Sincerely, Willis Wayde

by John P. Marquand

  “God damn them bugs,” he was saying.

  It was Mr. MacDonald, the head gardener, and Mr. MacDonald was always a dour man. A stout man in blue overalls was standing by the gasoline engine in the pump house. His hands were in his pockets and his face was red and chubby. He took one glance at Willis and then turned away again. It was Mr. Beane, the estate superintendent, who knew every pipe and wire and water conductor on the place. Like Patrick, the people on the place already accepted Willis as a fact, but they did not know where he fitted in any more than Willis knew himself, and they did not want to talk until they knew, but Mr. Harcourt’s police dog felt differently. When Benny saw Willis he wagged his tail and ran ahead of him toward the oak woods beyond the house. Benny was the only one that morning who knew where Willis fitted in. Benny was always agreeable to the employees on the place, but he never went for walks with them, not even with Mr. Beane.

  The stretches of woodland behind the walls were as disciplined as the paintings of an English park, and like the brook that ran through the southern end of the property they were all units in the landscape plan. Once each year a party of tree surgeons, watched by Mr. Harcourt and Mr. Beane, cut down dead limbs and crowding brush and saplings, so that the large oaks and pines and beeches were allowed to grow unhindered, with the brook winding softly among their shadows. It was possible to walk freely beneath the trees, but for greater convenience the place was interspersed with well-cleared paths called walks, the names of which soon became familiar—the Brook Walk, the Pine Walk, the Hickory Hill, the Azalea, and the Rhododendron Walks. Without knowing its name yet, Willis walked down the Brook Walk with the police dog trotting ahead of him. The shade of the path and the cool sound of the brook could not dispel the heat above them, and bright shafts of sunlight continually fell across the path. He was walking toward the Bryson Harcourts’ house and he saw it for the first time when the trees thinned out near the edge of a large field. The house lay at the end of a gradual slope, a newer structure than the big house and almost as large, made of brick in Georgian style, forming a minor principality within the general boundary, with its own lawns, gardens, stable, and tennis court. The unexpected sight of it made Willis feel like a trespasser, and sudden shyness made him turn away.

  He was walking back toward a bend of the path near the foot of a large white pine tree when the dog sprang forward suddenly and a girl’s voice called, “Down, Benny.” For a second Willis felt an acute desire to hide, but instead he walked slowly around the turn and saw a girl somewhat younger than himself, patting the police dog’s head.

  The girl in front of Willis wore a middy blouse and a blue pleated skirt, and her blond hair was done in a heavy braid. Her face was as freckled as his own and her eyes were critical. He never forgot their color—a sort of greenish-blue.

  “How did you get in here?” she asked.

  “I was just walking around with the dog,” Willis answered.

  “Well, he isn’t your dog,” she said.

  “I know he isn’t,” Willis said.

  “Then how did you find him?” she asked.

  “He was over by the big house,” Willis answered, “and he came along with me for company, I guess.”

  “Oh,” the girl said. “You’re one of the people that my grandfather gave the garden house to, aren’t you? Beane said there was going to be a boy.”

  “Yes,” Willis said, “that’s me, I guess.”

  “Well, that’s all right then,” the girl said. “Beane said you were about Bill’s age, but you’re bigger. I thought you were a town boy. They sneak over the wall sometimes.”

  “I didn’t sneak over any wall,” Willis said.

  “I didn’t say you did,” the girl said, “and you needn’t act angry. This is my grandfather’s place, and it’s my place, partly. At least my brother and I are going to own it some day.”

  “I’m not acting angry,” Willis said.

  “You don’t need to,” the girl said again. “And I have a right to ask you questions. You don’t know your way around here, do you?”

  “No,” Willis said. “I was just looking around. He said I could go anywhere.”

  “Who said?”

  “Mr. Harcourt said,” he answered.

  “All right,” she said, “but I guess you don’t know who I am, do you?”

  “I guess you must be the girl,” Willis said.

  “What girl?” she asked.

  “The girl they were talking about at the big house last night.”

  “Oh, you were up there, were you?” she said. “Well, my name’s Bess Harcourt. What’s your name?”

  “Willis,” he told her, “Willis Wayde.”

  “Did you know this brook is stocked with trout?”

  “No,” Willis said.

  “He didn’t tell you you could fish, did he?”

  “No,” Willis said.

  “You could if I told you. Do you know how to cast?”

  “Yes,” Willis said.

  “I bet you don’t,” she said. “Where did you learn?”

  “Out West,” Willis said. “There are a lot of streams better than this out West.”

  “I’ve got to study French with Mademoiselle this morning. Do you know French?”

  “Not very much,” Willis said.

  “I didn’t think you did, but we can go fishing this afternoon. Maybe I’ll bring Bill. Meet me here at three o’clock and put on some old clothes. Where did you get those clothes?”

  “In Kansas City,” Willis answered.

  “I should think you’d take your coat off anyway,” she said. “Can you play tennis?”

  “No,” Willis said.

  “Well, maybe Bill’s tutor can teach you. Bill has a tutor from Harvard. Can you ride?”

  “Yes,” Willis said, “everybody can ride out West.”

  “I don’t mean Western riding,” she said. “I wish you had a haircut, and you wouldn’t look so funny.”

  “You don’t look so hot yourself,” Willis said.

  “It’s none of your business how I look,” she answered. “I’m not trying to look any way at all.”

  “Neither am I,” Willis said.

  “Oh, yes, you are,” she answered. “You’re trying to show off. I’ll be here at three o’clock, and don’t keep me waiting.”

  “Bess,” a boy’s voice was calling, “Bess!”

  “Oh, all right,” Bess called back, “all right.”

  “Come on so we can do our damned French,” the boy’s voice called.

  Of course it was Bill Harcourt who was calling. A second later Willis saw him, hurrying down the path, a slender, dark-haired boy in white duck trousers.

  “It’s all right, Bill,” Bess said. “He’s one of the people in the garden house. His name is Willis Wayde.”

  “Oh,” Bill said. He looked at Willis quickly but not critically like Bess.

  “It’s nice there’s someone else around here,” he said. “You’ve got to come over and see us.”

  “We’re going fishing this afternoon,” Bess said.

  “You and your fishing,” Bill said. “All you want is someone to show off in front of. Come on, Bess.”

  Everyone had certain functions on the Harcourt place, as Willis learned without resentment. It was part of the order, he began to understand, that Patrick and Mr. Beane and everyone else should address Bill and Bess as Mr. Bill and Miss Bess, when they usually called him Willis. On the other hand, Bill and Bess asked him around quite often to their house, but they hardly ever asked Mr. Beane’s son, Granville, there. It was natural, however, that Willis and Granville became best friends, because they went to high school together. When anyone told him, as the town girls and boys frequently did, that Bill and Bess Harcourt were stuck-up kids, Willis knew that this was not so. Bill and Bess were no different from anyone else, when you got to know them. They only led different lives.

  The Bryson Harcourts always moved to Boston in the autumn to a life of which Willis knew no
thing, and Bess went to a girls’ private school there, and Bill went to a boys’ boarding school in Milton. Willis was not even curious about what they did, being absorbed in his own problems. They would part casually and without much regret, and when they met they would pick up things where they had left them.

  Mr. Harcourt went to Boston, too, in late November, but the big house stayed open, and he or Mr. Bryson were always in it for a night or two every week. The general affairs of the mill were in the hands of Mr. Henry Hewett, the plant manager, who lived with Mrs. Hewett in a square white house just across the street from the mill buildings, but Mr. Harcourt was the one who made the main decisions.

  III

  Only a day or two after he had arrived, Willis saw Mr. Harcourt again. It was a lonely time before school opened, with nothing much for him to do except run errands for his mother, who was very busy putting things to rights in their new house. The size of the estate still made him homesick, if you could be that way without having any particular home to be sick for. Yet he must already have begun fitting into the place, because Mr. MacDonald had spoken to him that morning, when Willis had started out on another of his walks. He had stopped at the edge of the vegetable garden, which lay basking in the sun. Its rows of corn, carrots, lettuce, and beets stretched like city streets to the cold frame, and Mr. MacDonald was scowling at the turf edging of the strawberry bed.

  “Hello, Willis,” Mr. MacDonald said.

  “Good morning, sir,” Willis said.

  “You call me Mr. MacDonald, Willis,” Mr. MacDonald said. “But there’s no need saying sir. God Almighty, I don’t own this garden.”

  “Excuse me, sir,” Willis said. “You talk to older people that way out West.”

  “Is that so?” Mr. MacDonald said. “You never saw an estate like this in the West, did you?”

  “Maybe not so fancy,” Willis said, “but there might be something like it in California or Oregon.”

  “California,” Mr. MacDonald said. “Everybody’s always blowing about California. I bet you never saw a squash like that in California. It’s going to win first prize at the fair, if the judges ain’t crooked, and so will my glads and chrysanthemums, by God! Hell, you can raise anything on this ground that they raise in California, only you got to work for it here and not loaf. They don’t have the bugs we do in California.”

  “They’ve got quite a lot,” Willis said.

  “Hell,” Mr. MacDonald told him. “There’s a special bug here that eats everything, and more of them keep coming, because we’re civilized. I bet they don’t spray their apples five times a year like I do mine.”

  Mr. MacDonald stopped and rubbed his hands together.

  “You’ve got to know your bugs here and you’ve got to watch ’em. Like I say, there’s some little bastard eating everything—green worms on the tomatoes, and potato bugs of course, and corn borer in the corn, by God, and cutworms underground. Mr. Harcourt don’t know what we’re up against here. I don’t know how it’s going to end.”

  “Well, everything looks pretty good,” Willis said.

  “You’re damned right it looks good, because I make a study of it. You go down there and look at Mr. Bryson’s vegetables, or flowers. Hell, that feller Wilkins down there puts on a show, but there’s nothing behind it.”

  “Who is he?” Willis asked.

  “Hell, he’s Mr. Bryson’s gardener,” Mr. MacDonald told him. “I don’t say anything against anyone, but I’ve got eyes. You’ll see a lot around here if you keep your eyes open, boy, and now you’d better run along. I’m busy.”

  “Mr. MacDonald,” Willis said, “is there anything I could do to help you, for a day or two?”

  “For a day or two?” Mr. MacDonald said. “God Almighty, it would take me a year or two before you’d be of any help.”

  “I’ve worked summers on my grandfather’s farm. In Kansas,” Willis said, “out around Topeka.”

  “God Almighty, this isn’t a farm,” Mr. MacDonald said. “Why don’t you go and feed the swans down in the pond?”

  “What swans?” Willis asked.

  “God Almighty, haven’t you got eyes?” Mr. MacDonald asked. “The swans, down in the pond off the front driveway, for God’s sake. Now run along. I’m busy.”

  Those were the first words Willis had had with anyone on the place, except a few with Patrick. He had seen the pond on the lawn by the front driveway, and sure enough there were three swans down there, floating effortlessly on the smooth water, and there was a little island in the middle of the pond with a small house on it. While Willis stood on the bank, the largest of the birds glided toward him, and Willis called to him encouragingly. He had not the remotest idea of what might happen, until the bird made a hissing sound, flapped its huge wings and half flew and half sprang out of the water. Willis took a startled step backward, but the bird propelled itself toward him, and Willis backed away again.

  “Don’t run,” a voice behind him said. The swan still hissed and spread its wings, and Willis turned around and saw Mr. Harcourt.

  “Jupiter always loses his temper if you go too near the edge,” Mr. Harcourt said. “Get back in the water with the girls, Jupiter. Behave yourself, behave.”

  Mr. Harcourt walked briskly toward the swan.

  “Get back in the water, Jupiter,” Mr. Harcourt said, “and you needn’t expect a gratuity every time you see me.”

  “I didn’t mean to stir him up, sir,” Willis said.

  “The next time you come, throw him a piece of bread,” Mr. Harcourt said. “He’s like certain members of my own family. He expects something and loses his temper if he doesn’t get it. Even the rector is that way if you don’t give enough. I’ve just been talking to Mr. Bowles on the telephone for half an hour about the parish hall. That’s why I’m late, and just when I was driving out I saw you.” He nodded toward the driveway, and Willis saw that the Locomobile was standing waiting.

  “I was just walking around, sir,” Willis said. “I was up in the vegetable garden and then I came down here.”

  “Landing in a place like this must be a little difficult,” Mr. Harcourt said. “Of course I’m used to it, having been brought up here. My father always kept swans in the pond. I suppose that’s why I do. Was MacDonald in the garden?”

  “Yes, sir,” Willis said.

  “I suppose he talked to you about insects,” Mr. Harcourt said. “He always does to me. If you haven’t anything to do, why don’t you come down with me and see the mill?”

  Mr. Harcourt could always put anyone at ease. It was not charm exactly. It was his being the same with everyone.

  He told Willis not to sit with Patrick but in back with him, because, he said, he wanted the pleasure of his company. It was only a long while later that Willis came to learn that there was a reason for Mr. Harcourt’s interest when Mr. Harcourt asked him where he had lived and where he had gone to school. He was really asking about the life of Alfred Wayde, and it was not such a bad way to gather information, as Willis realized later, when he learned the same technique. If you talked to someone, even a boy, there had to be an exchange of confidence, and you had to tell about yourself in return for what you got, and this required a deceptive sort of guile. It was a form of art which very few could master, and Willis never could be the artist that Mr. Harcourt was.

  When Mr. Harcourt was a boy, he said, he used to drive with his own father to the mill—in a buggy drawn by a dappled gray. There were more workers’ houses along the Sudley Road now, but he had tried to keep to Mr. George Harcourt’s plan when new houses were being built during the First World War. A war, Mr. Harcourt said, had always made the factory grow. It was during the Civil War that Mr. Harcourt had started riding down there with his father. It was quite a place in those days, more picturesque than now. The mill had been run by steam instead of electricity, and coal barges were unloaded at the dock by gangs of Irish workmen. The houses made a little village of their own now. There was a general store, and the general manager�
�s house had been built in the eighties just where Mr. Harcourt’s father had wanted it to be. Mr. Harcourt touched on these matters casually, as though Willis knew about them already, and that was the best way to learn about the mill, by a sort of osmosis.

  The Harcourt Mill was running at full blast that morning. The hum and the clatter that came from its open windows and the pungent smell of rubber from the vats combined to make it into a great machine, and all the people behind the wire fence that surrounded it were moving according to its discipline. That was the best way to envisage any industry.

  The machine was running smoothly, as it always did while Mr. Harcourt was alive. When the Locomobile pulled up in front of the mill, the gates swung back, but Mr. Harcourt shook his head.

  “No, no,” he said to Patrick, and he had to raise his voice above the noise. “I’ll walk around for a while, but come back for us at lunchtime, Patrick.”

  He stepped out of the Locomobile lightly and quickly and nodded to the gateman.

  “Stay close behind me, Willis, or you may get lost,” he said, and he hurried past the trucks by the loading platform. No one seemed to notice Mr. Harcourt and Willis as they walked by. Mr. Harcourt always prided himself on never interrupting anything, and everyone there accepted his presence as a piece of everyday routine. Mr. Harcourt never stopped, he never gave Willis an explanation, no matter how strange the sights were they encountered, but still a picture of the Harcourt process unrolled scroll-like for Willis as he followed Mr. Harcourt.

  The Harcourt process was an accumulation of skills that had begun when the Harcourt Mill itself had started spinning yarn back in 1850. The durability and strength of Harcourt belting had given it a reputation in the trade of which the mill was proud. Though the process was largely mechanical, it was one that demanded care and precision. You talked about workmanship in sales conferences, but the morale of workmanship was something different. Later Willis learned subconsciously to estimate this morale, and he felt its presence on that first walk past the noisily accurate machinery. The labor in the Harcourt Mill was good skilled Yankee labor. Everyone in the Harcourt Mill was as good as everyone else, in his own way. The elderly foremen did not bother to look up as Mr. Harcourt moved past them, and every motion that the men made was lazily casual but at the same time beautifully precise. Mr. Harcourt walked through Sheds 1, 2, and 4 and through the pump shed and through Warehouse No. 1 to the shipping shed and then to the newer brick building, Unit No. 3, where they were installing new machinery. Except for sounds of hammering and the clicking of chain hoists, Unit 3 was quiet. A section of a boiler was being lowered to its foundation, and Willis saw his father in his shirt sleeves standing among the workmen, and for the first time in their walk Mr. Harcourt paused to watch.