Man's Country/Chapter 16
AND yet, contrarily, Fay found in this perfect retrospect ground for forebodings. George, on the other hand, was unreservedly optimistic. His wife and his business were both together now, he could devote himself to each without robbing either.
Feeling this way about carrying his wife into his business, George felt not the slightest compunction about carrying his business into his home. As he sank deep in a luxuriously cushioned chair, lulled by Fay's low, strumming reveries at the piano, as he sat opposite her at meals, as he went with her complaisantly to golf or dinners or the theater, his business went always with him. He went into abstractions over it and came out to tell her enthusiastically at length, or monosyllabically in brief, jerky sentences, things that he had thought, ideas that had come to him; and then relapsed into others.
But Fay soon ceased to regard these as forgivable eccentricities. She found in them signs that business was absorbing him more and more completely, and began to feel the worm of resentment gnawing. In some ways she saw less of her husband than she had of her lover. It was never so easy for him to arrange a morning canter. It was, never so certain that she could get him out to the links or away on the yacht exactly when she wanted him. A point was presently reached where her dissatisfaction broke out in petulant protest.
"But, my dear!" he reminded her with wide, surprised eyes. "My dear! We're married now."
"That's exactly it, I suppose," she retorted bitterly.
"But my job—" he began to argue, and she cut him off to demand satirically.
"Did I marry a man, or did I marry a business?"
He was hurt and perplexed and afraid to try to carry forward the argument. Besides, there was a reason now why he must not argue with her or get her excited. But he still had ideas that refused to stay battened below decks in his mind.
"Fay," he began one day, with a tender light in his eye, "I want my son born in my own house."
"Our son, I suppose you mean," corrected Fay with a soft, averted glance and a blush, for the idea, in vital and inevitable form, was still new to her.
"Our son," he smiled, acknowledging the correction, "in our own home. One that I've paid for with money I made myself; a house that you and I have planned with our own minds, just to express ourselves and: our own ideas for us—and for him."
"Why," chirruped Fay with a little cry of delight, "why—that's a lovely thought, George! Perfectly lovely."
"Let's make a house that isn't Romanesque and isn't Gothic or Georgian or anything but just modern and attractive and comfortable and cheery and cosy," elaborated George. "It couldn't be so big as this, not near, for I haven't got the money to build one—and it couldn't be on as fine a site as this, for I haven't the money for acreage on the Grosse Pointe front. It could be down nearer to the Indian Village, say."
"But when I have so much money, George," she intervened, "when he is to be ours, wouldn't you think it would be fair to let me at least buy the land our house would stand on?"
George paused a moment. He wanted to do it all himself—he really did; but in such a moment and over a project like this he could not be ungenerous. "Why, certainly: that would be fair, Fay—only I'd ask you to make it a modest lot—in a modest location. You see, dear, I figure that about a hundred thousand is all I can spare for house and decorations—decorations, of course, including furnishings—and you can't get much of a house in your set for that."
"We could do very nicely with it though," admitted Fay, feeling a luxurious sense of self-satisfaction in thus committing herself to a program of enforced frugality. "It would be such fun being modest and economical for our boy's father's pride's sake. But only a hundred thousand! George—aren't you a millionaire?"
"Of course," assented George. "Several of 'em another year; several more of 'em when the Judson-Morris Motor Works stops expanding and strikes a normal gait where I can get my money to stand still and let me count it. This year alone my dividends would be seven hundred thousand if I could take 'em out, but I can't. I'll have to put back every bit over this hundred thousand. We must live on my salary."
"While my money goes right on piling up, with never a thing to do with it, except to use a little of the interest for pin money," his wife pouted. "It's a continual temptation to extravagance, and it makes me feel so useless, so superfluous, George! Sometimes, with all this everlasting expansion out at the Judson-Morris show, you're skimping for money, I gather, and sometimes scrambling madly for it. Why don't you take my money and put it out there?"
"Your money?" George jerked out the query. The idea seemed to come like a shock to him. "Your inheritance in the Judson-Morris hopper?" Then he shook his head quickly with just the faintest suggestion of the air of a man who hastens to put away temptation. "No; I wouldn't feel comfortable—not in investing your money there."
But why wouldn't he feel comfortable? he asked himself, the instant he had made this kind of response, and Fay, not so much because of her husband's decision as because of the manner of it, was questioning also, but aloud:
"Sound—it's sound—the Judson-Morris Company, isn't it?" she asked. "The money would be safe, wouldn't it?"
"Sound? Safe?" George jeered at himself, and he laughed at her. "Secure as the future of the automobile," he declared.
Again his manner was cocksure and his confidence as firm as Gibraltar. The wife was as convinced as her husband.
But while this fond project of nest-building swelled George Judson's heart in moments when he could think of it, the sum total of his business energies was being absorbed by that most audacious and hazardous enterprise of a bold and daring career, the attempt to carry the Nemo model unimproved through a second year and double its total sale at the same time. It was understood by all that he staked not alone his reputation, but his fortune and the future of the Judson-Morris Motor Works. And who was there to hold back when their leader dashed so far out in front?
But abruptly this air of confidence began to be vitiated. This devitalizing appeared to be directly traceable to the January automobile shows, where the Nemo model of a year past found itself now set up in comparison with the showings of up-to-the-minute models and designs of other manufacturers. To some Judson-Morris men the Nemo model appeared not so far ahead of the others as they had thought; there were, indeed, those who felt that the Nemo was not even abreast. Such men recalled their earlier doubts and remembered their first misgivings. Brooding these a while, some were moved to write in to John Williams, General Sales Manager, about them. Some of these letters complained of the "old style planetary transmission," and some talked about the "old-style lines of the car."
John Williams, with faith in his president quite undaunted, showed a judicious few of these letters to George.
"Croakers!" the president denounced fiercely. "Fire 'em. They don't believe in us. Fire 'em. Get new agents."
But John Williams was getting more letters every day, and he could not fire a whole distribution system. Near-by agents did not trust to mails but came in and talked to John. The more important of these the General Sales Manager passed on to the President.
But George, more politic when he met these doubters face to face than when he only read their letters, was nevertheless quite unyielding. He laughed at them, he taunted them, he challenged them, and it was a tribute to his own ability as a salesman that he actually resold the project to these men over their doubts and in spite of their fears. He made them doubt themselves instead of doubting him and his enterprise. Not a man of them but went out pinning his faith once more to the Nemo model and with a half-chagrined smile at himself for ever having wavered.
Fay was surprised, one night, while sitting on her husband's lap, to notice lines of care etching themselves into his forehead.
"You stick too close to that old shop," she warned. "You must come with me for a long drive tomorrow."
"All right, sweetheart," he said with an agreeableness and a smile that gave utter denial to the idea that he was overtired or worried.
And he kissed her every fear away—until one day Maidie Huffler thought to brighten her period of enforced seclusion by a little well-meant sympathy.
"Isn't it just too bad about George over-staying his market that way?" she began.
Fay, though startled by her tone and quick to discern that Maidie thought she had hold of some sort of bad news, was quicker even in her pride and loyalty. She laughed aloud and merrily.
"Overstayed his market?" she derided. "Say, Maidie! Any time George Judson overstays his market, you just tell me, will you?"
The challenge in Fay's voice and manner was thoroughly dislodging to Maidie's assumed position.
"Oh, then," she inquired, a good deal less certain of herself, "then it isn't as bad as they say?"
But by this inquiry she carried a quick flutter to Fay's heart, for it assured the wife that "they" must have been saying something very bad indeed. Of course this connected instantly with the sleepless nights and the care lines in his face, but she would no more allow Maidie Huffler to know that she was ignorant of the details of her husband's business than she would permit her to suppose the slightest shadow hung over the bright prospects of Judson-Morris.
"Serious? Maidie! You always were credulous!" Fay laughed satirically as well as convincingly. "Tell me, child," she urged teasingly, "who has been spoofing you now?"
Maidie crimsoned slightly. "Oh, nobody in particular," she insisted apologetically. "I just sort of heard jt whispered round that he had a big sales campaign on and that it—it wasn't working out quite."
This gave Fay something to take hold of, and her rejoinder was quick, stout, and cunning. "Is that it?" she responded with a superior smile. "Well, Maidie, perhaps you don't happen to remember—of course you wouldn't know it as we do—but every time in the past when George was putting over one of his coups there was always a flock of croakers sitting round and saying it couldn't be done. And while they were saying it couldn't be done, George was going right ahead and doing the thing. That's why he's—why he's George Judson," she concluded, radiantly triumphant.
Maidie felt fairly deflated, and conceding the case against herself, could only be mildly waspish with, "That's why you're Fay Judson, too."
Fay flushed, but preserved her sang-froid.
"You can't see me the wife of a business failure, can you?" she inquired coolly.
The two girls kissed, and Maidie went her way—wondering. Fay remained behind—also wondering, although her argument had quite convinced herself, and it was really more than ninety-eight per cent curiosity and an opportunity to be playfully subtle that made her inquire that night,
"George, what does it mean to overstay one's market?"
George looked puzzled. "Why, uh—why?" and he hesitated, frowning—frowning as if he were going to shunt her off, but she would not be shunted.
"That's what they're saying about you, dear!" she accused him sweetly. "That you've overstayed your market."
The frown blew up in a quick burst of laughter. "They are, are they? Ha, ha, ha!" And George roared long and loudly—long enough to get plenty of time to think. Then he explained volubly. "It means, my dear, that some people are getting envious—that the wish is father to the thought—that I saw something before they did, and that I'm about to clean up on it—two years' profits in one twelve months and a little better. Overstayed my market. Ha, ha, ha!"
An expression of glorified relief sunned itself on his wife's face.