most consoles me for growing older is that I was born early enough to have had a peek at that world. It was a quieter, slower, more gracious world …”
Hie! Once again the impertinent little sound supplied her with an unsought semicolon. This time the laughter spread to the associates, but Mrs. Abercrombie heard Mr. Tilney’s angry “Hush!” Silence was restored except for one girl who, with a hand to her lips to hold in evident hysteria, hurried from the room. As Mrs. Abercrombie resumed her speech she became aware, from the intent eyes and clenched fists of one young man before her, that he was making the same violent effort to repress his laughter.
“A more gracious world,” she reaffirmed in a louder, clearer tone. “A world where the telephone was reserved for important communications. Where a letter had to be thought about because it had to say something. Where there were no coffee breaks, no lady smokers, no machines for selling Coca-Cola …”
Hic!
And now came pandemonium. The room seemed fairly to explode into one orgiastic roar of laughter. The repressive forces which had been used to maintain the silence hitherto had only swollen the ultimate furor. Juniors, abandoning themselves now to the general mood, heedless of the consequences, and then, almost immediately, jubilantly relieved to see their seniors in the same fix, threw back their heads, clapped their hands and howled. One of the office boys actually rolled on the floor. Mr. Webb, holding his hands over his big stomach, afraid perhaps of tiring his heart, made appalling, gasping sounds. But worst of all was Rutherford Tower. He behaved like a creature demented, hugging himself with his arms and swinging his torso to and fro as he screamed in a high pitched voice: “Oh! Oh! Oh!”
Only Mr. Tilney did not laugh or even smile. He continued to gaze at Mrs. Abercrombie with eyes of gentle and inquiring sympathy as if there was no commotion, as if the speaker had simply paused to turn a page of notes, or to take a sip of water, and would resume in a moment. And then Mrs. Abercrombie, gazing back at him, felt a sudden weight in her knees and shoulders, felt the desk behind her as she sagged against it, and knew at last that it was she herself who had hiccuped.
She hesitated only a moment the next morning before pushing open the glass door to the reception room. Yet in that moment she raised her chin and squared her shoulders in the manner of a French noblewoman ascending the steps to the scaffold. The receptionist lowered her eyes and barely whispered her morning greeting; the two office boys, waiting for messages, nudged each other; an associate hurrying by in the corridor hurried a bit faster. It was some consolation, Mrs. Abercrombie reflected grimly, that they were all more embarrassed than she. She walked directly to Mr. Tilney’s office and paused before the busily typing Miss Clinger.
“May I see him, please?”
Miss Clinger looked up with false surprise. “Oh, good morning, Mrs. A. Yes, go right in, why don’t you? He’s on the phone now, but he shouldn’t be long.”
Mrs. Abercrombie’s eyes softened as she stood before the desk of her telephoning employer. He was listening at the moment, but he raised a hand and smiled broadly in a friendly greeting that made them intimate. Painless to her already was the memory of last night’s taxi ride to Brooklyn, when he had taken her to her very door, protesting all the while against the “barbarous” custom of office parties, assuring her that everyone knew that hiccups were caused more by ginger ale than by liquor, apologizing for the rudeness of the younger people and associating himself with her as members of a dwindling minority who still realized that without form, substance was merely clay. He had even warned her, at her door, to tell her husband nothing about the matter and to come to the office the next morning and “face down” the whole sorry crew. And she had done it. He would see that she was not unworthy of his trust and of his generosity.
“Mr. Tilney,” she said when he had put down the instrument, “I just stopped in to tell you one thing, and then I’ll be off, for I know what a busy man you are. Here it is. I thought when the Surrogate died that the last of our really great gentlemen had gone. I now know I was wrong.”
He did not let her down. He did not spoil their moment by words. He sensed that her compliment was one that could only lose by acknowledgment. He simply sat and smiled at her, nodding his head gently, until she turned away to
hide her tears and hurry from the room.
She passed Mr. Tower’s room and noted that he was peeking at her from behind his Law Journal. With stiffly averted head she continued to her own desk where she found her telephone ringing. It was Mrs. Grimshawe.
“Oh, dearie, you did come in. I’m so glad.”
“Of course I’m in, Lois. What do you want?”
“Mr. Tower called ten minutes ago to say he didn’t think you’d be in, and could he have a girl from the pool?”
“Tell Mr. Tower,” Mrs. Abercrombie answered gratingly, “that that will not be necessary. I will take care of his work. As usual.”
Hanging up, she reached for Tower’s unopened mail and dumped it in her “Hold” basket. She then opened the Foundation account book and started making slow, careful entries of elaborately rounded figures. At half past ten his head at last appeared in her doorway.
“Could we do some dictation now, please, Mrs. Abercrombie?”
She looked up and gazed at him in bland astonishment. “Why, I think so, Mr. Tower,” she replied cheerfully. “Just as soon as I’ve finished with the account books. Mr. Tilney told me last night that he wanted everything up to date by the end of the year.”
The long head and the sallow face disappeared, and Mrs. Abercrombie reflected, with a deep sigh of satisfaction, that she still had a whole half year to make him pay for those cries of the night before.
The Mavericks
HARRY REILLEY occupied a peculiar status among the associates of Tower, Tilney & Webb. He had not been netted by the hiring committee in its annual Christmas canvas of the editors of the Harvard, Yale and Columbia law reviews. He was thirty-two and clerking for a small firm of real estate lawyers in Brooklyn when Clitus Tilney had decided to bolster Tower, Tilney’s small department in that field by hiring a young man, already trained, from the outside. Harry had understood that he was being employed as a specialist with little chance of ultimate partnership, and he had not minded until he had discovered the tight little social hierarchy into which the firm was organized. Then he decided that working in his status was like climbing the stairs in a department store while alongside one an escalator carried the other customers smoothly and rapidly to the landing.
Powers of Attorney Page 9