Man's Country/Chapter 19
AT four o'clock on Friday, after a perfect dream of a cruise, the Gray Gull drew into her dock, but Fay Judson looked in vain for her husband. For certain reasons she was painfully anxious to greet him—vague, undefinable reasons; emotions, perhaps, they were instead—but they made her doubly desirous to be folded to her husband's breast and made sure that she was entirely his.
But no husband was in sight. Instead—Blakeley, standing embarrassed and uncertain in the back of the crowd. He made his way to her as soon as the gangplank was down.
"Mr. Judson hopes you have had a pleasant cruise and regrets that a business trip has called him away."
"Out of town? What time will he get into the city this afternoon? Surely he could not have forgotten the Newcomb dinner."
"Not before tomorrow," admitted Blakeley, serious as the man was always serious.
Tomorrow? Fay could have cried with vexation; then something womanly, something more wifely than a sense of slight, got hold of her. "Is—is anything wrong, Blakeley?" she asked in a low tone. "Seriously wrong?" Her blue eyes looked startled and soberly anxious.
Blakeley was scared as well as surprised. Surprised beyond measure to see that Mrs. Judson had no faint suspicion of that whirlpool rapid through which her husband's business affairs were being buffeted as if they had been a barrel with George on the inside. Scared because he knew if she was to be told anything now, it would be by one who did not know what she had been told before—and obviously her husband had told her something to keep suspicion allayed.
"Why, no; nothing serious," assured Blakeley, and Fay with quick relief decided that he was only embarrassed. "Just that Mr. Judson got an opportunity to save something on a parts contract by getting right out on the ground at once," blundered the secretary.
Fay dismissed the man with a nod. "Thank you so much for coming," she said sweetly, but her lips tightened between this speech and the one she addressed to Sir Brian as she turned vivaciously upon him.
"Isn't it too vexing?" she exclaimed. "George had to go away on an old business trip and couldn't be here to welcome us home. He sent his greetings though, and you must come over to dinner tomorrow night and tell George about that experience of yours in the heart of Africa. Of course he'll be for entertaining you with how he has driven a bargain for seven hundred tons of rubber or something like that at an eighth of a cent below the market in Congo or Belgium or Vladivostock or wherever it is that rubber comes from."
She laughed; and Sir Brian laughed—perhaps because what Fay said was funny—or perhaps because he perceived that she would not have made a speech like this about her husband's business before they started on this cruise.
"But—but—whatever shall I do?" wailed Charlotte Newcomb, when over the telephone Fay broke the news that George Judson was detained by a most vexatious and entirely unexpected business entanglement.
"I—I could bring Sir Brian, I think," Fay suggested tentatively.
The wail went out of Mrs. Newcomb's voice in one sudden gasp of relief. "Oh, do!" she emphasized gratefully. "Fay, you are a lifesaver! You wreck me and then you rescue me."
"Thank goodness, that horrid situation was saved!" reflected Fay after she had had one more telephone conversation. "Sir Brian is such a convenience, I don't know how I ever did without him."
She grew pensive, studying herself in the mirror. "A woman of leisure should marry a man of leisure," she decided. "I thought I was going to be a help to George. I thought I wanted to help him, but—" Some upper teeth indented her full, red lip, and she was silent once more, staring thoughtfully at the pattern of a rug.
And this mental defection of the wife came at a particular moment when George was rather in need of assistance, too. He was down in Ohio in a town with an Indian name, and he was dealing with a man with an Indian torturer's heart. The contract between the Elbert Wheel Company and the Judson-Morris Motor Company was the means of torture. Jim Elbert was ruthlessly slicing his pound of flesh with a rusty knife from the quivering business form of Judson-Morris. At length George was satisfied that his appeals fell on absolutely stony ground; that he could win no concessions, no consideration whatever.
"Very well," the young man announced, with a sudden change of manner from earnest appeal to dangerous resignation and a trap-like click of his even, strong teeth. "Very well, Mr. Elbert; you shall have your blood-money. You shall deliver those wheels exactly as per specifications, and you will get your checks. But when the last wheel is shipped and the last check is in, write our name off your books. It will never appear there again. Thanks, too, for that little oration of yours on how a wheel is made. It has given me an idea. There is one profit that our next year's car will save. Hereafter we shall build our own wheels."
Mr. Elbert looked startled. For one thing, he understood force and defiance much better than he understood an appeal for mercy. For another, this swift change in manner unsteadied him—made him fear that he had grasped too tightly.
"Going on?" he husked. "Why, George, I heard you couldn't go on. I understood there wasn't going to be any next year for Judson-Morris."
"Couldn't go on! Are you crazy?" snapped the automobile builder irritably. "Don't you know Judson-Morris is entirely solvent? The little setback in the market this year was due to a mistake in judgment, and I'm the man that made it. I'm the man that's going to unmake it, too." And there came an exultant chuckle to George's throat.
"But, George," protested Jim Elbert with a pained expression, "if you're going on, why we want to go on too. If I had understood that—"
"Yes," interrupted the president of Judson-Morris, "if you had known that we were not in as bad as you thought, you'd not have squeezed us as hard as you did. But now that you've done the pincers act you're through. As I told you, we shall build our own wheels from this on."
George Judson walked out of the office and down to his hotel. His teeth were gritted. He was going on—on.
He reached Detroit physically exhausted and mentally weary and naturally turned to his home as to a haven of rest. He had faced some of the bitterest experiences of his business life. That was tough! But his wife had been away upon a delightful pleasure trip. That was fine.
He would rush into her arms, and she would rush into his. She would kiss the sore spots of his spirit; her warm caresses would rest and revive him. They would have a joyous little evening together, and he would go forth in the morning with the nerve and strength of a conqueror once more.
And Fay did receive him tenderly, but seemed hardly to appreciate that he might be weary or that he was scarred with wounds encountered upon the way to honorable victory over circumstances that were adverse. Well—give an account of yourself! was rather her mood, and in his stiff-necked pride he gave it only sketchily, without illuminating detail or comprehensive analysis, and it was in consequence but sketchily appreciated.
"And now, what kind of trip did you have?" he asked with assumed enthusiasm as they sat down to a tête-à-tête dinner.
"Wonderful! Wonderful!" and Fay opened her eyes in unaffected ecstasies as at the memory of a perfect adventure. "Sir Brian was such a dear. He enjoyed everything so much—in his undemonstrative way."
And so she went on. But unfortunately, when she came to rhapsodize on Sir Brian at the Newcombs' dinner, she was inevitably reminded of her husband's latest breach of the law of good breeding by running out on the same dinner, thereby introducing Sir Brian to it at all. With burning eloquence she read the indictment to the unhappy culprit, and then with her reproachful blue eyes pinned him like a butterfly on a cork.
George fanned himself violently with his napkin. "Gee whiz, Fay! Can't you understand?" he squirmed. "A whole lot of things came up unexpectedly. This new model we've decided on rather suddenly for next year meant new contracts with our parts makers, and I had to go chasing round to see every one of 'em personally."
"But couldn't you have seen them this week?" she inquired with a superior air.
"This week?" George looked at her in simple amazement. What was the matter with her that she couldn't understand?
Rallying his frayed nerves, he started to be very patient. "No, Fay, dear," he began with a kind of sweet reasonableness. Then the slight
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frown upon her beautiful brow caused his patience to take wings. He thought, judging from past experiences, that he saw the futility of it all. "No!" he blurted with sudden anger. "No! This week wouldn't do as well. Look here, Fay! Confound it, I'm tired. I'm working hard. I've been traveling. I haven't been getting my sleep. I'm not going to stand for any more of this sort of thing. I won't be bawled out like this. I'll come to your darn fool social stunts when I can—when it's convenient—but when it isn't, I won't; and I'm not going to try to tell you why, either. Just business; that's the reason!—Just business!"
Somewhere in the delivery of this speech George had risen and pushed back his chair. Fay was astounded and terribly hurt. Then her pride was touched, and she was bitterly angry, but she would not respond in kind. She owed too much to her own self-respect. She would be cutting instead.
"I might have known," she said, with quivering nostrils and a curl of her beautiful lips, "that a man of your—your practical nature, would be perfectly common whenever anything displeased him."
"Humph!" snorted George, and stood gazing at his wife as if she had struck him unfairly. Then, fearful of what he might say or she might, if the argument were continued, he tried to manifest self-control by pushing his chair in with nice precision. "You will regret this, Fay," he said reproachfully, and he walked out of the room with his head in the air.
Fay watched him, still terribly angry, but stricken with the realization that that was her husband who was walking away from her. It was appalling to think that he could do such a thing.
So they parted—and so they eventually went to bed—for the first time without a good-night kiss.
But George was restless and remorseful and couldn't sleep. Somewhere past midnight he tiptoed, pajama-clad, to his wife's bedside. The instreaming light of a brilliant moon revealed her position and her features—the position of a person stiffly awake; and he saw her eyes wide but unregarding; yet they had to see him—how he stood with mournful contrition in his pose and how humbly he stooped, lower and lower, till his lips touched her hand and kissed it in token of—of what?—submission—no; of affection and desire to be at peace.
Because she did not draw the hand away, but suffered his lips upon it, he argued that she was mollified, and shuffled gratefully back to bed without speaking a word. That she was mollified or relenting or even remorseful upon her own account seemed evident when she took pains to be at breakfast with him in the morning. No allusions were made to the quarrel of the night before, but the pair were ostentatiously considerate and tender toward each other.
George drove off with the notion that the atmosphere had cleared; that he had successfully turned another corner in his marital experience; that he had asserted his independence sufficiently and that his wife would not again heckle him for failure to figure at a social function when business beckoned him violently in another direction.
And business was beckoning violently now. Knot by knot, he actually had the craft gaining speed again. The biggest impulse to this came from Hilary.
Hilary was a tall, pale man with a pinched face and a bulging brow surmounted by a tuft of thin, brown hair. Taciturn and secretive, working alone and almost unnoticed in a corner of the engineering shop, Hilary had been the man to whom Milton Morris was accustomed to take the knottiest of his practical problems. And now, like a flash out of darkness, this taciturn, secretive, competent chap shuffled in to Chilton's desk one day with a design for a new car that instantly commended itself to the vice-president's discerning eye. George Judson saw the points even more quickly than Chilton.
"You've got it, man! You've got our next car right there in your hand!" he declared with a burst of enthusiasm that nearly bowled over the bashful designer. "You're a darn poor publicity man, Hilary, but you've got ideas."
After Hilary got his first car of the new design built and George had studied its lines and ridden in it, his enthusiasm was greater yet.
"This car is a hummer, Hilary," he told its creator, "and by the way, there is no reason at all, is there, why the wheel on this model should not be exactly the same as the wheel on the Nemo?"
"None in particular," mumbled Hilary.
"Good!" said George. "That's where we save ourselves from Jim Elbert. I've got to take thirty-two thousand wheels I didn't want from him, and we'll use them up that way. Meanwhile we'll be getting our own wheel shop under way."
"Wire wheels will be coming back sometime," opined Hilary, an absurdly long speech for him. "Maybe soon."
"You think so?" asked George, surprised.
After his inarticulate fashion Hilary expounded his reasons for the views expressed and did it convincingly enough to give the President of Judson-Morris pause.
"Guess we better plan that wheel factory for both wire and wood, and then we can jump with the cat," he decided, and in doing so felt himself getting conservative.
Yet no one who knew exactly what was happening in the Judson-Morris Works could accuse him of that for one minute, because, at a time when his whole works were shut down except the assembling and shipping departments, he was stubbornly going on with the enlargement of the factory. Seven thousand men out. Department after department empty and silent as a tomb, but walls still lengthening, tons and tons of steel going in, yards and yards of concrete being poured every day.
"He's an idiot and a fool!" growled one of Ford's men whom some business had brought into the plant.
"Or he's the greatest wizard of them all!" chuckled John Williams.