Sincerely, Willis Wayde

by John P. Marquand

  “Easy, Joe,” Willis heard his father saying. “Hold it.” Alfred Wayde raised his voice to a shout. “Did you ever see an elephant set his foot on a man’s head in the circus? Well, he’s got to put his foot down easy. Good morning, Mr. Harcourt.”

  “Is it coming down all right?” Mr. Harcourt asked.

  “The boys are doing fine,” Alfred Wayde said.

  “Then don’t stop on my account,” Mr. Harcourt said. “I brought Willis along with me this morning.”

  “Oh,” Mr. Wayde said, “hello, Willis. Let her down, Joe.… Easy, easy.”

  His father had no time for anything except for the problem in front of him. He was always at his best when he was facing mechanical fact.

  “We’d better go to the office now. I don’t think we’ll be able to help them, Willis,” Mr. Harcourt said.

  The mill office building had been designed by the Boston architectural firm of Wentworth and Hynde, early in 1916. Representatives from a number of industrial plants had begun to visit the mill at that time, and Mr. Harcourt had been the first to see the sales value of an impressive place in which to receive customers. Though the general spirit of the building was in keeping with the older mill construction, a considerable sum had been spent on nothing but appearance. Its large arched doorway and its small-paned windows with green shutters gave the mill office the appearance of a Federalist dwelling, as it stood by itself at the northwest corner of the plant on a carefully tended plot of lawn. It looked, as Mrs. Blood had once said—because she and some other family stockholders had been opposed to the extravagance—like a headmaster’s overgrown house in a boys’ school, but at the same time it indicated without words the solidity and prosperity of the whole establishment.

  The interior also looked more like a house than an office. There was a fine hallway, and a broad staircase rising to the sales and plan departments. There was a large waiting room with a comfortable open fireplace—almost like a room in a men’s club, as Mrs. Blood said—and there were a directors’ room and rooms for all the chief executives. Instead of contracting with an office-supply house for the necessary desks, chairs, and tables, Mr. Harcourt had called in an interior decorator, who had furnished the main office with antique reproductions and often with genuine pieces of English Chippendale. The walls of the main hallway were hung with a collection of sailing-ship pictures, and the table in the directors’ room was a Duncan Phyfe. As Mr. Harcourt said, the office building was the one place in which he had been allowed ever to express his own taste. If none of it had anything to do with commercial belting, it gave an impression of quality, which was the basis of the Harcourt product.

  Mr. Harcourt’s mind was on this subject now, as he walked into the main hall with Willis and nodded to Miss Minton, the receptionist, who sat behind a flat Georgian desk.

  “How does this strike you, Willis?” he asked. “I’ve never seen why business should not be conducted in agreeable surroundings or why people should suffer when they talk over costs and figures. Is Mr. Hewett in, Miss Minton?”

  “Yes, Mr. Harcourt. He was asking for you,” Miss Minton said. “Shall I tell him you’re in?”

  “Oh, no,” Mr. Harcourt said, “I’ll stop in and see him.”

  Mr. Hewett’s door was open. It was one of the rules at the Harcourt Mill that every one of the key officers should keep his door open except when he was in a private conference, and also that every officer should be ready to see any employee whatsoever, without appointment; and it was not a bad rule either for a small organization. Except for his neat brown suit and for his age—he was in his sixties then—Mr. Hewett reminded Willis of Mr. Beane at the Harcourt place. He had the same broad heavy shoulders and the same broad face, but unlike Mr. Beane he wore horn-rimmed spectacles. He was seated at his desk reading a report when Mr. Harcourt entered.

  “Hello, H.H.,” Mr. Harcourt said.

  “Hello, H.H.,” Mr. Hewett answered.

  It was one of the old Harcourt jokes, that they both had the same first name and the same initials.

  “This is Willis Wayde,” Mr. Harcourt said.

  “Oh, he’s Alf’s son, is he?” Mr. Hewett said. “Mary’s been planning to pay a call on Mrs. Wayde, but she said it was only fair to let her get settled first. Well, how do things seem to you, Willis?”

  Willis cleared his throat, and his voice broke slightly.

  “It’s pretty big to get an idea of it all at once,” he said.

  “Some people around here never do,” Mr. Hewett said. “Will you draw up a chair and sit down, H.H.?”

  “No, thanks,” Mr. Harcourt said. “Is there anything I ought to know about, Henry?”

  “Nothing this morning,” Mr. Hewett said. “Decker is coming in this afternoon. Do you want me to sit in with you?”

  “It might be just as well,” Mr. Harcourt said. “Is Bryson in?”

  “He’s upstairs going over sales,” Mr. Hewett said. “Bryson’s got a new chart.”

  “No doubt I’ll hear about it later,” Mr. Harcourt said. “Henry, Number Five is working all right now, isn’t it? At least it sounded right.”

  “Old Man Avery was sick that you noticed it yesterday,” Mr. Hewett said. “He’s breaking in two new cutters, you know. Anything else on your mind, H.H.?”

  Mr. Harcourt pinched his lower lip gently.

  “I saw them testing out that yarn, and I still wouldn’t call it long-staple Egyptian. They ought to know better than to send us a shipment like that, and I wish you’d tell them so from me. And the skylight’s still out at Unit Three.”

  “You’re right it is,” Mr. Hewett said, “but the boys are setting the new glass now.”

  Willis followed Mr. Harcourt further down the hall, and Mr. Harcourt stopped at another open door.

  “Go in, Willis,” he said. “This is where I stay when I’m here.”

  Willis was surprised by the simplicity of Mr. Harcourt’s office. It was larger but its appointments were much simpler than those in the room of any other executive, but there was a reason behind everything with which Mr. Harcourt was connected. The battered desk, the old-fashioned carpet, the wooden chairs around a bare pine table, the grate, the tongs and shovel, the coal bucket by the fireplace had all come from the old office of William Harcourt. Then they had been used, with only a few additions, by Mr. George Harcourt, whose portrait, with that of Mr. William—both replicas of the ones in the Harcourt dining room—stared somberly from the walls. The furnishings indicated dramatically that Mr. Harcourt, as the head of the Harcourt Mill, could dispense with elaborate settings.

  “These things here,” Mr. Harcourt said to Willis, just as though Willis were a distinguished visitor, “were bought by my grandfather when he started the mill in 1850. A lot of business has been done across this desk. Sit down there, won’t you, Willis?”

  He pointed to a chair beside the desk and sat down himself on the swivel chair behind it, first glancing out of the window behind him and then out of the window to his left. Then he examined some papers in front of him without bothering to put on his spectacles.

  “Excuse me just a minute, Willis,” he said, and he read the office memoranda with a concentration that made Willis think that an invisible curtain had fallen between them.

  “Miss Jackman,” he called, “will you come in, please?”

  Miss Jackman had been his secretary for twenty years, and she had been in the accounting department for some years previously. She was gray-haired and straight-backed, with steel-rimmed glasses that made her look like a schoolmarm. She opened the door of her own office at the end of the room, strolled across the threadbare carpet and halted in an almost military way in front of Mr. Harcourt’s desk. Mr. Harcourt smiled at her, but she did not return his smile.

  “You’ve got me down for a pretty tight schedule this afternoon, Miss Jackman,” Mr. Harcourt said. “I’m getting old and I like time to turn around in.”

  “Yes,” Miss Jackman said, “but you haven’t got the time t
oday. You should have been in earlier this morning.”

  “Perhaps I should have,” Mr. Harcourt said.

  “The bank’s called you from Boston,” Miss Jackman said. “Will you be at the meeting on Tuesday?”

  “Yes,” Mr. Harcourt answered, “and I’ll have lunch at the club.”

  “Mr. Bryson wants to see you.”

  “What does he want now?” Mr. Harcourt asked.

  “It’s about the sales department.”

  “Oh dear me,” Mr. Harcourt said. “Tell him to see me at the house this evening.”

  “They have guests for dinner tonight.”

  “Well,” Mr. Harcourt said, “tell him before dinner. Is there anything else?”

  “Yes,” Miss Jackman said, and Willis thought that she hesitated because he was there.

  “Well, what is it?” Mr. Harcourt said.

  “Mrs. James telephoned. She’s very anxious to have you call her back.”

  “She called me here at the office? She really shouldn’t do that,” Mr. Harcourt said. “Well, get her for me in ten minutes. Thank you, Miss Jackman.”

  Miss Jackman strode back into her own office and closed her door sharply and decisively, and Mr. Harcourt smiled.

  “I’m afraid Miss Jackman is displeased with me this morning,” he said. “Perhaps I’m too dependent on her, and it never pays to depend too much on anyone. I wonder what you think of the Harcourt Mill, Willis, now you’ve seen it. It seemed like a big place to me when I saw it first, but it isn’t really. Perhaps you’ll work here some day. Would you like it if I got you a job next summer in the school vacation?”

  “Yes, sir,” Willis answered. “I’d like it very much.”

  Hero worship is always natural in a boy. You were always filled at that age with unfulfilled wishes, and Willis was wishing just then that he could be exactly like Mr. Henry Harcourt, without having the least idea what such a wish entailed.

  Mr. Harcourt leaned back in his swivel chair and his lower lip twitched slightly.

  “From what I hear,” Mr. Harcourt said, “your family moves around a lot. I used to enjoy change once myself. When I was your age I wanted to go to sea. When I was a little older my father had me travel for the mill. I always liked to see new parts of the country and to arrive in a strange town at night and move on next day, but now I’m caught in the mill machinery—not literally but figuratively. I suppose nearly everyone gets caught in some way eventually.”

  “I guess Pa doesn’t want to get caught,” Willis said.

  “Your father has a creative mind,” Mr. Harcourt said. “It’s hard for anyone to stay still who has a mind like that.”

  “The last man Pa worked for,” Willis said, “was a man named Mr. Harrod Cash in Denver. He’s a pretty rich man, I guess. Maybe you’re acquainted with Mr. Cash.”

  “Yes, I know him,” Mr. Harcourt said. “He’s a lot richer man than I am, actually.”

  “Well, he hired Pa to get the water out of a silver mine of his,” Willis said, “and after Pa did it Mr. Cash wanted him to run the mine, but Pa said the mine wasn’t a problem any longer.”

  “Your father told me about that,” Mr. Harcourt said. “What does your father want you to do, Willis?”

  “He wants me to be an engineer, too,” Willis said. “He tries to get me to do logarithms and things like that. When there isn’t any school around, Pa teaches me geometry and things and Ma teaches me the rest. She taught school once.”

  “Do you want to be an engineer?” Mr. Harcourt asked.

  “No,” Willis said. “I like making things, but I can’t take machines apart.”

  “Do you like to read?” Mr. Harcourt asked.

  “Yes, sir,” Willis answered, “but not scientific books.”

  “Well,” Mr. Harcourt said, “it seems to me it’s time you went regularly to school. I’m going to tell you a secret, Willis.”

  Mr. Harcourt’s face wrinkled into a frosty smile.

  “It’s rather a simple secret. You can repeat it if you want to, though I’d just as soon it remained between you and me. I happen to think your father is very exceptional in many ways. I want to use you to keep him with us, Willis.”

  “Me, sir?” Willis said.

  “Yes,” Mr. Harcourt answered. “I’m going to talk to him about your future this afternoon.”

  “I don’t think he thinks much about my future, sir,” Willis said. “Pa thinks mostly about machinery.”

  “Every father thinks about his son,” Mr. Harcourt said. “You’ll know when you have sons of your own.”

  He stopped, because the door to Miss Jackman’s office had opened.

  “Will you speak with Mrs. James now?” Miss Jackman said.

  “Oh, yes, all right,” Mr. Harcourt said.

  There were two telephones on Mr. Harcourt’s desk, one for the mill and one for the outside. He lifted up the receiver of the outside telephone.

  “Hello, Harriet,” he said. “I’ve been meaning to call you. I’ll be in town on Tuesday—the bank meeting.… Yes, you can reach me at the club.… Why, that sounds delightful, Harriet. Shall we say the usual place at the usual time? … I don’t really give a damn what Mildred and Bryson think. On Tuesday, then. Good-by, my dear.”

  Mr. Harcourt hung the receiver back and laughed softly. He glanced in a startled way at Willis.

  “Excuse me, Willis,” he said. “Miss Jackman!”

  Miss Jackman opened the door quickly.

  “Will you call up the house in town,” Mr. Harcourt said. “Tell them I’ll be in town over Tuesday night and if Patrick’s waiting I’ll go home for luncheon now.”

  “Mr. Bryson has asked you for dinner Tuesday night,” Miss Jackman said.

  “Yes,” Mr. Harcourt said, “I know. Will you call up Mrs. Bryson and tell her that I’m sorry, I’ll be in town, and you might tell her that I’m dining with Mrs. James.”

  “Wouldn’t it be better if you told her that yourself?” Miss Jackman said.

  “No, no,” Mr. Harcourt said. “Well, Willis, we’d better be leaving now or your mother will think you’re lost, and I want to thank you for your company, Willis, and for giving me a very pleasant morning.”

  IV

  Clyde as a town had a self-consciousness peculiar to all small towns that have been settled for several centuries. New arrivals were always set apart from everyone else in Clyde. They might live there for years, die there, and leave their children there, but they were never an integral part of the town itself.

  When Willis’s mother joined the Ladies’ Alliance of the Congregational Church, she was always known as Mrs. Wayde from the Harcourt Mill; and his father, when he joined the Clyde Men’s Club at Mr. Hewett’s invitation, was always known as the Wayde who worked at Harcourt’s. It seemed curious to Willis that his own position was slightly different from that of his parents. The difference must have started with high school, where he was always known by the boys as “the guy,” and by the girls as “the fellow,” who lived at the Harcourt place. He was never the smartest boy in his class or the dullest one either, and he had entered school too late to be identified with any particular group. Yet it was amazing how much people remembered about him when it became worthwhile to remember.

  Several of Willis’s schoolmates had exchanged photographs with him at graduation time, and were happy to exhibit these pictures in later years. Willis was younger then, of course, but who wasn’t? Still, in the school picture he had all the makings of what he was later—fine broad shoulders and a handsome face, in a manly way. It seemed strange, come to think of it, that he hadn’t been voted the handsomest boy in the graduating class, instead of its president, Howard Twining. The reason probably was that Willis was still a little gawky and hadn’t grown up to himself. He hadn’t broadened up to his tallness, and he still was outgrowing his clothes. Even so he was very neat and eagerly agreeable-looking. His hair, though a mite long, was all slicked down and neatly parted, making one recollect that Willis was one of
those boys in high school who was careful to carry a pocket comb. The nice thing about that picture was the straight, reliable way in which Willis looked at you—an honest look and no smirking. His was a face you could trust, a sincere, honest, unpretentious face.

  Mr. Bertram Lewis, who retired as principal of the Clyde High School in 1927, even at the age of eighty, distinctly remembered Willis Wayde. It seemed that Mr. Lewis, called Gumshoe Lewis by generations of his pupils, had realized the instant he set eyes on Willis that the young man had a future ahead of him, although Mr. Lewis did not announce his discovery for many, many years. It seemed only yesterday, he used to say, that Willis and his mother had called at the old high-school building on the day before school opened in September, 1922. He was struck immediately by the young man’s fine, upstanding appearance. He could tell right away that Willis was exceptional. Often when the winter twilight fell and Mr. Lewis made a final tour before going home, he would find Willis still studying at his desk, and he remembered what Willis said, just as though it were yesterday. “When I work something out by myself,” he said, “then I know it, Mr. Lewis.”

  It was strange when Willis once heard this anecdote repeated that he could not remember a single occasion when he had stayed after school, except once when Miss Minnie Wilson had kept him there after she had caught him passing a note across the aisle to Susan Brown, and it was not his note either. It was a note that Bill Ross, now owner of the Ross Garage, wanted delivered to Susan Brown.