14

MILLBURGH, PENNSYLVANIA

2.05 P.M. EDT

Mary Walling was acutely conscious of the atmosphere of hair-trigger apprehension that hung over the stiffly seated group in the library of the old Tredway mansion. The conversation that had filled these first few minutes was forced and aimless, without point or purpose. There had been, of course, no open acknowledgment by anyone of what would be decided here this afternoon—and she sensed that there would be no such acknowledgment, even after the decision was made—yet she was sure that all of the others secretly shared her awareness that, before they left his room, the new president of the Tredway Corporation would be selected.

There had been no lessening of Mary Walling’s earlier fear that her own happiness would be jeopardized if her husband moved up to the presidency, but that threat had been overbalanced by the later-rising and even more terrifying fear of what the effect on Don might be if he were to lose what he now so clearly regarded as the fulfillment of his own destiny. She knew that he could never be happy now without it—and his happiness was a prerequisite of her own.

The moment she and Don had entered the room, Mary Walling’s apprehension had been aroused by the way that Loren Shaw had already pre-empted a seat beside the desk, as close to Julia Tredway Prince as it was possible for anyone to be. When, a moment later, George Caswell had come in with Erica Martin, Shaw had adroitly maneuvered Caswell into a chair between his own and Dudley’s. Thus—partly by accident and partly, she was sure, by Shaw’s design—Don now sat alone facing the shoulder-to-shoulder solidarity of Shaw, Caswell and Dudley. She knew that the three had lunched together and it was only too clear that the addition of Julia Tredway Prince’s vote was all they needed to make Loren Shaw president. Don had said he was sure of Mrs. Prince’s support, but Mary Walling found it difficult to share her husband’s certainty. There had been nothing beyond simple courtesy in the way that Mrs. Prince had greeted Don when they arrived and, during these past few minutes, Loren Shaw had been making the most of his strategic position at Julia Tredway Prince’s side.

Feeling herself an outsider—almost an observer with no right of participation—Mary Walling had slipped back into the corner behind her husband. She realized too late that his face was hidden from her view—by then Erica Martin had already taken the chair in the opposite corner—but there was the compensating advantage of being able to watch the room from his viewpoint and to see every glance that was sent in his direction by any of the others.

Of one thing she was now certain—Loren Shaw wasn’t thinking of Don as his competitor in the battle for the presidency. The way that Shaw’s eyes stabbed toward her husband when Alderson’s name had been mentioned by George Caswell made it clear that Shaw regarded Don as only the lieutenant of his real adversary.

“I, too, am sorry that Mr. Alderson isn’t here,” Julia Tredway Prince said. “You weren’t able to locate him, were you, Mr. Walling?”

Don shook his head in silence and Mary Walling wished that she could see his eyes, wondering whether he was aware as she was that Julia Tredway Prince’s remark had been the first admission, even by indirection, that there was a purpose behind the invitation that had brought them together—and aware, too, of the implications of Shaw’s glance.

If Julia Tredway Prince’s remark had really been purposeful, the purpose was quickly abandoned. She turned to George Caswell and again asked a question that seemingly had no point except to force conversation. “I understand that you flew over, Mr. Caswell?”

“Yes—and quite luxuriously. A friend of mine was good enough to give me the use of his company’s plane for the day.”

“You know that’s getting to be quite a thing,” Dudley burst out as if he had withstood the restraint of silence as long as possible, “—all these presidents of big companies having their own private planes. I was on this NAM committee last year—had a meeting down at New Orleans—and three of the big boys came down in their own planes. Man, that would really be the life, having your own plane!”

Shaw cleared his throat. “I should think it might be an extravagance that would be a little difficult to justify to the stockholders.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Caswell said in mild rebuttal. “There has to be some way to compensate a corporation president adequately these days. It’s hardly possible to do it with salary alone, income taxes being what they are.”

Julia Tredway Prince looked up at her husband who was lounging against the doorframe. “Dwight and I met a man in Jamaica last winter who had flown down in his own plane. He was the president of some steel company—remember, Dwight?”

Dwight Prince’s long face contorted in a forced grin. “Yes, he’d traded a duodenal ulcer for a DC 3—which hardly makes me think he’d gotten the best of it. As a matter of fact—” he hesitated as if he were enjoying the attention he was receiving,”—it’s a little difficult for me to understand why any man would want to be the president of a large corporation these days. As far as I’m concerned it’s one of the least rewarding forms of suicide.”

Mary Walling was not surprised to see Shaw’s head snap up and her husband’s shoulders square, but she was puzzled by George Caswell’s squinting frown.

“Oh, hardly as bad as that,” Caswell said, his poise quickly recovered. “In a properly organized corporation, with adequate delegation of authority, there’s no reason why the right man should be under too great a strain.”

“The right man,” Shaw repeated as if it were a point to be driven home. “And it does take the right man these days—a very different type of man than was required in the past.”

There was a warning in Shaw’s purposeful tone and Mary Walling glanced anxiously at the back of her husband’s head. His shoulders were hunched and he seemed to have no interest in anything except his clasped hands.

“I’m not certain that I understand you, Mr. Shaw,” Julia Tredway Prince said.

Shaw seemed surprised. “It’s the point that I made last evening.”

There was something close to shock in Caswell’s quick side glance, but Shaw was looking at Mrs. Prince and didn’t see it.

“Oh, yes,” Mrs. Prince said. “It’s quite an interesting theory. You see—well, suppose you explain it to the others, Mr. Shaw.”

There was the stillness of tense expectancy and Mary Walling saw Loren Shaw shake out a fresh handkerchief. It was the second time that she had seen him do the same thing during the bare five minutes they had been in the room.

“Well, it’s a bit more than a theory,” Shaw said. “The point I was making was that—well, there was a time, of course, when most of our company presidents came up on the manufacturing side of the business. In those days that was excellent preparation for general executive responsibility, because most of the problems that came to the president’s desk were concerned with manufacturing. Later, as distribution problems became more important, we sometimes saw a president rise from the sales organization—and again that was quite appropriate. Today, however, we have a very different situation. The problems that come to the president’s office are predominantly financial in character. Matters concerning manufacturing and distribution are largely handled at lower levels in the organization. The president—who we must always remember is the agent of the stockholders—must now concern himself largely with the primary interest of the stockholders.”

“And the typical stockholder isn’t interested in anything but dividends?” Julia Tredway Prince asked, more as a prompt than a question.

“Exactly,” Shaw said. “Of course you’re an exception, Mrs. Prince. You still have what we might call a sense of ownership. The average stockholder doesn’t think of his stockholdings as ownership—any more than he thinks of himself as the part owner of the bank where he has a savings account—or the part owner of the government because he has some Defense bonds. When he buys Tredway stock he makes an investment. The only reason he makes it is to get a return. Thus, at the top level, the corporation must now be governed to be what its owners want it to be—a financial institution in which they can invest their money and receive a safe return with the emphasis on safety. As a matter of fact—well, you know this, Mr. Caswell—there isn’t one stockholder out of ten who could even name the cities where we have our principal factories.”

“You’re absolutely right,” George Caswell said—and the strength of the support that he offered Shaw made Mary Walling feel the hard clutch of despair. “There’s no doubt that the emphasis in corporation management has gone over on the financial side. I’m sure that’s why it has become so common during these last few years for men to step from investment or banking into corporation management.”

Loren Shaw hesitated as if his caution had been aroused, but then quickly went ahead. “Yes, there have been cases like that—where a corporation was so unfortunate as to find itself without a major executive who was trained in financial control and modern management methods. More typically, of course, there’s such a man available right within the organization.”

It was a direct bid, a challenge, a throwing down of the gauntlet, and Mary Walling’s heart sank as she saw that her husband wasn’t going to respond. She leaned far forward attempting to see the expression on his face and, looking up, her eyes met Julia Tredway Prince’s.

“Oh, Mrs. Walling, you aren’t very comfortable there, are you?” Mrs. Prince said quickly. “Won’t you come up here?”

It was an invitation that could not be denied and as Mary Walling moved forward Julia Tredway Prince rose from the chair behind the desk and she sat down beside her on the sofa in front of the window.

“I don’t know that I get you completely, Loren,” Walt Dudley said in a petulant grumble. “I can see that we have to keep the stockholders happy—got to earn a profit—but I don’t see how you can say that selling isn’t important—or manufacturing either.”

“Of course they’re important,” Shaw said, his voice tinged with the forbearance of a teacher for a not-so-bright pupil. “But don’t you see, Walt, they’re not ends in themselves, only the means to the end. Then, too, it’s a matter of management levels. As I said a moment ago, by the time you get to the presidential level, the emphasis must be predominantly financial. Take income tax as only one example. To a far greater degree than most people realize, income tax has become a primary governing factor in corporation management. In our own case—well, over the past year I’ve devoted a substantial amount of time to the development of a new relationship between the parent company and some of our wholly owned subsidiaries in order to give us a more favorable tax situation. Here’s the point—that one piece of work, all purely financial in character, will contribute more to our net earnings than the total profit we’ll make from one of our smaller factories.

“Take another example—one that I’m sure will interest Mr. Walling. Don and his associates have done a very capable job of reducing cost on our finishing operation at Water Street—producing some very nice savings—but, unfortunately, it will add little to our net earnings, less than a quarter as much as we will gain from a new accounting procedure that I was fortunate enough to get the government to approve in connection with the depreciation of the assets of our lumber company. Do you see what I mean, Walt—that top management has to be largely financial these days?”

Dudley said something and Shaw went on talking, but Mary Walling’s ears were blocked with the realization that Don’s hopes were blasted. What Shaw said was true. The world was changing. The Bullards were defeated and the Shaws were inheriting the earth. The accountants and the calculators had risen to power. The slide rule had become the scepter. The world was being overrun with the ever-spawning swarm of figure-jugglers who were fly-specking the earth with their decimal points, proving over and over again that nothing mattered except what could be proved true by a clerk with a comptometer.

Julia Tredway Prince cleared her throat. “Are you suggesting, Mr. Shaw, that there’s no place any more for corporation presidents of Mr. Bullard’s type?”

It was the first mention of Avery Bullard’s name and it came like an unexpected clap of thunder. Every eye in the room was on Loren Shaw. Even Don Walling, as Mary noticed gratefully, was watching him sharply.

Shaw was balling his handkerchief in the palm of his right hand but his voice, when he spoke after a moment’s hesitation, carried no trace of the nervous tension that his fingers betrayed. “I was speaking in general terms, of course—not specifically about the Tredway Corporation.”

“I’d still be interested in having your viewpoint,” Julia Tredway Prince said pleasantly. “I’m sure the others would, too.”

The handkerchief was a hard ball, tight-clutched in Shaw’s hand, but his voice was still carefully casual. “No one can deny that men of Mr. Bullard’s type played a great part in our industrial past. They belonged to an important phase of our commercial history. I would be the first to acknowledge the great debt that we owe Mr. Bullard for his leadership in the initial formation and early development of the Tredway Corporation.”

The way in which Shaw had relegated Avery Bullard to the distant past was so purposeful that Mary Walling was certain that Don couldn’t have missed it. She glanced at him and caught the fading of an odd half-smile that seemed to recall some memory in her mind, yet despite the quick, frantic racking of her brain she could not remember when she had seen it before, nor what special meaning it had in the lexicon of their intimacy. Then, suddenly, she forgot everything else in the realization that Don was about to speak, that he was going to fight back. Hopeless or not, he would make the try! She knew that the effort might make his defeat all the more bitter, but that realization could not dim the elation that made her heart pound wildly as she waited for his first words.

“As I get your point, Loren,” Don said, “you’re maintaining that Avery Bullard was the right man to build the company, but now that the company has been built we need a different type of management in order to make the company produce the maximum amount of profit for the stockholders.”

Mary Walling watched her husband intently, surprised at his composure. She had been expecting the flare of half-anger but his voice was cleanly dispassionate.

Shaw, too, seemed surprised, his hesitance betraying his search for a hidden trap. “I don’t know that I’d express it in exactly those terms—but, yes, that’s substantially what I mean.”

An expectant hush had fallen over the room and George Caswell broke it by saying nervously, an undertone of near-embarrassment shading his voice. “I don’t know that this is anything we have to thresh out here today—too soon for any of us to see the situation clearly. After all—” He had glanced at his wrist watch and suddenly stiffened, his eyes fixed and staring, and there was a long pause before he said in a low voice. “Coincidence, of course—happened to look at my watch—exactly two-thirty.”

Mary saw other blank looks that matched her own.

“Just twenty-four hours,” Caswell said in whispered explanation. “He died yesterday at two-thirty.”

Mary Walling’s heart sank—afraid that Don had lost his chance, afraid that the cloud of grief that now shadowed the room could not be broken. Then she heard Julia Tredway Prince say, “Avery Bullard is dead. Nothing can change that, no matter how long we wait to talk about it.”

There was strength in her voice but when she turned Mary saw, in puzzling contrast, that there was a mist of tears in her eyes. She knew what Julia had done—that she had purposefully saved the situation for Don—and she felt the warmth of a gratitude that was chilled only by the sensing of her own failure in not having been able to do for her husband what another woman had done.

But one thing was now clear. Don had been right about Julia Tredway Prince’s support. With her vote and Alderson’s, he needed only one more. Where would it come from? Her eyes polled the faces of the three men who sat facing him … Shaw, Caswell, and Dudley … close-shouldered and resolute. What could Don possibly do to break through the barrier of their tight-woven opposition.

Unexpectedly, it was Dwight Prince who spoke. “I’ve often wondered about men like Mr. Bullard. He was a great deal like my father, you know—willing to give his whole life to a company—lay everything on the altar like a sacrifice to the god of business. I’ve often asked myself what drives them to do it—whether they ever stop to ask themselves if what they get is worth the price. I don’t suppose they do.”

“It’s accomplishment that keeps a man going,” Dudley said in his sales-meeting voice. “That’s what I always tell my boys—it isn’t the money that counts, it’s that old feeling of accomplishment.”

An enigmatic smile narrowed Don Walling’s eyes as he looked intently at Loren Shaw. “Going back to this question of the kind of a management that you think the company ought to have from here on out, Loren—the kind of a management that measures its accomplishment entirely in terms of return to the stockholders. We’d need a strong man to head up that kind of a management, wouldn’t we?”

A faint flush warmed Loren Shaw’s neck. “Of course.”

“And it would be a big job, even for an able man? He’d have to throw himself into it—make a good many personal sacrifices in order to do a job?”

Shaw hesitated, wary and unblinking. “If he were the right man there’d be no worry on that score.”

“What incentive would he have?” Don Walling demanded, and for the first time there was the sharp crackle of attack in his voice. “You will grant that there’d have to be an incentive?”

Loren Shaw forced a cold smile. “I’d say that sixty thousand a year might be considered something of an incentive.”

“You would?” Don Walling’s voice was whiplashed with astonishment. “Do you really think a man of that caliber would be willing to sell his life for money—for what would be left out of sixty thousand a year after taxes?”

Dwight Prince’s tongue-in-cheek voice cut in unexpectedly. “You could always give him his own plane as a bonus.”

The flush on Shaw’s neck spread like a seeping stain. “Of course there’s more than money involved.”

“What?” Don Walling demanded. “What Walt just called a sense of accomplishment? Would that satisfy you, Loren? Just suppose that you were the man—that you were the president of the Tredway Corporation.”

Mary Walling’s heart stood still as her body stiffened to the shock-wave of what Don had said. She had not expected this … that it would be brought out in the open … and the taut silence made it plain that the others hadn’t expected it either.

Don Walling leaned forward. “Suppose that you were to spend the next twenty years—all the rest of your working life—in doing what you say needs to be done. Would you be satisfied to measure your life’s work by how much you had raised the dividend? Would you regard your life as a success if you’d managed to get the dividend up to three dollars—or four—or five or six or seven? Is that what you want engraved on your tombstone when you die—the dividend record of the Tredway Corporation?”

The blood-color had crept out over the mask of Shaw’s face, but Mary Walling saw that it was not the flush of an embarrassment that acknowledged defeat, but the stain of an anger born out of desperation.

Like a fighter at bay, Shaw tried to escape the attack with a diversion. “That’s all very well, Mr. Walling—to take the high-minded attitude that money isn’t important—but how far do you think you’d get next month if you offered the union negotiators a sense of accomplishment instead of the six cents an hour they’re demanding?”

George Caswell grimaced, shifting uneasily in his chair. Mary Walling could sense his disappointment at Shaw’s weak evasion of the issue. Had Don seen it, too? Did he realize that Caswell might be split away from Shaw—that Caswell might give him the one vote that was all he needed?

Don Walling’s eyes were still on Shaw. “What sense of accomplishment would you offer them—the wonderful hope that if they passed up a raise and sweated their guts out to make that production line run a little faster, that we might be able to raise the dividend from two dollars to two dollars and ten cents?”

There had been a smile in his voice, dulling the edge of his sarcasm, but now as his eyes left Shaw and fanned the whole room his words were soberly measured. “I don’t want to be facetious about this—it’s too serious for that. Loren’s right when he says that we have an obligation to our stockholders—but it’s a bigger obligation than just paying dividends. We have to keep this company alive. That’s the important thing—and a company is like a man. No man can work for money alone. It isn’t enough. You starve his soul when you try it—and you can starve a company to death in the same way. Yes, I know—sometimes our men in the factories give us the impression that all they want is another raise in wages—and then another and another and another. They make us think that getting more money is all that matters to them. But can we blame them for that? God knows, we’ve done our best to try to make them believe that money is the only measure of accomplishment that matters to us.

“Look at what we did this last year with what we called a ‘communications program.’ We put out a movie that analyzed our financial report and had meetings in all the plants. The men weren’t much interested in our financial report—we knew that to begin with, it was the premise we started from—so what did we do? We tried to force them into being interested. We disguised the dollars as cartoons—little cartoon dollars that jumped into workers’ pocketbooks—other little cartoon dollars that dragged in piles of lumber and built factories—and a big fat dollar that took a trip to Washington and was gobbled up by Uncle Sam. Oh, it was all very clever—even won some kind of an award as an outstanding example of how to promote industrial understanding. Understanding? Do you know what it forced our men to understand? Only one thing—the terrible, soul-killing fact that dollars were all that mattered to the management of this company—dollars—dollars and nothing else.”

“But that program was Mr. Bullard’s own idea,” Shaw cut in like a quick knife thrust.

Mary Walling had been so completely swept along that her guard had dropped and Shaw’s interruption came as a shocking surprise. Her eyes flashed to her husband. Had he been caught off guard, too?

“No, I don’t think we can call that Mr. Bullard’s idea alone,” Don Walling said. “It’s something that’s in the air today—the groping of a lot of men at the top of industry who know they’ve lost something, but aren’t quite sure what it is—nor exactly how they happened to lose it. Mr. Bullard was one of those men. He’d been so busy building a great production machine that he’d lost sight of why he was building it—if he ever really knew. Perhaps he didn’t.”

Julia Tredway Prince’s voice, so close to Mary Walling’s ears that even a whisper seemed like an explosion in the silence, asked, “Do you know, Mr. Walling?”

Mary Walling held her breath through the moment of silence. Could he answer that question? A smile flickered on his face … that same tantalizingly familiar smile that she hadn’t been able to identify before. Now suddenly, she remembered when she had seen it before … that night when he had finally designed their house … when, after all of his groping and fumbling had frightened her almost to the point of losing faith in him, he had suddenly made everything come right and clear.

“Yes, I think I do,” he said. “You see, to Mr. Bullard, business was a game—a very serious game, but still a game—the way war is a game to a soldier. He was never much concerned about money for its own sake. I remember his saying once that dollars were just a way of keeping score. I don’t think he was too much concerned about personal power, either—just power for power’s sake. I know that’s the easy way to explain the drive that any great man has—the lust for power—but I don’t think that was true of Avery Bullard. The thing that kept him going was his terrific pride in himself—the driving urge to do things that no other man on earth could do. He saved the company when everyone else had given up. He built a big corporation in an industry where everyone said that only small companies could succeed. He was only happy when he was doing the impossible—and he did that only to satisfy his own pride. He never asked for applause and appreciation—or even for understanding. He was a lonely man but I don’t think his loneliness ever bothered him very much. He was the man at the top of the tower—figuratively as well as literally. That’s what he wanted. That’s what it took to satisfy his pride. That was his strength—but of course that was his weakness, too.”

Mary Walling listened in amazement. Where were those words coming from … those words that he could never have said before but were now falling so easily from his lips? Was that actually Don who was talking … the same man who had never been able to answer those dark-of-night questions before?

She watched him as he rose from his chair and in the act of standing he seemed a giant breaking shackes that had held him to the earth … shaking loose the ties that had bound him to the blind worship of Avery Bullard. He stood alone now … free.

“There was one thing that Avery Bullard never understood,” Don Walling went on. “He never realized that other men had to be proud, too—that the force behind a great company had to be more than the pride of one man—that it had to be the pride of thousands of men. A company is like an army—it fights on its pride. You can’t win wars with paychecks. In all the history of the world there’s never been a great army of mercenaries. You can’t pay a man enough to make him lay down his life. He wants more than money. Maybe Avery Bullard knew that once—maybe he’d just forgotten it—but that’s where he made his mistake. He was a little lost these last few years. He’d won his fight to build a great company. The building was over—at least for the time being. There had to be something else to satisfy his pride—bigger sales—more profit—something. That’s when we started doing things like making the sixteen-hundred series.”

He turned and confronted Dudley. “Are your boys proud when they sell the sixteen-hundred series—when they know that the finish is going to crack and the veneer split off and the legs come loose?”

“But that’s price merchandise,” Dudley said in fumbling defense. “There’s a need for it. We’re not cheating anyone. At that price the customers know that they can’t get—”

“How do you suppose the men in the factory feel when they make it?” Don Walling demanded. His eyes shifted from Dudley to Shaw. “What do you imagine they think of a management that’s willing to stoop to selling that kind of junk in order to add a penny a year to the dividend? Do you know that there are men at Pike Street who have refused to work on the sixteen-hundred line—that there are men who have taken a cut of four cents an hour to get transferred to something else?”

“No, I wasn’t aware of that,” Shaw said—and the weakness of his voice signaled the first thin crack in his armor. “I don’t suppose it would hurt too much if we dropped that line. After all, it’s a small part of our business.”

A voice in Mary Walling’s mind wanted to shout out at her husband, urging him to drive in for the kill that would clinch his victory. Couldn’t he see that Shaw was defeated … that Caswell was nodding his approval … that Walt Dudley was waiting only to be commanded?

But Don Walling turned, looking out of the window, and his voice seemed faraway as if it were coming from the top of the distant white shaft of the Tredway Tower. “Yes, we’ll drop that line. We’ll never again ask a man to do anything that will poison his pride in himself. We’ll have a new line of low-priced furniture someday—a different kind of furniture—as different from anything we’re making now as a modern automobile is different from an old Mills wagon. When we get it, then we’ll really start to grow.”

His voice came back into the room. “We talk about Tredway being a big company now. It isn’t. We’re kidding ourselves. Yes, we’re one of the biggest furniture manufacturers but what does it mean? Nothing! Furniture is close to a two-billion-dollar industry but it’s all split up among thirty-six hundred manufacturers. We have about three per cent of the total—that’s all, just three per cent. Look at other industries—the percentage that the top manufacturer has. What if General Motors had sat back and stopped growing when it had three per cent of the automobile industry? We haven’t even started to grow! Suppose we get fifteen per cent of the total—and why not, it’s been done in a dozen industries? Fifteen per cent and the Tredway Corporation will be five times as big as it is today. All right, I know it hasn’t been done before in the furniture business, but does that mean we can’t do it? No—because that’s exactly what we are going to do!”

His voice had built to a crescendo, to the moment that demanded the shout of an answering chorus—and then in the instant before the sound could have broken through the shock of silence, Mary Walling saw a tension-breaking smile on her husband’s face. In the split second that it took her eyes to sweep the room, she saw that the smile was mirrored in all the faces that looked up at him … even in the face of Loren Shaw.

She had sensed, a few minutes before, that Shaw was defeated, but she had expected a last struggle, a final flare of resistance. It had not come. Instinctively, she understood what had happened. In that last moment, Loren Shaw had suddenly become aware that his brain had been set aflame by a spark from Don Walling’s mind—a spark that he himself could never have supplied. Now he was fired to accomplishments that had been far beyond the limits of his imagination. Mary Walling understood the faintly bewildered quality of Shaw’s smile, because she, too—long ago—had found it mysteriously strange that Don’s mind was so unlike her own.

George Caswell was standing, extending his hand. “We’re all behind you, Don. I can promise you that.”

“Yes sir, Don, you bet we are!” Walt Dudley boomed.

Shaw shook hands silently but it was a gesture that needed no words to make it a pledge of loyalty.

And now Julia Tredway Prince was standing, too. “I think the occasion calls for a toast. Dwight, would you mind—yes, Nina, what is it?”

Nina was standing in the doorway. “There’s a telephone call for Mr. Walling. The gentleman says it’s very urgent.”

Dwight Prince stepped forward. “There’s an extension in the back hall. Come and I’ll show you.”

Mary saw that Julia was about to speak to her but George Caswell stepped up as an interruption.

“I’m afraid I’ll have to run along. The plane’s waiting and I—well, I have to be back in New York for a wedding at six. I’ll be down on Monday, of course.”

“And you’ll stay over for the board meeting on Tuesday,” Julia said.

“As far as I’m concerned, it’s all settled now,” George Caswell said. “But you’re quite right—we do need the formal action of the board.”

Mary realized that at some missed moment Julia’s hand had found her own and that the world had become an out-of-focus haze filled with drifting faces and floating words … Shaw … Dudley … Erica Martin … all saying the same unsaid thing in a different way … and then, slowly, the consciousness dawned that there was another voice saying something else and the voice seemed to come from the warm, tight-holding grip that held her hand. She was alone with Julia Tredway Prince.

“You should be very proud, Mary.”

“I am—but frightened, too.”

“Because you don’t understand him?”

She felt her mind go blank with amazement. How could Julia Tredway Prince know … how could anyone know?

“Don’t worry about it, my dear,” Julia said. “You’ll never understand him completely. Don’t try. You’ll be happier if you don’t. He’ll be happier, too. Not understanding will make you very lonely sometimes, Mary—when he shuts you away behind a closed door—when you think he’s forgotten you—but then the door will open and he’ll come back and you’ll know how fortunate you were to have been his wife.”

“I know, I know,” she murmured, making no move to wipe away the tears in her own eyes because she saw that there were untouched tears in the eyes of Julia Tredway Prince. It was only after her memory echoed what Julia had said that she realized those last words had been in the past tense. Was it possible that Julia had …?

There was the interruption of a sound like distant wind chimes.

Nina stood before them, uncertainly, holding a tray filled with glasses and an opened bottle of champagne. “Mr. Prince said to bring eight glasses, but—”

“Thank you, Nina.” Julia took the tray from her hands and put it gently on the desk.

As her hand touched the offered glass, Mary Walling understood, for one fleeting instant, the miracle of her husband’s mind. Now it had happened to her! She knew without knowing why she knew … and as if it were something done in a dream she was raising her glass and saying, “To Avery Bullard.”

There was a long moment, a moment that could not be filled with old tears or old wine, but only with the silence of two women who shared a secret that bridged the ending of one world and the beginning of another.

“Thank you,” Julia said.

When Don Walling came back into the room they were standing at the window that looked out on the Tredway Tower. It had been a long time since there had been a word between them. There had been no need for words.

They turned together.

“Sorry it took so long,” he said. “There was some trouble about the connection. The others go?”

Julia nodded. “Is Dwight coming back?”

“I believe he’s still talking to Walt Dudley. I heard their voices in the garden. Loren Shaw is driving George Caswell out to the airport.”

“That was Fred Alderson on the phone,” Don Walling said. “You know, he did the darndest thing—drove all the way down to Maryland to see Jesse Grimm. Good thing he did—cleared up a misunderstanding—but I can’t imagine why he’d go to all of that trouble for me.”

Julia’s eyes twinkled with taunting amusement. “Of course it’s possible that he didn’t do it for you—he might have done it for the company.”

His face slowly softened into a boyish grin and, even without understanding, Mary Walling’s heart raced exultantly when she heard him laugh and say, “All right, I’ll learn. Just give me a little time.”

He hadn’t changed! He would never change … she must never think that he would. Julia was right … don’t try to understand him … yes, that had always been her trouble. It was only when she had tried to understand him that she had been afraid. She would never be afraid again … never!

3.20 P.M. EDT

Slowly, the on-edge platter of the earth fell back to a sensible horizontal and George Caswell eased back into his seat. The plane, he reasoned, had taken a long climbing turn into the southwest wind and now they were passing over Millburgh again, heading east. They were only a few hundred feet above the earth—perhaps as much as a thousand now—but the city had taken on a very different look, dwarfed to inconsequence by the widening rim of the horizon. The Tredway Tower, which his eyes sought out as the center point of orientation, had become startlingly insignificant. In truth, as he now saw, it was not a tower at all.

The brown band of the muddy river slipped past the edge of the porthole and the earth, rising to the high land beyond the cliff edge, lifted the airport into the sharp focus of his eyes. The plane that he had noticed beside the runway before their take-off was now a yellow insect feeding on the green earth … and the black bug that crawled toward the thin gray line of the highway was Loren Shaw’s car.

A smile began to form on George Caswell’s face, wavering and indeterminate, undecided between amusement and compassion. There was, as always, the temptation to smile at these very earnest young men like Loren Shaw who took life so seriously, yet you couldn’t help feeling a little sorry for them, too. There were so many things they didn’t understand … why Don was so different … different because of something that you couldn’t reason into credibility … something that was beyond explaining with words … as a Beethoven Symphony was beyond explaining with the rules of harmony, or a Cezanne painting with a recital of the theory of composition.

It was discouraging, of course, when you were young and ambitious to be forced to recognize that you were not one of those chosen few … but when you were older and wiser it was a great comfort to know that there were still men like that being born, that the cult of mediocrity had not yet sterilized the womb of the earth … that it never would … that there would always be men like Avery Bullard and Don Walling and all the others who were the builders of great companies and great institutions and great nations. No, all of the men who sat at the tops of all of the towers were not men of that stripe … there weren’t enough to go around … so there were the fakirs and the charlatans, too … the hangers-on, the jackals and the vultures … the Bruce Pilchers.

George Caswell’s smile hardened with grim satisfaction as he thought of how shocked Shaw had been when he had told him about what Pilcher had done. He had been right to tell him … yes, that was a part of Shaw’s education … learning that there were men like that … the money-mad and the greed-crazed … not as many as the public thought there were, but still enough so that a man had to be taught to be on his guard … not, of course, that Shaw needed that kind of teaching but still it was a lesson that it didn’t hurt anyone to learn.

Yes, Shaw was a good man … but a little naive, too … worrying that Walling might have gotten the wrong impression because he had pushed so hard for recognition of the importance of financial management. No need to worry … a president expected his vice-presidents to push their specialties … and Shaw had been right … the financial side of the business was important … required a lot of attention. They would never be able to finance those ideas of Walling’s out of earnings alone. There would have to be a lot of securities sold … a debenture issue this fall … probably another next year … common as soon as the market looked right for it.

Unconsciously, George Caswell’s habit-trained fingers had reached for his notebook and slipped out the little gold pencil that was tucked in its pin-seal cover. He flipped a page and the blank paper suggested a note. He wrote it—a reminder to speak to Kitty about inviting the Wallings to come over for a weekend … sometime soon … but not this next weekend or the one after … wait until the Whaler’s Cup races were out of the way.

3.32 P.M. EDT

Stealthily, like an invader in his own home, J. Walter Dudley tiptoed across the dining room and opened the kitchen door, opening it only wide enough at first to make certain that he was alone. Then, assured, he stood and stared into the coldly gleaming room, waiting for its reflected whiteness to burn the black shadows out of his mind.

His heart slowed its beat. He could breathe again. Resolutely, he walked to the far wall and opened the little white-enameled door. His closed hand reached in, the fingers opened and a crumpled wad of yellow paper fell down the black shaft. Almost instantly, there was the quick light of a distant flame as the incinerator consumed the telegram.

With the flash of the flame there was the flash of regret that he had not read it once more. But there was no need of that. He could remember. He would always remember. He could read it any time he wanted to read it. It would always be in his mind.

MR J WALTER DUDLEY

TREDWAY CORPORATION MILLBURGH PA

MY DEEPEST SYMPATHY FOR THE LOSS THAT THE ENTIRE INDUSTRY HAS SUSTAINED IN THE DEATH OF A GREAT MAN

EVA HARDING

MILLBURGH, PENNSYLVANIA

3.43 P.M. EDT

Erica Martin’s hand burrowed into the drawer, her ringless fingers sliding smoothly down through the slickness of crepe and satin and the woolly warmth of cashmere until, at last, her fingertips found the hard coolness of the glass and the yielding softness of the leather frame.

Gently, she lifted it from hiding. Avery Bullard had never known that she had kept this picture. It was a print that he had rejected from several that a New York photographer had made. He had studied it the longest of all but in the end he had tossed it across the desk and said, “Better get rid of that one, Miss Martin. Makes me look too damned human. Don’t dare give people the wrong idea, you know.” Then he had laughed and she had laughed and there had been so few times when they had ever laughed together that she remembered all of them, but this time more than the others … remembering it too often and too vividly when the picture had been on the mantel. That was why she had hidden it away months ago.

Her arms lifted the picture and her inner voice, clearer than her lips could have spoken said, “Don’t be angry with me, Avery, because I guessed that it would be Don Walling. I knew you never wanted me to guess what was in your mind—I don’t know why you wanted it that way but I know you did—but this time I had to admit that I knew. There was no other way. Don’t you see that? And I was right, wasn’t I?”

He understood. He was human. Why had he been so afraid to admit it? Why had they both been so afraid?

NEW YORK CITY

3.50 P.M. EDT

The crotchety old man in the florist shop looked at the twenty-dollar bill doubtfully, rubbing the water stain with the ball of his thumb, finally deciding that he would take a chance. “That’ll be twelve-sixty all together for everything—the flowers and sending them to this place in Pennsylvania. You want to put in a card, miss, you’ll find one over there at the desk.”

Anne Finnick looked at all the cards. There was an awful pretty one that was just right … a picture of one of those big boats and seagulls flying and everybody waving like they were saying goodbye … and the printing said BON VOYAGE TO A WONDERFUL FRIEND. Bon Voyage was French. It meant like when somebody was going away. That’s what he was doing, wasn’t it? He’d like it being French. All of those rich people were crazy about French.

3.55 P.M. EDT

Luigi Cassoni knew that he was a fortunate man. Not only was he blessed by having most of his prayers answered, but also he was lucky. When a man was not very bright it was a great comfort to know that he was lucky. There seemed to be a connection. If he had been bright it would not have taken him so long to count the money that he had collected for Mr. Bullard’s flowers and to write all of the names on a piece of paper. But if he had been able to do it quickly, he would not have been there to take Mr. Walling and his wife to the twenty-fourth floor. That had been a very important thing to do. When the old Duke had died without a son to take his place, the men who sat by the fountain in the Via Torrenzo had shaken their heads and said that it would be bad. They had been right. That spring the olives had been only half as heavy on the trees as they had been when there was a Duke in the castle—and that was the year when not one of Pietro’s ewes had twin lambs—and when Angelino ran away to marry a Sicilian, and Maria’s burro fell from the cliff and was killed on the rocks at the sea. There was not a man in the village who had lived long enough to remember when there had been so many misfortunes in a single spring.

Yes, Luigi decided, he was a very lucky man to live in a country where there was always a new duke for the castle.

A shadow crossed Luigi’s mind, fast-moving like the earth shadow of a sea cloud crossing the Via Torrenzo, when the wind was from the Mediterranean. It was too bad that the carillon could not ring but that was one of the things that was not understood in America … that the bells could sound both grief and joy at the same time.

3.56 P.M. EDT

In those first few moments after they had entered the office that had been Avery Bullard’s, Mary Walling felt that there was something almost improper in their presence, that they were guilty of irreverence in thus entering the precincts of death. She knew that Don had felt it, too, because he had said obliquely, “I don’t actually move up until Tuesday, of course.”

“I’m glad you brought me,” she said. “Now I’ll be able to imagine you here.”

“Probably take a lot of imagining,” he said in a tone that asked for denial. “You never thought that anything like this would happen, did you?”

She said, “No”—because she thought it was what he wanted her to say—and then, “You were wonderful out at Julia’s. I’ll always remember every word that you said.”

“Will you?” His arm found the curve of her waist and, looking up at him, she saw his boyish grin of confession. “You know, all the way down here I’ve been trying to remember what the devil I did say. I didn’t make any crazy promises, did I?”

“Only a whole new world,” she laughed, breathless with the hope that this moment would last, this wonderful sharing, this moment when his mind was hers, when she could completely understand.

But the door was closing. His face sobered. “God, but there’s a lot to do! I suppose I should have talked to him out there at Julia’s—gotten him started on some things for Monday morning.”

“Who, dear?”

“Loren Shaw. He’ll be executive vice-president, of course.”

“He’ll be——?” She stopped in astonishment.

“What’s the matter?”

“Nothing. I—well, I never thought you liked him, that’s all.”

The door was tight-closed now. “Where did you ever get that idea? Damned capable man—Shaw. Not too much imagination, perhaps—but sometimes that’s an asset. It’s possible to have too much imagination around the place. I’ll need somebody to help me keep my feet on the ground.”

“I know,” she whispered.

“Well, let’s get out of here,” he said, tensely impatient. “Oh—better leave a note for Miss Martin.”

He found a piece of paper and a black pencil and she watched as he wrote:

Call executive committee meeting nine o’clock Monday morning.

MacDonald Walling

She heard Julia’s voice … you’ll never understand him completely … don’t try … you’ll be happier if you don’t … he’ll be happier, too.

Julia was right.

“Ready?” he asked.

“Ready,” she said—and they walked together out into the dark corridor.