VI
Willis always admitted that his characteristics of aggressiveness matured in him later than they did in some young men. He had qualities of patience and a sort of modesty that combined to keep him from pushing ahead in any annoying manner.
This slow development of Willis Wayde probably explained why he had never attracted great attention during the summers he worked at the mill, but later all sorts of people remembered him. Both of his contemporaries, Bill Harcourt and Steve Decker, who had been sent to learn the business when Willis Wayde was there, had their own pictures of Willis. Mr. Henry Hewett, after he was retired, added more to the portrait, as did Mr. Briggs, but then Mr. Briggs was bitter after Mr. Bryson Harcourt had accepted his resignation.
It was the business of Miss Minton, the receptionist, to remember everyone, and Willis was tall and handsome, with nice blond hair that always needed cutting, and there were girls in the office who used to say that they would like to muss up Willis’s hair. Willis was popular but he was never fresh, the way Mr. Bill Harcourt sometimes was.
Mr. Hewett often said that he could have told plenty, if tact had not prevented him, about the goings on at the mill in those days.
Henry Harcourt was having his troubles with Bryson, and Roger Harcourt was trying to shoot holes in everything and waiting for Henry to die so he could muscle in on the management; and Bill had no serious interest in the plant. Mr. Hewett had been surprised when H.H. once told him that if Willis had a few more years on him he’d be management material. Old H.H. was always making plans, but Mr. Hewett could not see what old H.H. saw in Willis. Willis was a hard-working boy and a nice boy with manners, but Willis lacked in push and aggressiveness in those days.
Mr. Briggs, being closer to the firing line in those days as sales manager, saw more of old H.H. in his last years than he had at any time previously. In spite of his age, H.H. had a mind that was twice as young as Bryson’s. He was constantly playing with ideas for enlarging the Harcourt line and he was never afraid to spend money on experiment in spite of the rest of the family. He saw that if you stood still you were lost, in an expanding era like the twenties. He was constantly calling Mr. Briggs into conferences with Alf Wayde. Alf Wayde might not have looked like much, but he had made his own refinements in the Klaus patents, and he had perfected the Harcourt interwoven joint and the machines that made six different Harcourt carcasses. Harcourt Mill was beginning to develop a line that could answer any industrial requirement, and time was all that interfered. If they had only followed the plans of expansion which were already in the works, Harcourt’s would have been the sweetest piece of property in the business. Alfred Wayde certainly knew his belting, but no one could have guessed in those days that Alf’s son Willis was good for much.
Willis was not aware of any of the upper-level stuff that was going on at Harcourt’s in the summer after he had graduated from Boston University. He and Bill Harcourt and Steve Decker did odd jobs in the sales department and ran all sorts of errands, and Mr. Henry and Mr. Bryson Harcourt and Mr. Hewett and Mr. Briggs were distant figures. Yet everyone knew that there was a cleavage of ideas, and that before old H.H. began planning expansion, the mill had been a comfortable family business that paid excellent dividends. Mr. Bryson never saw why it should not have been kept that way and Willis had one clear glimpse of that difference of opinion between Mr. Henry and Mr. Bryson.
During July both he and Bill were in the sales department helping one of the new assistants, a Mr. Harrow, prepare a sales folder with photographs and cross sections of the new Harcourt belting. Mr. Harrow, who had recently been imported from New York, was engaged that afternoon in writing brief descriptions of different Harcourt belts, and Willis and Bill Harcourt were preparing rough drafts for Mr. Harrow to put into final form. They sat in their shirt sleeves side by side at a table upstairs in the sales department.
“Say,” Bill was saying, “here’s a new one.”
“Which one?” Willis asked.
“Harcourt Oak-Heart,” Bill said. “I never heard of that one.”
“Oh,” Willis said, “that’s the general-purpose white belting.”
It seemed to Willis that Bill should have known by that time that Harcourt Oak-Heart was one of the most stable features in the line. The binder threads in Oak-Heart were interwoven in such a way that ply separation was entirely eliminated.
“What’s ply separation?” Bill asked.
It was difficult to do his own work and Bill’s at the same time, but Willis knew a lot about Harcourt Oak-Heart, and he was starting to explain the whole thing to Bill when Mr. Briggs opened the door of his corner office. Mr. Briggs was in his shirt sleeves too, and his starched collar was wilted. He was holding a sales form covered with figures.
“Willis,” he asked, “can you drop what you’re doing?”
Mr. Briggs’s belt made a crease around his middle, and as usual he was in a hurry and as usual he spoke in the ringing tones that he used when he was addressing his salesmen.
“Yes, sir,” Willis said.
“Take this down to Mr. Harcourt’s office, will you?” Mr. Briggs said, and then he saw Bill Harcourt and his voice grew more cordial. “You don’t mind my taking Willis away from you for a minute or two, do you, Bill?”
Bill folded his hands behind his head and smiled.
“Oh no,” Bill said, “just as long as he comes back.”
Mr. Briggs laughed heartily.
“That’s fine,” he said. “That’s fine. Right up to your ears in it today, aren’t you, Bill?”
“Over my head and treading water,” Bill said.
Mr. Briggs laughed again. “Well,” he said, “that’s fine. Mr. Harrow showed me the piece you wrote about Harcourt Vulcanoid. It had a real punch to it. Take this and get going, Willis.”
The office building, which had once seemed overambitious, was beginning to grow cramped and inadequate. The inventory department had been moved outside, and the engineering department now occupied the vacant room. Carpenters were putting up temporary partitions for the two engineers whom his father had hired recently, and Willis had a glimpse of Alfred Wayde smoking his pipe and bending over his drawing table, oblivious to the carpenters’ pounding. Things were quieter when Willis descended to the lower floor. There the illusion of the Federalist mansion still existed, and the door to Mr. Harcourt’s office was open as usual. Although Mr. Harcourt always wore his coat, he contrived to look cool in summer. He was seated in his swivel chair and the light of the window behind him, from where Willis stood, made his features shadowy, until he pivoted slightly sideways. Mr. Bryson Harcourt was seated near the corner of the desk, with the light directly on his face.
“I only wish you’d tell me,” Mr. Bryson was saying, “what on earth you think is going to happen here eventually?”
The chair springs squeaked discordantly as Mr. Harcourt leaned back.
“We’ve been over that before,” he said. “It will have to be your problem eventually.”
“Father,” Mr. Bryson began, “I wish you’d try to see this from my point of view.”
“Excuse me, sir,” Willis said. “Mr. Briggs sent this down to you.”
“All right,” Mr. Harcourt said. “Thank you, Willis.”
As Willis crossed the room and laid the paper on the desk, they were both looking at him uncomfortably.
“Well, Willis,” Mr. Bryson said, “how’s Bill getting along upstairs?” His voice was friendly. The façade was back in place.
“He’s doing fine, sir,” Willis said.
It was one of those things that one remembered only in view of what happened later. It was not Mr. Bryson’s fault that he had not inherited the ability of Mr. Henry Harcourt. A part of old H.H. was as antiquated as the Locomobile that Patrick drove, but if he were alive today, Willis was sure that Mr. Henry Harcourt would have done very well indeed.
When the five o’clock whistle blew that afternoon, his father asked him if he wanted a ride back home. He was still driving a T-model Ford. Its fenders were battered and its chassis creaked, but its engine ran like clockwork.
“It’s a damn funny thing,” his father said, when they reached the driveway of the Harcourt place, “to be driving this can in these surroundings, but it runs all right.”
“It ought to,” Willis told him. “You take it apart and put it together enough.”
“Say,” Willis’s father said, “you’re working up there with young Bill. Is he any good?”
“He’s all right,” Willis answered.
“You know damn well he isn’t,” his father said. “Not that he isn’t a nice enough kid. I wish you wouldn’t play around with those Harcourts so much, Willis. It seems to me that you’re getting big ideas.”
“What sort of ideas?” Willis asked.
Alfred Wayde laughed harshly.
“Like marrying the boss’s daughter, and you don’t want to marry any boss’s daughter.”
Willis felt his face redden. The Ford had stopped in the road by the garden house, but Alfred Wayde still sat with his hands on the wheel.
“I don’t see how you got that idea in your head,” Willis told him. “I’m not thinking of marrying anyone.”
Alfred Wayde breathed deeply through his nose.
“Don’t act like I’ve been spying on you, boy,” he said. “It’s only that there’s some things about you that worry me, Willis. Now listen. No man ever thinks seriously about marrying. It just comes over him when he reaches a certain age. But, God—I don’t want to give you a lecture.
When I was a young fellow your age, I always liked girls. Sometimes I had four or five at once, but I never went seriously with anyone until I saw your mother in Topeka, and then it came over me the way I say. But, hell, I don’t want to deliver a lecture.”
There were beads of perspiration on Alfred Wayde’s forehead and he rubbed his sleeve across his face.
“I wish you’d take a few drinks sometimes, Willis, and hell around and see some girls—in your own group, I mean—not girls like Bess.”
Willis cleared his throat.
“What girls, for instance, Pa?” he asked.
“Hell,” Alfred Wayde said, “it isn’t my function to pick out girls for you. What I mean are reciprocating girls.”
“Reciprocating girls?” Willis repeated after him.
“Now, Willis,” Alfred Wayde said, “I’m using a mechanical term, but I mean girls who are able to give you back the same that you give them. Not girls like pack rats. You remember the pack rats in Arizona?”
“I remember them,” Willis said, “but I don’t see what they have to do with it.”
Alfred Wayde rubbed his face with his sleeve again.
“Sometimes I wish to God we’d stayed in Arizona, and you’d be different, son. A pack rat always leaves you something, but once one of them in Arizona ran off with a five-dollar gold piece of mine and left me a piece of horse manure. Reciprocating girls do better than that. You don’t want to end up with a cow chip, Willis.”
Willis laughed, but he was sorry that he had when he saw his father’s face.
“I’m no good at giving a lecture,” Alfred Wayde said. “All I mean is you ought to go around with some girls made out of the same ply as you. Instead, you run over and see Bess and those Boston girls and press your pants in the kitchen. You ought to go downtown and have a few drinks and see some real girls.”
“But what girls?” Willis asked. It was hot in the Ford and the locusts in the trees made a buzzing noise like tea kettles.
“Well, for a starter, why not take Mazie Minton from the reception desk to the pictures? She’s a pretty girl.”
“She’s too old,” Willis said.
“Well, then, some of those kids you went to high school with,” his father said. “The town is full of pretty girls.”
“Look,” Willis said. “I understand what you mean, partly, but I don’t have much time.”
Alfred Wayde turned his head slowly and stared at him. He was wearing a blue work shirt without a tie. His trousers were baggy and spotted, and no amount of machinist’s soap ever completely removed the ingrained grease from his hands.
“How do you mean you don’t have much time?”
Willis was suddenly acutely aware of his own neat coat and tie.
“I’ve been working pretty hard,” he said. “I got through college in three years, you know, and I’ve been working every summer.”
“Hell,” Alfred Wayde said, “I used to work twelve hours firing a donkey engine college vacations, but I was always full of piss and vinegar at night. The thing with me was I never gave a damn. I’ll tell you what the trouble with you is.”
Alfred Wayde snorted and looked through the windshield as though he were driving the stationary car.
“You’re trying to be something you aren’t,” he said. “You watch it, Willis. You keep on trying to be something you aren’t, and you’ll end up a son of a bitch. You can’t help being, if you live off other people.”
“I don’t get your point. I honestly don’t,” Willis said.
Alfred Wayde shifted his weight and leaned his elbows on the wooden steering wheel.
“Listen, boy,” he said. “People are divided into two parts—people who do things and the rest, who live off those who do things. Now I may not amount to much, but I’ve had a pretty happy time, because I can turn out something. I can do anything in that damn mill that anyone else can do, and they all know it, boy. Well, maybe you’ll spend your life living off other people’s doings, but if you have to, don’t fool yourself. Maybe you’ll end up like Harcourt. I don’t know. But you’ll never be like Harcourt.”
There was a good deal in what his father had said, and Willis realized it even then. He was listening to the age-old definition of management and labor, to a description of the chasm that always divided the creator and the entrepreneur, and of course his father had been right, but Willis could only put his thoughts in a single awkward question.
“But you like Mr. Harcourt, don’t you?” Willis asked.
“Hell, yes,” Alfred Wayde said. “All his moving parts are greased. He knows what he is, and we get along, but he lives off me just the same.”
“Well, you live off him, too, don’t you?” Willis said.
“All right,” Alfred Wayde answered, “all right. There always has to be a boss in the front office. I only say, don’t try too hard, Willis, or else you’ll end up a son of a bitch.”
Alfred Wayde was a realist who always told the truth. He was simplifying the Harcourts in exactly the same way he could simplify the explanations of a complicated process.
“Sometimes,” Alfred Wayde said, “I wish I’d never brought you here. By God, I should have stayed out West. It’s time we started moving, but now, by God, old Harcourt’s got us, and he isn’t going to live forever either.”
Alfred Wayde pushed himself away from the wheel and kicked open the door of the Ford.
“Well, I guess that’s about all I’ve got to say, Willis, and now I’m going in to get a rye and ginger ale and you better have one too, but just remember what I said. Look around for some reciprocating girls.”
Cynthia Wayde opened the door of the garden house just as they were getting out of the car.
“What have you two been talking about,” she asked, “out there in the sun?”
“I’ve just been telling Willis a few facts,” Alfred Wayde said, “and now I’m going to give him a drink.”
“Oh, Alf,” Mrs. Wayde said, “you know Willis hardly ever takes anything.”
“It’s time he started,” Alfred Wayde said.
“Well, Willis isn’t like you, Alf,” Mrs. Wayde said, and she stood in front of Willis in the parlor while Alfred Wayde went to get the glasses and ginger ale. “Willis, I wish you knew some nice girls.”
“Gosh,” Willis said, “do you wish that too? Reciprocating girls, not pack-rat girls?”
But he was not obliged to explain what reciprocating girls meant, because the telephone rang in the hall.
“I’ll go,” he said, and it was Bess Harcourt calling.
“Is that you, Willis?” she said. “How about coming over after you’ve had your supper. The family’s gone away to the shore, all except me, and Daddy forgot and left the liquor closet open. We can have some Scotch if you come over.”
“Why, thanks,” Willis said, and in spite of everything he did not feel tired at all. “I’d like to very much.”
Perhaps in some ways Bess was a reciprocating girl.
Bess was waiting for him on the driveway outside the Bryson Harcourt house. The brick Georgian house which Bryson Harcourt had built was still untrammeled by tradition and it always looked to Willis rather like a country club, with its tennis court and its swimming pool. The last of the evening light was still in the sky that evening, and the scene remained in his memory as a sort of dream of wish fulfillment.
Like the house, Bess in her cool silk summer dress was a part of that dream, but he was familiar with her too. In fact they knew each other better, perhaps, than either of them knew anybody else. Nevertheless he could never tell when he met her whether she would have good manners or none at all. She seemed almost shy that night.
“I feel awfully lonely tonight,” she said. “It’s too hot in the house. Let’s go and sit by the swimming pool. It’s awfully nice of you to come over, Willis.”
“I always do, when you ask me,” Willis said.
“Yes,” she said, “I know.”
The pool was near the woods, and its water reflected the dying light in the sky. The pool was far enough away from the house so that no one could see them, and both of them must have known that this was their reason for going there.
“If you’re lonely,” Willis asked her, “why didn’t you go to the shore with your family?”
“You know why perfectly well,” Bess said, and she laughed. “Don’t you miss me sometimes?”
“Yes,” he told her, “sometimes.”
“It’s nice to have a secret sin,” Bess said, “and you’re my secret sin. Well, what are you waiting for?” She had stopped in front of the pergola at the end of the pool, where the reclining chairs were. There was no reason to wait any longer, and of course he kissed her.
“I’m awfully glad you’re here,” she said, “even if it isn’t sensible. I’ve been in and out of the water all day, but I’ll watch you if you want to swim.”
“No thanks,” Willis answered. “It’s getting pretty cool.”
“All right,” she said. “I’ve sneaked out the soda and the ice and everything. You can pour me a small drink if you want to.… Bill says it’s time I learned to drink a little, and it’s part of the secret sin.”
“That’s just what my father was saying,” Willis answered, “that I ought to take a drink occasionally.”
“It tastes horrid, doesn’t it?” she said, and Willis silently agreed with her. “Your father’s a funny man. Sometimes I think he never notices me.”
“Everybody always notices you,” Willis said.
She sat down on one of the reclining chairs.
“Move over close to me,” she said. “I wish I didn’t always like it when you’re with me, and we can’t go on like this indefinitely, can we? Or people will begin to talk.”
“Yes, I guess that’s so,” Willis said, “but then, you asked me over, didn’t you?”
She reached out her hand toward his.
“You wanted to come, didn’t you?”
“Oh yes,” he said, “I wanted to.”
“All right, as long as you wanted to,” and she held his hand tighter. “I wish you could always be around when I want you.”
He did not answer.
“Willis,” she said, “I’ve felt queer all day. I’ve felt awfully old.”
“Why do you feel queer?” he asked.
“I don’t know why,” she said, “and I don’t know why I can talk to you better than anyone else. Maybe I love you. But that would be awfully silly.”
His common sense made him agree with her. Both he and Bess Harcourt always had the gift of knowing exactly where they were.
“I’ve been wondering all day what’s going to happen to us all,” she said. “Daddy’s nice but he’s a rather stupid man, don’t you think so? Willis, I have the queerest feeling.” Her voice choked suddenly. “Promise me you won’t go away.”
“You don’t want me around,” Willis said, “not really.”
“I half want you,” she said, and then her voice dropped lower, almost to a whisper. “There’s got to be someone to look after us, Willis.”
It was a preposterous remark, and his own answer was equally preposterous.
“You know I love you, Bess,” he said.
“All right,” she told him, “I wanted you to say that, but it’s utterly ridiculous.” She stood up suddenly. The afterglow had left the sky and the stars were out.
“I know you can’t change anything any more than I can,” she said. “If we have to be ridiculous, let’s go walking in the woods.”
Willis was sure that something serious was facing him when he received a typewritten memorandum brought up by one of Miss Jackman’s typists to the sales department late one afternoon a few days after his evening with Bess. The name of the girl who brought it was Nellie Bailey, he remembered. She had been in the class ahead of him at high school, not that that detail mattered, except to show that he still recollected every circumstance surrounding that message.
“Mr. Harcourt,” the memorandum read, “wishes to know if it is possible for you to call on him at the House at eight o’clock this evening. Please answer by bearer. Edith Jackman. Confidential.”
The memorandum was characteristic of Miss Jackman’s style, even down to spelling house with a capital. Willis picked up a pencil immediately and wrote, “Yes,” on the square piece of paper and handed it back to Nellie Bailey. Then he had a physical sensation that bordered on nausea. He was almost sure that the summons had something to do with Bess, because in the end Mr. Harcourt always heard and noticed everything. There was one thing he did not want and this was for his father and his mother to see that he was worried. Lately he suspected that his parents had been discussing him, and his mother had brought up the subject of nice girls several times.
“Willis,” she said, as soon as he got home, “is anything the matter?”
“Why, no. What makes you think so?” Willis asked.
“Because you don’t look happy.”
“I’m perfectly happy,” he told her.
“No,” she said. “You look drawn around the eyes. Can’t you tell your mother what’s the matter?”
“It isn’t anything, Mom,” he said, “except Mr. Harcourt wants to see me at the big house at eight o’clock.”
“Alf,” she called. “Alfred, come in here out of the kitchen.”
His father came from the kitchen holding a Stillson wrench.
“You told me to fix the sink trap, didn’t you?” he said. “What is it, Cynthia?”
“Mr. Harcourt wants to see Willis at the big house.” She spoke slowly and carefully, as though he might find the statement difficult to understand.
“Is that so?” Alfred Wayde said. “I told you we ought to have moved out of here before this, Cynthia.”
“I hope he isn’t going to try to do something for Willis,” she said.
“Willis is working for him, isn’t he?” Alfred Wayde said. “Just the same as I am.”
“I know,” she said. “I don’t know why it should bother me when Mr. Harcourt gets talking about Willis, but it’s sort of as though he owned him.”
“He owns everybody,” Alfred Wayde said.
“Well, he doesn’t own me,” Cynthia Wayde said. “It isn’t as though he isn’t very kind, but I hope he isn’t going to do too much for Willis. If he wants to do anything, he could raise your pay, Alf.”
“I could make him easy enough,” Alfred Wayde said, “if I wasn’t too much obliged to him.”
“There,” she said, “there! That’s exactly what I mean.”
Willis later often gave talks to chosen young men in his office on the subject of the successful interview. Actually there were only two things to remember, and the rest would look out for itself. You had to bear constantly in mind exactly where you stood and where the other person stood. It helped to think of yourself as playing a hand of bridge. When the dummy was on the table, you could judge with fair accuracy what your opponents held, if you recalled the bidding and the conventions. It was even easier when there was only one opponent.
When Willis walked from the garden house to the big house to call on Mr. Harcourt, he had already developed some adroitness. It was Stevenson, he believed, who once had said that a young writer must learn to play the sedulous ape, and the same thing was true with a young man who tried to get on in business. Willis had never been wholly sedulous but he was proud of the model he had chosen, and he liked to think that evening that he had been a little like Mr. Harcourt. He had brushed his hair carefully and had put on his best suit and he had shined his shoes down cellar, but he had been careful to wrinkle his coat slightly and also to disturb the slickness of his hair with his fingers. No matter what happened he was going to be as much as he could like Mr. Harcourt and in a smaller way like Bill.
“Good evening, Mr. Willis,” Selwyn said. “Mr. Harcourt’s waiting for you in his study off the library.”
Willis felt a pulse beating in his throat.
“Selwyn,” he said, and he smiled. “Do you notice anything about me?”
“No, Mr. Willis,” Selwyn said.
“No handkerchief in my breast pocket.”
“No one has to tell you anything twice,” Selwyn said, “as I heard Mr. Harcourt say this evening, Mr. Willis.”
It was the way Selwyn might have spoken to Bill. There was no wonder that he always had a warm spot in his heart for Selwyn.
Mr. Harcourt was in his small study with piles of papers in front of him.
“Oh here you are, Willis,” Mr. Harcourt said. “I hope this does not keep you from some more agreeable engagement.”
Willis could not be sure, but it seemed to him that Mr. Harcourt had underlined the last phrase slightly.
“Sit down,” Mr. Harcourt said, “but close the door first.”
Willis crossed the small room while Mr. Harcourt was speaking and seated himself in the caller’s chair facing Mr. Harcourt, trying neither to slouch nor to sit too stiffly. The single casement window of the study was closed when he came in, and with the door closed the study was cool and so quiet that he could hear the ticking of Mr. Harcourt’s gold watch in his waistcoat pocket. Mr. Harcourt looked smaller and frailer than usual and his face looked paler and the lines deeper, but the silent room continued to exaggerate his careful detachment and the slow, deliberate motions of his hands.
“I’ve been intending for some time to speak to you frankly, Willis,” Mr. Harcourt said, and his voice was measured and soft, but in the closed room it had a resonant, chimelike quality. Then Mr. Harcourt smiled one of his quick formal smiles that only went so far as to curve his mouth and immediately disappear.
“In a way I am going to throw myself on your discretion and say one or two things of a highly personal nature, which I shall rely on you not to repeat.”
“Yes, sir,” Willis said.
“You see, I have to rely on people,” Mr. Harcourt said, “and I haven’t gone wrong often. Hand me that box of cigars, please, Willis, and the cutter.”
Mr. Harcourt selected a cigar and the cold snip from the cutter sounded so unnaturally loud that Willis felt his muscles tense.
“Well,” Mr. Harcourt said, “I was speaking about you to Bess the other evening. Hand me the matchbox please, Willis.”
Willis reached quickly for the silver box that stood at the end of Mr. Harcourt’s work table, but his fingers closed on it clumsily.
“Thanks,” Mr. Harcourt said. “I wish she were a boy. She has the family ability, I think, and Bill hasn’t got it. Do you agree?”
“I don’t know, sir,” Willis said.
“Of course you know,” Mr. Harcourt said. “Some people have a commercial instinct and some haven’t. Bill’s like his father—not that I’m not fond of them. They’re loyal to me.”
He paused as though he expected Willis to say something.
“Commercial instinct may not be the proper phrase. It’s something I have and something they haven’t. It isn’t only an ability to make money—that’s an incidental part. At any rate I think you have it.”
Mr. Harcourt paused again, and Willis felt a strange tingling in his spine.
“Well,” Mr. Harcourt said, “if the family hasn’t got the instinct, we must find it elsewhere, Willis. Henry Hewett’s a good man, but he’s too old for any long-term planning. Briggs is all right in sales, but he’s too nervous to take on anything else. It’s a mistake to think you’re going to live forever. Well … I’m calling in a management firm—Beakney-Graham in New York. I’m asking them to go over the office setup and to make general recommendations. You don’t know why I’m telling you this, do you?”
“No, sir,” Willis said, “I don’t.”
Mr. Harcourt stared at him for a moment without speaking.
“Because I’m thinking of taking you into my office as a sort of assistant, Willis. I’m going to need someone in about two years who is loyal and who knows me and knows the family. Bill is going to the Harvard Business School in the fall. I want to send you there too.”
Mr. Harcourt’s measured voice stopped, and probably it was time. At any rate Willis needed time to put what Mr. Harcourt had said into any sort of order.
“Well, sir,” Willis began.
“Just a minute,” Mr. Harcourt said. “I haven’t finished yet. I want you to meet customers who come to see me. You must get to know the stockholders and learn to get me information when I want it. Before you can be what I’m thinking of, I want your rough edges smoothed off. Bill can teach you a little. I know you’ve been watching him, and I can help you myself, but most of it is going to be up to you. I hope you see what I mean.”
Willis cleared his throat, but his voice was still hoarse when he answered.
“I see what you mean, sir,” he said, “but I don’t know as I’d be able to do it.”
Mr. Harcourt tapped his finger several times against the end of his cigar.
“Maybe you won’t,” he said. “I’ll have to see.”
“You’re being mighty kind to me, sir,” Willis began, but Mr. Harcourt stopped him.
“No,” he said, “I haven’t the slightest intention of being kind to you.”
He stopped and still kept his glance on Willis.
“Have you talked to my father about this, sir?” Willis asked him.
“Why under the sun should I?” Mr. Harcourt said.
“He wouldn’t like it, sir,” Willis said, “and he wouldn’t send me to any business school.”
Mr. Harcourt coughed gently.
“He isn’t going to,” he said. “I’m paying for this party, Willis.”
There was something arrogant in the way he said it that Willis did not like even then.
“No,” Willis said, “I couldn’t do that, sir.”
At least for once he had looked Mr. Harcourt in the eye and had laid it on the line.
“All right,” Mr. Harcourt said. “All right, if that’s the way you want it, Willis.”
Willis pushed back his chair and stood up.
“But thank you very much for offering this to me,” he said.
Mr. Harcourt placed his cigar on his ash tray.
“Sit down,” he said. “We haven’t finished yet. Suppose we put it this way. It takes two years to go through the Harvard Business School. I am prepared to lend you three thousand dollars for your expenses, Willis, and you can give me your note for it at six per cent. You’ll be working in the summer. I’ll have it amortized out of your salary. I’m taking a calculated risk, but I do that every day. Do you like that better, Willis?”
“Yes, sir,” Willis said. “But it’s a lot of money.”
“I suppose it is, from your point of view, but these things are always relative,” Mr. Harcourt said. “Will you do it, Willis?”
It was the first decision that Willis Wayde had ever been obliged to make, and he liked to think that he did it rather well.
“Yes, sir,” he said, “I’ll do it, and thank you very much,” and then he cleared his throat again, “and I’ll always try to do the best I can, Mr. Harcourt.”
He meant every word of it, and it was easier to be nice in those days than it was later. Mr. Harcourt laughed softly.
“You’d be a damn fool if you didn’t,” he said, “and I’ve never set you down as one. Well, that finishes our conversation. Let’s go out and join the ladies, Willis.”
His first instinct was to thank Mr. Harcourt and to say he should be going home, but instead Willis followed him down the hall to the living room. Even on that short walk he began to be vaguely aware that he had lost some sort of freedom which he could not name exactly and which he had not valued until he lost it.
He was not surprised when he saw Mrs. Harcourt and Bess seated on the living-room sofa, and it was a suitable ending for that evening.
“Well, Harriet,” Mr. Harcourt said, “Willis is going to the Harvard Business School.”
He was surprised, although it did not seem unnatural, that Mrs. Harcourt took his hand in both of hers.
“Oh, Willis,” she said, “I’m so glad for you, and I’m glad for us. I know you’re going to be a great help to Mr. Harcourt.”
There was a great deal more to her words than met the ear. She seemed relieved and happy, and Bess seemed happy too.
“I’m glad too,” Bess said, “but you certainly took an awfully long time talking about it.”
“Not so long,” Mr. Harcourt said. “There’ll be some more details tomorrow, Willis. I want to see you and Bill at the office at ten o’clock.”
“I’d better be going home now,” Bess said, and she smiled in a quick way like her grandfather. “You’ll walk home with me, won’t you, Willis?”
It was more like an order than a question.
“Yes, of course, Bess,” Willis said.
“He says it just like a yes man, doesn’t he?” Bess said, and everybody laughed.
“Willis, dear,” Mrs. Harcourt said, and he was startled. It was the first time she had ever called him “dear.” “We want you to feel that you are a part of the family now, don’t we, Henry?”
Mr. Harcourt put his hand on Willis’s arm.
“He knows that already,” he said, “or he ought to, Harriet.”
Willis knew that it was true. In some way, without the words being spoken, he had sworn some sort of allegiance in Mr. Harcourt’s study. He had traveled a long way since he had stepped off the train with his suitcases and his Stetson hat one summer afternoon, and he was sure that Mr. Harcourt had planned it. Mr. Harcourt had always planned everything.