Sincerely, Willis Wayde Read online

  “Oh yes, of course,” Mrs. James said, and she smiled at Willis and held out a gray-gloved hand.

  “Mrs. James and I have been motoring,” Mr. Harcourt said, “and I suggested that we might stop for a cup of tea before returning to Boston.”

  “Yes, sir,” Willis said.

  Mr. Harcourt touched his lower lip, and suddenly he began to laugh at some private joke of his own.

  “I really thought I’d never see anyone at this time of day, but you never can tell, can you? Won’t you join Mrs. James and me in a cup of tea?”

  “I guess I ought to be getting home, sir,” Willis said.

  They were acting as though the whole thing were perfectly natural, but Willis was sure it was not.

  “Please come with us, Willis,” Mrs. James said. “You look as though you need a cup of tea.”

  “And you can tell us why your father wants to get water out of bananas, Willis,” Mr. Harcourt said.

  Patrick’s wife, who always helped out in the winters, served tea in the library. The ornate silver service, which Willis had seen in the dining room, had been placed on a low table in front of the black marble fireplace, where three lumps of cannel coal were burning. Almost as soon as they arrived, Patrick’s wife, in her black dress and stiff starched apron, brought in the silver hot-water kettle, placed it on the rack above the spirit lamp and lighted the wick. It was the first time that Willis had ever seen the conventional serving of tea.

  “Nellie,” Mr. Harcourt said, “this is Mrs. James. I’m not sure whether you’ve ever met her before.”

  “Pleased to meet you, ma’am,” Patrick’s wife said, “and I hope the tea will be all right.”

  “If you will bring in the bread and butter and toast, please, Nellie,” Mr. Harcourt said, “and some pound cake, if there is any. I’m sure Willis could do with some cake.”

  No one spoke again until Nellie had left the room.

  “Are these Ethel’s tea things?” Mrs. James asked.

  “Yes,” Mr. Harcourt said, “a wedding present. That was quite a while ago. You can tell from looking at Nellie and me.”

  “Do you want me to pour, Henry?” Mrs. James asked.

  “I think so,” Mr. Harcourt said, “if you would be so kind, Harriet,” and suddenly he laughed.

  “What are you laughing at?” Mrs. James asked.

  “Only at the general situation,” Mr. Harcourt said. Mr. Harcourt looked handsome and younger when he laughed, and somehow Mrs. James looked younger too. Suddenly Willis was sure that she was kinder than Mrs. Blood.

  “I wish you didn’t have such a sour sense of humor, Henry,” Mrs. James said.

  “Not sour,” Mr. Harcourt answered, “mature, Harriet.”

  When Patrick’s wife came back carrying a peculiar piece of furniture which Willis knew later was called a curate’s delight, Mrs. James was seated before the tea table, her hands moving gracefully and quickly, and she measured out tea into the silver pot and poured hot water into the fragile cups to warm them and then poured the water into a silver bowl. Willis never again saw anyone who could pour tea and move all those things about as beautifully as Mrs. James.

  “Now just what is it that your father’s doing in the cellar?” Mr. Harcourt asked.

  Something inexplicable had happened that had made Willis feel perfectly at home. They were interested when he described how he and his father had both fried and baked banana chips and then went on to the centrifugal machine.

  “I guess Pa’s still down there working,” Willis said. “Maybe he won’t bother to come up for supper. When he gets working on something, he’s like that.”

  “Yes,” Mr. Harcourt said, “the creative mind.”

  “There’s one funny thing about Pa,” Willis said. “He doesn’t care what’s going to happen, if he works it out about those bananas. He just says he doesn’t want to be a banana king.”

  “He’s not like me, Willis,” Mr. Harcourt said. “He doesn’t need to be a king of anything. What would you do if the bananas worked out right?”

  “I guess I’d think about starting some kind of factory, sir,” Willis said.

  “That’s what I’d do too,” Mr. Harcourt said, “exactly.” His head turned quickly to the window, and Willis saw the lights of the Locomobile coming up the drive.

  “Dear me,” Mr. Harcourt said, and he pulled a gold watch from his waistcoat pocket. “There’s Patrick and it’s six o’clock. I suppose we’d better leave, Harriet.”

  “It’s been ever so nice seeing you, Willis,” Mrs. James said, “and I hope we’ll meet again.”

  “You’ll meet again,” Mr. Harcourt said. “Willis is going to work for me at the mill this summer, aren’t you, Willis?”

  “Yes, sir,” Willis said.

  He felt tremendously happy as he walked down the passage to the front hall. Mr. Harcourt had spoken previously of his working at the mill, but he had never said before that Willis would work for him. You had to have a hero when you were going on sixteen, and Willis would have gladly died for Mr. Harcourt.

  Willis was to spend his life in a highly competitive arena in which, in spite of a surface geniality, there was a peculiar lack of mercy once the chips were down. All sorts of small things added themselves together in that competition so that microscopic errors of judgment and careless moments often became momentous in the end. The line that separated success from mediocrity was fascinatingly thin and wavering. That meeting with Mr. Harcourt and Mrs. James he could see later was one of those events which finally put him on a confidential basis with the Harcourt family.

  Willis was not surprised at all when the news broke suddenly that Mr. Harcourt and Mrs. James had been married quietly and had gone for a while to Palm Beach in Florida. He could not understand in the least why everyone, including Mr. Beane and Mr. MacDonald, appeared surprised and unsettled. Except for himself, it seemed to Willis that Patrick was the only one who was not surprised, and he should not have been, having driven them in the Locomobile. Willis discovered that Patrick’s attitude toward him had changed after that tea party, and incidentally Patrick began to call him Master Willis.

  Perhaps Patrick never kept his mouth as tightly shut as he said he did, or perhaps it was Nellie, his wife, who did the talking. At any rate the word must have got around that Willis had known all about Mr. Harcourt and Mrs. James before anyone else, and it gave Willis a new position on the Harcourt place.

  He understood more clearly that he had been in the midst of an earth-shaking event the next time he saw Bess Harcourt.

  “You say you saw her?” Bess said.

  “Yes,” Willis answered. “She was at the big house.”

  “She doesn’t look like much, does she?” Bess said. “Just an old lady without any money or anything. I don’t know why old people get married and make things hard for everybody.”

  “I thought she was kind of nice,” Willis said.

  “That shows how little you know,” Bess said. “She wasn’t nice to get Grandfather to marry her and get all the money that Daddy would have had, but we’re all going to be pleasant to her when she comes here. We mustn’t show the way we feel.”

  “Well, I thought she was sort of nice,” Willis said.

  “Don’t be silly, Willis,” Bess said. “You don’t understand because you haven’t got a single cent of money. Grandfather is a silly old man, and Mummy’s making me embroider a pincushion cover for her.”

  “Maybe I’ll make some money some day,” Willis said.

  “Don’t be silly, Willis,” Bess said again. “I don’t know why I like you when you talk that way.”

  “I don’t care if you don’t,” Willis said.

  “Well,” Bess said, “as long as we’re here and there’s no one else around, don’t you want to kiss me, Willis?”

  “No, not much,” Willis said.

  “Now, Willis,” Bess said. “We’re going to have a dance this spring in the vacation, and Mummy says she’s going to ask Steve Decker and W
innie Decker. We have to ask them because their father is the mill’s lawyer. And I’ll get Mummy to ask you too. I’m going to put my hair up for it. Please kiss me, Willis.”

  Willis had a happy time at that party, and, in fact, he always did have a good time whenever he was invited to the Bryson Harcourt house. Both Mr. and Mrs. Harcourt had a way with young people, if you wanted to use the term, perhaps because they had remained young in so many ways themselves. Mrs. Harcourt always made an especial effort to talk to him, but her attention never made him self-conscious. Mr. Bryson was kind to him too. Mr. Bryson Harcourt was impulsive and generous, and Bill was very much like him. It made no difference if they remembered you only when they saw you.

  It was a very informal party—just two or three girls who were friends of Bess’s from Boston and two or three school friends of Bill’s, and then Steve and Winnie Decker and Willis. After what Mrs. Harcourt called a pickup supper in the brightly lighted dining room—the Bryson Harcourt house always looked very new and cheerful—they rolled back all the rugs in the big front hall, and Mr. Bryson turned on the phonograph.

  Willis always did have trouble learning steps, but Mrs. Bryson Harcourt went out of her way to say that he was doing very well, and those friends of Bess’s all tried to teach him, and Bess was very kind herself. She wore her hair up, as she had said she would. She had also, she told him, borrowed two kinds of perfume from her mother’s dressing table and, if he would promise not to tell, a little rouge from her best friend, Gertrude Fredericks. Mrs. Harcourt asked him in a low voice to try to be especially kind to Winnie Decker, who was a fattish frightened girl in those days. Willis was sure that he was having a much better time than Steve Decker, who looked tall and sallow and sour.

  “Say,” Steve Decker said to him, “let’s step outside and smoke a cigarette.”

  Willis had never smoked in his life, but he would have died rather than tell Steve Decker. He was very glad to step outside with him on the driveway.

  “What are you coughing for?” Steve asked him. “Haven’t you ever smoked a cigarette?”

  “Oh yes,” Willis answered, “lots of times.”

  “These parties bore me,” Steve said. “Every time the Harcourt kids ask us to one, the old man makes us go. Bill Harcourt isn’t so hot either, do you think so?”

  “No,” Willis said, “no, he isn’t so hot.”

  “And Bess, she isn’t so hot either. Say, do you know what?”

  “No, what?” Willis asked.

  “She asked me to kiss her. She said it was time she learned how to kiss a boy. Say, what do you know about that?”

  Willis coughed again.

  “What do you know?” he said.

  “Say,” Steve said, “when’s the old man getting back?”

  “What old man?” Willis asked, as he coughed again.

  “God Almighty,” Steve Decker said, and he laughed urbanely. “Old Harcourt and his new wife. Boy, I’d like to have been around when the family got that news. I bet it set old Bryson right on his ass.”

  Willis could still feel the acrid sting of the cigarette smoke and recall his twinge of fascinated horror at that allusion to Mr. Bryson Harcourt. He could still feel the cool April air on his face with its message of early spring and growth. He could even remember the exact sound of a footstep behind him on the gravel drive. It was young Bill Harcourt, already taller than his father.

  “Hello,” Bill said. “What are you two doing out here?”

  “Just resting,” Steve Decker said, “and taking a drag on a cigarette.”

  “Oh, boy,” Bill Harcourt said, “give me one, will you?”

  Bill was always ready to try anything, and his enthusiasm never died. Willis always had a warm spot in his heart for Bill.

  The annual meeting of the stockholders of the Harcourt Mill occurred just after high school had closed in June and just before Willis had started to work at the mill. Everybody was back on the place by then—the Henry Harcourts, the Bryson Harcourts, and Bill and Bess. The leaves were all out on the trees except for the catalpas. It was all a time of newness and hope when the stockholders gathered at the Harcourt Mill and then met for luncheon at the big house. The machinery, the offices and Harcourt belting were symbolized at the Harcourt place each June by the fresh edging of the turf along the drive and the flowers of the rhododendrons and the laurels, and by the swans floating on the still waters of their pond.

  As the hour approached that marked the end of the meeting at the mill, everyone was too busy to think of Willis Wayde. He wanted to keep out of the way, but curiosity impelled him to stand in the corner of the rose garden, where he could see the automobiles as they came up the drive. That was where Bess Harcourt met him and asked him, as she often did, what he was doing.

  “You can see,” he said, “I’m not doing anything.”

  There was no doubt that Bess was growing up. She was no longer the middy-bloused girl that she had been the previous summer. Her braid was doubled up now and tied by a ribbon, and she wore a blue sweater and a red belt around her waist, but she still had her blue serge skirt and her sensible square-toed low shoes.

  “Well, I’m not doing anything either,” Bess said. “I guess they’re fighting down at the mill. It always means they’re fighting when they’re late.”

  Willis did not answer, but Bess was still young enough to talk freely.

  “They all think Grandfather’s spending too much money,” Bess said. “Cousin Emily was awful cross this morning. She was in the den with Daddy before they went to the mill, and then Cousin Roger came, and then the Hayward cousins came. Mummy doesn’t like the Haywards and I hate them.”

  The mill problems were all new to Willis then.

  “When Cousin Emily’s mad her nose gets thin,” Bess said. “Do you think my nose looks like hers?”

  “I’ve never seen her nose,” Willis answered.

  “It’s shiny. She never puts on powder.”

  “Is that a fact?” Willis said.

  “Don’t keep saying that,” Bess told him. “Let’s go inside the big house and look around.”

  “No,” Willis said, “we wouldn’t have any business being there.”

  Bess looked at him thoughtfully. It seemed to Willis lately that she was always looking him up and down as though she had never seen him before.

  “You haven’t but I have,” she said. “If anyone catches us I’ll say that I invited you, but no one’s going to notice.”

  “I’ll stay here,” Willis said. “You go if you like.”

  She took his hand and tried to pull him after her.

  “Gosh,” she said. “You’re twice as strong as Bill. I know a place where we can hide and see them through the banisters, at the head of the stairs. I did it last year.”

  He was sure he would not have gone if she had not said that he was twice as strong as Bill.

  The front door stood open but there was no one in the hall, and there were flowers at the foot of the staircase, banks of flowers, and not a sound except in the kitchen and the dining room. Willis could almost believe they were invisible as they tiptoed through the house.

  “Look at the drinks in the library,” Bess whispered, “but those are only Grandfather’s second-best cigars. He never has his best ones for Cousin Roger and the Haywards. Look at the dining room. All the cut glass is out. When they start eating we can stand here and watch.”

  The dining-room table was stretched its full length and there were turkeys and whole hams on the serving table beside the pantry door and heavy lace tablecloths and the green Chinese place plates, but the cut glass was what Willis recalled most clearly—that heavy, ornate glass of another age, a tumbler and three wine glasses beside each plate, glittering like ice in that silent room.

  “It’s handsome,” Willis whispered.

  “They always have it for the meeting,” Bess whispered back. “I was going to have it some day, before he got married again.”

  Then Bess drew a quick shar
p breath.

  “Hurry,” she whispered. “They’re coming,” and she reached for his hand. “Hurry.”

  Then he heard the sound of wheels on the gravel driveway, and he and Bess seemed to be like people in a dream. She was still holding his hand as they ran on tiptoe down the hall.

  “The wisteria never looked better,” he heard a man’s voice say.

  “Hurry,” Bess whispered. “Upstairs, hurry!”

  In a second they reached the balustrade of the upstairs passageway that looked down on the hall below. There was a casement window on the left and a small niche beside the window which gave access to the window and nothing more.

  “Here,” Bess whispered.

  It was not a bad place to hide, affording just room for them to sit close together on the floor and to peer through the banisters.

  “This is it,” Bess whispered, and she still held his hand.

  The whole house had suddenly become alive. Mr. Henry Harcourt had appeared, and Mrs. Harcourt was with him. They were standing near the foot of the staircase, and Willis never knew how they had arrived there so quickly. He could hear Mr. Harcourt’s voice.

  “Roger,” he was saying, “I’m not sure whether you have met your Aunt Harriet.”

  He was speaking to a stout middle-aged man whose hair was so closely cropped that you could see the pink of his scalp beneath. He was so fat that he should have had the conventional jolly expression, but instead his round face had a petulant look and his voice had a precise and fluty quality.

  “No, Uncle Henry,” the fat man answered, “I haven’t had the pleasure. Welcome to the family, Aunt Harriet.”

  “That’s Cousin Roger,” Bess whispered in his ear. “He owns a lot of stock.”

  “Didn’t Catherine come with you?” Mr. Harcourt said. “Oh, here she is. I don’t believe you’ve met your new Aunt Harriet, Catherine. This is Roger’s wife, my dear.”

  A tall lady with bony wrists and gaunt rangy shoulders came into Willis’s line of vision.

  “I’ve been looking forward to it,” she said, “dear Uncle Henry.”

  “That’s Cousin Catherine,” Bess whispered. “She’s nasty, and their children are nasty.”