In the winter when Mr. Wilding reached the office, always at exactly half-past eight, he would hang his black overcoat and his derby hat carefully on a hat tree in the corner and would place his overshoes squarely underneath the coat. In the summer he would hang his straw hat in the same place—a hat which was something like a modern leghorn, soft and yellow, with a frayed band around it. As soon as he arrived Miss Joslin, who still wore leg-of-mutton sleeves, would come in with a few letters. She would always be out again in half an hour. Then he would call for Mr. Withers, the head of the bond department. Then he would lean back in his swivel chair, watching the customers file into the board room before the market opened, and at exactly half-past ten Mr. Riley, the head clerk, would hand him a paper with the opening prices, written in a steady, copperplate hand. At half-past twelve exactly he would walk to his club for lunch and he would be back at his desk promptly at two o’clock to read the bulletins from the news bureau, still with his door half-open. He very seldom received a caller. He very seldom spoke to his partners, and precisely at five o’clock he would be driven home to Brookline, where they say he went to bed at nine. He seldom did anything positive, but nothing ever escaped him. He never raised his voice, but somehow he always seemed more integrated than anyone else there, more completely in touch with life.
It was one of my duties for the first two weeks that I worked there to bring Mr. Wilding a pint of milk and two crackers at exactly eleven o’clock. Mr. Wilding would fold his paper across his knees and would ask gently about the market. Then he would say, “Thank you, Harry,” and pick up his paper again. Though our conversation hardly ever went further, by the time two weeks were over I had a feeling that Mr. Wilding knew me very well.
“Mr. Wilding wants …” they used to say, or “Mr. Wilding thinks …” But I never could tell how anyone knew what he wanted or thought.
When I started in with Smith and Wilding it was customary to pay new candidates in the office a flat sum of three hundred dollars a year. Although the whole atmosphere was money—and we were right in the beginning of the boom of the War Babies then—we apprentices were working under great pressure without a thought of money. There were six of us starting in the office that year, all from Harvard and all with good connections. Every morning we were given a list of prospects, all the bad ones to whom the regular staff had not been able to sell anything, and we set off to peddle the bonds that Smith and Wilding carried, each of us equipped with a description of the securities, which we were supposed to have carefully digested. We went in and out of offices all day long up and down the financial district, but it was not like business.
If I ever sold any Smith and Wilding bonds to a stranger that summer I cannot seem to remember it. It was surprising, though, how many family connections there were and how many people knew my father.
“Hello,” they used to say. “So you’re John Pulham’s boy.”
I should have felt better if I could ever have made a stranger buy a bond. I took the matter up once with Mr. Withers, who told me it would come in time. Mr. Withers had been fullback on the Harvard team about ten years before and he still had the old fighting spirit. When he called the salesmen into his office his voice had a spellbinding quality and he used to refer to Mr. Wilding as “Uncle Frank.”
“Now,” he used to say, “these four-and-halfs are going to be hard to move, but Uncle Frank wants us to move them quick. Now, get into it, on your toes, and out on the street.”
He said a lot more which made a good deal of sense, but most of it was lost on me, as I would listen dazedly, trying to follow his phrases. The established salesmen always had the banks and insurance companies and all the leads that ever amounted to anything. The neophytes were simply being run ragged for the good of their souls. It was all part of a Spartan system.
“You can’t sell bonds to people unless you know them,” Mr. Withers said. “Just keep calling on them and sweeten up your connections. You’re not complaining, are you, Pulham?”
“No, sir,” I said, “of course not.”
“A bond salesman never complains,” Mr. Withers said. “I’d hate to think that you were yellow, Pulham. A bond salesman always has guts.”
When I think of Smith and Wilding I always think of leather upholstery and cigar smoke and the staccato sound of the tickers, and of the boy on the tall stool calling out quotations to the other boys up at the blackboard. I can never forget the unwearied activity behind the cashier’s cage where the clerks in their sleeve protectors sat on stools in front of the ledgers. They belonged to a different society which I did not know well, since they did not have much to do with the front office, but Mr. Wilding knew them all. It was an honor to work for Smith and Wilding in those days. Everyone in the office said it was an honor, and nearly everyone outside was respectful and envious. Smith and Wilding was a good banking firm and they were kind to me. I have never forgotten how kind, at the time when I went to war.
Bill King found a job the summer we graduated as a reporter on the New York World. We exchanged letters occasionally and he came up to visit us when he had a week’s vacation. He was anxious to see the office and I took him in for a few minutes one day after lunch. Bill knew the inside of everything, all about the war and what was the matter with the Administration; he put his hands in his pockets and looked around the board room.
“It looks like the Union League Club,” he said. “They might as well be gambling on the races. If you want to make a little money buy steel. Steel’s going up.”
“If I were to buy stocks I’d be fired,” I said.
Bill began to whistle.
“All the necktie boys certainly do sell bonds,” he said.
Mr. Wilding’s door was open and Mr. Wilding was having his shoes shined, sitting with one foot on the bootblack’s box, his hands clasped over his stomach.
“Oh, my,” Bill said, “who’s that? He looks like Ralph Waldo Emerson.”
“Bill,” I said, “don’t talk so loud. That’s Mr. Wilding, the senior partner.”
Mr. Wilding unclasped his hands from his stomach.
“Harry,” he called, “come in here.”
You always jumped when Mr. Wilding spoke. I hurried through the gate that separated the partners from the customers’ room and stood beside his desk.
“I think you’d better do that shoe over again, Tony,” Mr. Wilding said. “I want a higher polish. Harry, who is that young man out there?”
“He’s a classmate of mine, sir,” I said. “His name is William King.”
“King,” said Mr. Wilding, “King. He doesn’t come from here, does he?”
“No, sir,” I said.
“What does he do?”
I told him Bill worked on the New York World.
“Bring him in,” Mr. Wilding said. “I want to see him.” Mr. Wilding folded his hands across his stomach and looked up at Bill King.
“So you work on a newspaper, young man?” Mr. Wilding said. “I heard you say that I looked like Ralph Waldo Emerson. It flatters me, but I’m not a minister.”
“No, sir,” Bill said. “I don’t suppose so.”
“Would you care to work here?” Mr. Wilding asked.
“No, thank you, sir,” Bill answered.
“If you ever should,” said Mr. Wilding, “let me know. That shoe is all right. You may start on the other one now, Tony. Harry, get me the last quotation on steel.”
I never knew what Mr. Wilding saw in Bill King and Mr. Wilding never explained.
“What’s the matter with the old man?” Bill asked later. “Does he think he’s a hero in a Horatio Alger book—the kind old man gives the boy a chance? He knew damned well I wouldn’t work in that doghouse, and you’d better get out of it, Harry.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Because you’ll never be like him,” Bill said, “not in a million years. Did you ever look at his eyes? I might be like him, but I wouldn’t want to be.”
“Boy,” we heard Mr. Wilding cal
l.
The office boy near the rail leaped as though he had been stung and ran to Mr. Wilding. A moment later the boy hurried across the board room with a white slip of paper which he gave to Mr. Jones, the customers’ man. Bill stood watching with his hands in his pockets.
“Harry,” he asked me, “do you think he could have heard me when I said something about steel?”
XII
A Great Experience, the War
Ellen, the one maid who could always get on with Kay, is forever breaking things. Nearly every day there is a crash in the pantry and her excuse is always the same.
“A part of it just came off in my hand.”
Just yesterday Ellen smashed one of our Canton china plates in the dining room. She explained that it must have been cracked already, because a part of it came off in her hand. The noise made me start, and when I saw all the pieces on the floor by the pantry door, somehow that broken plate reminded me of the way the war smashed everything. I do not mean that I was shell-shocked or anything like that, but I was always picking up pieces of things after the war, pieces of human relationships, pieces of thoughts, and when I tried to put them together again they never seemed to fit.
If you had been to a school like St. Swithin’s you were able to understand army discipline. I do not think that I was a bad soldier, as I look back on it after twenty years. Yet in other ways I was not fitted for the war at all. I never realized how little I knew about anything or how desirable life was, until I got to France and was reasonably sure that I would be dead or wounded within a certain time.
I still have a photograph of myself taken for the family just after I had been commissioned as second lieutenant in the officers’ reserve. A week or two later I was transferred to Camp Upton, and assigned to a regular army division, waiting for the transports. It is hard for me to recognize the rather thin, frail-looking boy in a garrison cap which was lost when I got to St. Nazaire. The forehead is good, the eyes are steady, the mouth is a little large—not a bad-looking boy—but I wish there were a photograph of me taken when I got home in the spring of 1919, because I should like to compare the two. I am sure a good deal was rubbed off my face when I got back. I am looking at a picture, not of myself, but of someone who was killed. I have always kept it in an envelope with a few of the letters I sent home and with one Kay gave me, which I wrote her, and with my second lieutenant’s commission and my discharge and with the order giving me a medal. The medal is upstairs in the box under my collar studs and I have never cared to take it out, because old General Rolfax only had it given me to save his own face. He should have been court-martialed for incompetence in ordering my company out into an untenable and useless position and then forgetting to recall it or to send out adequate support. As a matter of fact, he would have court-martialed me to make things look better, if it had not happened that I had a copy of his order in my pocket. That was the way war was, I suppose.
Henry Pulham, Second Lieutenant—Infantry: The only surviving officer of his company, after a reconnaissance in the town of M——. Lieutenant Pulham consolidated and held his position, although surrounded by the enemy, from dawn until dark of July 27th; refusing to surrender, Lieutenant Pulham continued his defense under heavy fire and, repulsing three assaults of a superior force, withdrew with his command under cover of darkness; recrossed the Vesle River and rejoined his regiment.
The funny part of it is that a good deal of it is true, although now I cannot imagine doing such a thing. We had two machine guns and a lot of hand grenades and some automatic rifles and the morale of the German infantry in front of us was pretty low, or else they thought they had us anyway. They would have had us too, if it had not been for a Jewish corporal named Reinitz who found a way down to the river after dark. I recommended Reinitz for the medal, but to no avail because he went to prison for attacking a French girl two weeks later—but that was the way the war was. Of course I like to think that I behaved myself properly, but I cannot help remembering that at least fifty lives would have been saved if we had given up when they asked us. The offer was made after a handkerchief was waved on the end of a rifle and an officer in dirty gray climbed out of the cellar hole of a house about fifty yards from where we were dug into what was left of a barnyard. When the man stood up, I stood up too and crawled out over the rubbish to meet him. I had just enough German to speak to him from what I remembered from Fräulein and the nursery, which made our conversation a strange intellectual effort. He was a captain and he was as grimy as I was and as lousy as I was and just about my age. He said we were surrounded and that he thought we had better give up. I told him that if any of my men wanted to, I would send them over.
“If they will kindly hold up their hands,” the Captain said.
I felt in my pocket and drew out a package of cigarettes. We each took one and lighted them and I offered him the rest. It was a hot, dry day and the perspiration was streaming down our faces. We stood there smoking for a minute, for he seemed in no hurry to go away.
“Beautiful thanks for the cigarettes,” he said. “I shall give you five minutes. If you or any of your men desire to come we shall be pleased to see you.”
He smiled and saluted.
“If Americans are like you,” he added, “I shall come to America.”
He never came to America and he never used the cigarettes, because he was dead fifteen minutes later. I crawled back over what was left of the wall, aware that I had to make a speech and that I had never been good at talking to enlisted men. I tried to think what Bo-jo Brown would have said, but it was not much help. When I got back over the wall I called Sergeant Brooks.
“Sergeant,” I said, “if any of the men would like to go over, they can do so in the next five minutes, but I think the right thing for me to do is to stay here with anyone else who wants to. You can pass the word around, Sergeant.”
Sergeant Brooks cleared his throat.
“Listen, you bastards,” he called, “if any of you are yellow you can go on over. The Lieutenant says he’s going to sit down here. He don’t want to live forever.”
I wished that I could have spoken the way Sergeant Brooks did. He was a good man and he was busted for drunkenness a month later.
“Attaboy, Lieutenant,” someone called. “Who said Lieutenant Pulham wears lace drawers?”
“That will do, men,” I said.
“Jesus Christ!” someone called. “Here they come, Lieutenant!”
The whole thing has always been a blur to me of physical weariness and physical fear, and, anyway, I have always been skeptical of the word of anyone who has been able to give a clear account of an infantry combat. At one place they got as near as twenty feet and we stood up throwing grenades at each other, like boys in a snowball fight. Then they crawled back and tried it again half an hour later, but they never pushed in seriously, because they must have thought they could get us eventually without undue loss and because the Germans were tired and pretty well broken by then. After that they simply sat down and waited and telephoned back to the seventy-seven’s to take us under fire. The fire was not very accurate—a good many of the shells were duds—and the lines were so near that the artillery was as damaging to them as it was to us. Artillery was always firing into its own infantry. Then the fire stopped and I saw them drawing back their line. They were probably cursing their artillery the way we cursed ours, and then it began to get dark. The whole thing was a mess, because they could have finished us with one good rush, but I suppose they did not want to die any more than we did. Whoever it was who ran the show must have decided to wait until morning.
I have often thought of Captain Rowle, who was in command of the company when we crossed the river. He was a red-faced, dumpy man in his thirties, who had done two hitches, as he called them, with the Regulars before he had been commissioned. I experienced little feeling of personal grief for Captain Rowle, when he lay in a cellar hole dying from an abdominal wound, because he had always ridden me, and in his lighter moments
had made fun of the way I talked. He may have had excellent reasons for feeling that I did not amount to much, but it struck me as strange that none of those officers seemed to like me and that I did not like them, especially since I always got on well enough with my own crowd. I never could seem to get it out of my head that most of them had not gone to St. Swithin’s or Harvard; instead they had been educated at colleges which they called “schools” and had lived in environments which I could not picture. They were most of them foul-mouthed and noisy boys, who discussed their sexual prowess and who were always after cognac. It was only later that I began to understand that they were just as good as I was and often a great deal better, but I could not seem to be deeply moved when Frank Murphy, the first lieutenant, was killed, or when Eddy Boyle, who was a senior to me, was shot in two. I did not want to see Rowle much when Sergeant Brooks crawled over and said the Captain wanted to speak to me.
“There’s something he wants to say to you,” said Sergeant Brooks. “He’s damned near through.”
We had been able to drag some of the wounded into a cellar hole and Captain Rowle was half sitting up, leaning against the wall. His face was a greenish white and the first-aid bandages over his hairy abdomen were covered with blood and the only first-aid man who was left was squatting near him.
“That son of a bitch won’t give me any water,” Captain Rowle said.
“You ought not to drink water, sir,” I told him.
“For Christ’s sakes,” said Captain Rowle, “don’t I know when I’m through? Give me some water.”
I gave him some water from the first-aid man’s canteen.
“Thanks,” Captain Rowle said, and he asked some questions about the men and gave me a letter to send to his wife. “You’ve got to get out of here,” he said, “and I don’t want anybody to say we came out here without orders. Someone’s going to catch hell for this. I told the Colonel before I started that I wanted it in writing. Put this in your pocket. Don’t let them say I used bad judgment. It’s there in writing.”
H. M. Pulham, Esquire Page 12