“And here’s Will Burnham,” Mr. Harcourt said. “But you remember Will, don’t you, Harriet?”
“He’s the president of Grandfather’s bank,” Bess whispered. “So he doesn’t count, and there’s old Decker, with spots all over his coat. He doesn’t count much either.”
The hall was filled with people now, shaking hands with Mr. and Mrs. Henry Harcourt and then moving toward the living room.
“Selwyn has cocktails for us in the library,” Mr. Harcourt was saying.
“There come Mummy and Daddy,” Bess whispered. “There must have been a fight at the meeting. You can tell because Daddy’s laughing too much. And here come the Haywards, sticking together as usual. Grandfather bought most of their stock anyway, but Daddy says they never miss a free meal. Everybody hates the Haywards.”
“Doesn’t anybody like anybody else?” Willis whispered.
“Of course not,” Bess whispered back, “except when they take sides in a fight.”
“Hello, Ruth,” Mr. Harcourt said, smiling at Mrs. Blood.
“Will there be green-turtle soup for lunch as usual?” Mrs. Blood asked.
If they did not like each other Willis could see that there were bonds which held them together, so that, confronted by a common danger, they would stand together against a stranger. They were proud that they were Harcourts and proud of their dislikes.
The group in the hall was growing smaller.
“Only distant cousins are left now,” Bess whispered. “I don’t know why Grandfather wastes his time with them.”
But Mr. Harcourt was always the same with everyone. He seemed to be having a delightful time. He seemed to be particularly pleased to see each one again.
Finally Mr. and Mrs. Harcourt stood alone near the foot of the stairs, and Mr. Harcourt’s glance traveled slowly around the empty front hall.
“Well, my dear,” Mr. Harcourt said, “I think that’s the lot—the white man’s burden, you know—and we won’t have to do it again for a year. By the way, Harriet, don’t forget that I shall say grace.”
“Grace, Henry?” Mrs. Harcourt repeated.
“It’s a custom my father started,” Mr. Harcourt said. “It won’t hurt any of them to remember God and to thank Him that He has allowed me to look after their interests.”
“Don’t be sacrilegious, Henry,” Mrs. Harcourt said.
“I’m not,” Mr. Harcourt answered. “There’s a bonus check beneath every one of their plates, you know. They can’t wait to get in to lunch to see how much it is.”
“Henry,” Mrs. Harcourt said, “you look tired.”
“It’s always a strain handling damn fools,” Mr. Harcourt said, “particularly one’s flesh and blood. Let’s go and look at them, Harriet.”
They turned and walked away toward the living room, and Willis moved uneasily but Bess shook her head.
“Don’t,” she whispered, “don’t move. Here’s Grandfather coming back.”
She had seen him before Willis had. He came walking across the empty hall with his quick, deliberate step, holding a cocktail glass. He paused near the open front door for a moment and then he began walking slowly up the stairs.
“He must be going to the bathroom,” Bess whispered.
Willis thought that it was a most indelicate remark. They could see him walking up the stairs, but when he reached the upper hall, they could only hear his footsteps moving nearer. Then they heard his voice right beside them.
“You can come out now,” he said. “The show is over.”
Willis heard Bess give a sharp gasp as he struggled to his feet. Mr. Harcourt was standing just in front of the niche that led to the window.
“It’s all right,” he said. “I noticed you up there,” and then he laughed. “I wished several times that I could be up there with you. Come here and kiss me, Bess. You’re getting big enough to kiss.”
“Oh, Grandfather, don’t be silly,” Bess said, and she giggled.
“It was quite a show, wasn’t it?” Mr. Harcourt said. “I used to watch it from here myself. In those days they had stovepipe hats and Prince Alberts. Now if I were you two, I’d sneak down to the kitchen and tell Mary to give you some food. If she’s cross, tell her it’s my orders, Bess.”
“Oh, Grandfather,” Bess said, “you’re awfully sweet.”
“Sweet as sugar,” Mr. Harcourt said. “Well, Willis.”
Mr. Harcourt’s lower lip was motionless.
“Yes, sir?” Willis said.
“Well, you’ve seen the family,” Mr. Harcourt said. “It may help you when you come to work for me next Monday. I’m putting you under old Bill Jackson in Building 1. Beginning Monday you and I will both be working for those people.”
He laughed and walked away.
“Gosh,” Bess said, “I thought that he’d be angry.”
Willis had half forgotten Bess, in his realization that he was no longer a stranger but a retainer of the great house. Mr. Harcourt had as good as told him so. He would have followed Mr. Harcourt anywhere, or died for him.
V
In later years, like any other successful man at the head of a growing organization, Willis was naturally sympathetic with people having problems similar to his, and he could hardly help but make all sorts of interesting contacts at conventions and business luncheons, which he cultivated as assiduously as a farmer cultivated his crop, with Christmas cards and notes at suitable intervals. If you had a good secretary, she would tell you, for instance, that it was about time to write to Mr. Charles Bottomly, the president of the Plywood and Binder Company in Wilmington, California.
“Dear Chuck,” you would write. “How’s it on the Coast? Long time no see. Huey Jenks from the Guaranty was around here yesterday, and he says the job you’re doing out there is terrific. Are you coming East to the NAM?
“Please find enclosed a little verse about Truman and the music critic that’s going the rounds here, in case you haven’t seen it yet. Well, long time no see, but give my regards to Clara and the kids, in which Mrs. Wayde joins me, even if she hasn’t had the pleasure of meeting them. Sincerely, as always.”
You never could tell when a little bread cast upon the waters might pay off. It never hurt to have too many friends doing the same sort of thing you were. Willis had told many of them a lot about himself over drinks in hotel suites, in corners of clubs and on golf courses, and a lot of them had told Willis a lot about themselves in return—of what they thought about so-and-so, about their yachts, about their hobbies, and their tastes in women and liquor and automobiles. This sort of thing was the currency of business friendship.
There was one thing Willis always noticed about all these friends. When they touched on their own careers and their own adventures in free enterprise, they usually began to deal in vague generalities. It was not that these people had anything to conceal. It was only that the average business life—one’s hours and years in plants and offices and conference rooms—was too personal to be explained fully. None of these events were dull to one who lived them but none had much value for anyone else. At least Willis knew that this was true with him.
He was almost seventeen the first summer he worked at the Harcourt Mill, and his days behind the fence had nothing much to do with his leisure time. He was only tired at night and very hungry. He was there to learn and he had learned better than the average. He worked with some others of his schoolmates that summer as a helper in Building 1, and then as an assistant checker in the warehouse. Steve Decker had started with him that summer, because Steve’s father had wanted him to learn the business too, but Steve had developed a bad cough and had to quit after a month of it. Willis was never good with machinery but he learned how to work with the rest of the repair gang and by the end of summer he knew the whole process in Building 1 pretty thoroughly. The next summer, after he graduated from high school, he went through Buildings 2 and 3, and later, when Mr. Hewett put him in to help in the sales office, Willis had a good knowledge of the whole plant, o
r a base, at any rate, on which his experience could build. He always possessed an instinct which enabled him to see the whole in spite of all the complicated parts. He could even see that the finished product of the Harcourt Mill was itself only a part of something larger.
He had begun to learn, even when he was a worker in Building 1, that it was possible to hire someone to do almost anything, and that no one could do everything himself. The secret was to know enough to understand what specialists must do, and some people could never learn that secret. Mr. Hewett, for example, knew only part of it, and Mr. Edward Briggs, the sales manager, knew only another part, but someone like Mr. Harcourt could hold it all together. Very few people seemed to learn that the whole was greater than any of its parts. Minds stopped in the Harcourt Mill, lost at some stage in the process, and if your mind once stopped you stayed right where you were—in Building 1 or Building 2, or in the outer office. It may have been luck or it may have been ability that made Willis move further forward.
If his detailed knowledge of belting and the part that belting might play in an industrial plant finally impressed a good many other people, he knew now that he could thank his father for this familiarity. By the time that Willis began working summers at the Harcourt Mill, Alfred Wayde knew every shaft and machine by heart. Moreover he was able to put his finger on the basic problems and the critical spots. In fact the Harcourt plant had grown so simple to Alfred Wayde that he was beginning to become bored with it, and his mind was constantly occupied in theoretical devices for cutting down on labor. Men made mistakes, he used to say, but machinery never. He was ashamed that a boy of his was not as smart as he was with machinery. He used to say, by God, that he would ram a little practical sense into Willis if it took ten years. He didn’t want the shop foremen to laugh at his son. He was always ready to go over and over with Willis the basic principles and the details of the machinery. Willis could still remember his father’s voice shouting simple facts about cogs and gears above the noise of machines. There was a relentless pressure about Alfred Wayde that finally made it impossible not to learn something, and Willis felt deep gratitude after a lapse of years.
He never expressed this gratitude to his father until a long while afterwards, not until the year 1948, to be accurate, when Alfred Wayde was retired and living in Southern California. Willis had gone to the Coast on a quick business trip by air, and his friend Ralph Schultz, vice president of Hocking Aircraft, with whom Willis had been doing some business, had asked him up to his house for dinner. When Willis had told Ralph that he could not make it because he had arranged to have supper with his father and mother, who were living in one of those new developments near San Bernardino, Ralph had insisted that Willis take a company car and a driver. It was late afternoon when Willis got to the development, called Canyon del Oro.
Canyon del Oro was one of those groups of ranch-type dwellings that kept springing up like mushrooms in California, each house on a lawn with its garage attached. The air was dry and the mountains behind were brown, as they were in summer, and the surroundings made Willis wonder why his father and mother had ever picked California. It took some time to find his parents’ house because it was indistinguishable from other redwood, picture-windowed, wide-eaved dwellings. Its number, thirty-seven, was on the gatepost and there was a newly planted hibiscus hedge in front and an old olive tree on the lawn. His mother, wearing dungarees and sneakers, was watching a lawn sprinkler when the car stopped outside the gate. Her hair was white but she moved as fast as ever.
“Willis,” she said, “isn’t it a lovely home? It’s just what I’ve always dreamed of.”
“Yes,” Willis said, “it looks swell, Mom.”
“It’ll look better,” she said, “when the vines get growing. Do you want the young man driving the car to stay for supper?”
“No,” Willis said, “he can get something to eat in San Bernardino.”
“All right,” she said. “We’re having steak. Your father’s taking the car apart again.” She raised her voice to a commanding shout. “Alf, Willis is here.”
His father appeared holding a monkey wrench. He had put on weight and he was puffing slightly.
“Hello, Willis,” he said. “How’s tricks? Cynthia, you get supper, and Willis and I will sit in the breezeway and have a drink.”
It was hot in the breezeway, and Willis took off his coat and unbuttoned the soft collar of his shirt.
“You’re all pressed up like a knife, aren’t you, boy?” Alfred Wayde said, when he came out of the house with a tray and glasses. “These God-damned aluminum chairs. I always think they’ll break.”
It was like old times, because nothing ever changed his father. As they sat there watching the sun drop to the west, Willis thought of the summers at the Harcourt place when Alfred Wayde and he came home from the mill together.
“It’s a long way since that damned Harcourt Mill,” Alfred Wayde said.
Alfred Wayde had seen plenty of other plants since Harcourt’s, but somehow the Harcourt Mill seemed clearer to them both than anything else, particularly to Willis.
“Now old Harcourt was always a good Joe,” Alfred Wayde said. “But Bryson—Jesus! How’s Bryson now?”
“He isn’t around much,” Willis said. “He does a lot of sailing.”
Alfred Wayde rattled the ice cubes in his glass.
“How’s Bill?” he asked.
“He isn’t around much either,” Willis said, looking at the cloudless sky and the burnt-orange grass in the distance. “He has a place in Marion now, but Bill’s all right.”
He always did have a warm spot in his heart for Bill. But Alfred Wayde’s mind was still on the Harcourt Mill. He still spoke of it as though he had been there yesterday.
“You taught me all I know about the mill,” Willis said.
“You’re damned well right I did,” Alfred Wayde said. “God, you were a dumb kid.”
He must have been dumb from Alfred Wayde’s point of view.
“You never could have got through Tech,” Alfred Wayde said, “not even with me on your neck. It’s just as well you went to Boston University. Do you remember something?”
“What?” Willis asked.
“You asked me the dumbest question once. I guess it was the first summer, when I was trying to knock some sense into you about that mill.”
“What question?” Willis asked.
Alfred Wayde rattled the ice cubes in his glass again.
“Your mother always says I drink too much,” he said. “Hell, alcohol’s never made me a failure, and I don’t set myself down for one.”
“What question did I ask you?” Willis asked.
“Oh yes,” Alfred Wayde said. “You asked me if I knew so much about that Harcourt Mill, why didn’t I want to run it?”
Willis did not answer but it was a question he still asked himself when he thought about his father.
“Boy,” Alfred Wayde said, “I’ve never wanted to run anything except machines. A good internal-combustion engine is better than a man.”
You could buy people who fiddled with machines, and the price of people who fiddled with men came higher, but Willis did not tell the old man that.
“Old H.H. was always monkeying with people,” his father said. “He couldn’t keep his hands off. I saved his bacon when I got him into conveyor belts, but old Harcourt was a good Joe.”
“I owe a lot to him,” Willis said.
Alfred Wayde laughed suddenly.
“Still on the same beam, aren’t you?” he said. “Listen, boy. I’ve told you we don’t owe them one God-damned thing any more than the engine in my Buick owes anything to me.”
There was such a thing as loyalty, but Willis did not bring it up. His mother was calling them in to supper, and he had not known that his father owned a Buick. He never would have owned one if Willis had not been more like Mr. Henry Harcourt than Alfred Wayde.
If Mr. Harcourt had taken an interest in Willis he had always known where t
o draw the line between interest and partiality. There were never any favorites or white-haired boys when Mr. Harcourt ran the mill. No one was rewarded for anything but merit. Mr. Harcourt never forgot the faces or the characters of his employees, and he knew their wives and children, and he always asked kindly questions when there was illness or trouble. If anyone was in trouble, even the lowest man on the wage scale, he could always see Mr. Harcourt at the office or at six o’clock at the big house, where Mr. Harcourt always kept an hour open before dinner.
Mr. Harcourt treated Willis the same way he treated everyone else, and when Bill Harcourt worked there for a month there was no way of telling that Bill was his grandson, except that Mr. Harcourt expressly told the foremen in Building 3 that Bill was lazy and not to let him get away with anything. If Bill did not like it he could always leave like anybody else, and Bill took it very well too, because he was always good-natured about everything.
When Mr. Harcourt used to meet Willis on the Harcourt place, he hardly ever alluded to the mill, but he often asked Willis about his high-school studies. When Willis took his college-board examinations, Mr. Harcourt asked about his marks, and seemed relieved that Willis had not done badly. Willis had got eighties in physics, mathematics and elementary French, and Mr. Harcourt did not take the dim view that Alfred Wayde took.
Alfred Wayde had never thought that a son of his would get a low seventy in geometry, and a sixty-eight in trigonometry. After all the work he had done with Willis on wintry evenings, it simply did not seem possible.
“He ought to have been allowed to study last summer,” Mrs. Wayde said, “instead of working in that mill. It’s what comes of us always moving around, Alfred. Willis has never had the chance.”
They were still talking about his marks when he walked out of the house feeling hurt and angry. It was the beginning of summer again, a gray and chilly day for June, and the weather was as unsettled as his thoughts.
There was never a time in life when you took things harder than when you were seventeen. Willis wanted to be alone and he was thinking of the pine woods on the hill beyond the brook. The last person he wanted to see was Mr. Henry Harcourt, but there he was, in the vegetable garden.
Sincerely, Willis Wayde Page 8