Man's Country/Chapter 24
THE next day, and the next and next—and on and on till the time turned magically into weeks and months—George Judson felt free to let himself sink into business with greater absorption than ever. He had once more achieved an understanding with his wife; the fact became more and more evident as time sped by. To this was added also a new kind of headclear confidence.
Things went swimmingly, too. A year went by—a year of splendid profit, with losses wiped out, with dividends declared, surplus accumulated, and prestige restored. George sensed himself as once more secured in the seat of executive control. The habit of success was once more resumed. Faith in Hilary as the designer to succeed Milton Morris had been amply justified. His second model, the Shiloh, took the water with a loud splash at the January shows, and Judson-Morris cars swept again definitely into the lead of their class.
Season by season, too, saw George's general judgments on the development of the industry confirmed. The factory went on building—went on expanding—production and profits went on increasing. Judson-Morris began to be a real factor in the automobile world and in the financial world as well. Twice in four years it was recapitalized and refinanced.
It was no longer a close corporation. Old holdings were broken up and went on the market. The stock was listed on exchanges.
There came a time when in a single year the earnings of George's remaining thirty-six per cent. of the stock would have sufficed to buy in the open market the fifteen thousand shares of Judson-Morris necessary to make sure and permanent his control, but the young president did not seize this opportunity, because in that moment his loyalty to his company and its future proved greater than any mere self-interest. He refused to halt the year-by-year expansion by declaring a hull-clean dividend of all its earnings. In part this was because George Judson loved his company better than he loved himself. For his company he would seize the moment; for himself he would take a chance. This was typically Judsonian—in a way, it is typically American. Today, George believed, was the seeding time, tomorrow the harvest; the greater the sowing, the larger the harvest; therefore he never paid off today what could be invested to create a larger fund for paying off tomorrow. It seemed a shrewd policy, but it had its hazards.
So also had matrimony! He had discovered that afresh and many times in these swift, successful years. Fay's attitude of sweet charitableness toward those exactions which business made of him had been disappointingly and perplexingly short-lived. What was the matter?
It did not seem to be Sir Brian. And yet Sir Brian was still around. But that was only because the globe-trotting young Englishman had a new hobby—air-flight. The feats of the Wright Brothers and others had challenged his sporting instincts. The idea of so combining a few struts of wire, a few spruce laths, and a few yards of canvas that one could thereby take a gasoline engine up in the air and go roaring round among the clouds with it appealed to his passion for adventure. So he flitted between the Wrights at Dayton and Glenn Curtiss at Buffalo, and every little while came back to Detroit to consult about the details of an engine to be perfected especially for this kind of service.
And every time he came he saw a good deal of the Judsons. George being busy he saw more of Mrs. Judson, yet there was not the slightest feeling of jealousy created by this, for the demeanor of Fay at this time was not that of a woman who loved her husband less, but more. Garbed for the links, looking her sweetest, her prettiest, and most winsome, Fay would plead with pouting lips:
"George! Do come out and have a round of golf with us this afternoon."
And George would be laughingly contemptuous. "Knocking a pill round a pasture? Nope! Not today. Sorry, sweetheart, I've got something real to do."
Absorbed, content, oblivious—playing the greatest game he could conceive of, stroke by stroke, across his huge mahogany desk, he looked down in these days upon mere sport as the diversion of a child mind.
And Fay would be furiously angry and—then—tramping the links with another—Sir Brian, perhaps—would inevitably try to be charitable. "Dear old money-grabber!" she would sigh. But it was hardly to be wondered at if she grew jealous of the factory. "Sell it, George!" she appealed one day wistfully. "I am losing you. I can feel you slipping away from me every day. Sell it and get out so I can have you all to myself. I have so much more than enough for both of us, you know."
George was horrified. "But I can't get out, Fay," he tried to reason with her. "It isn't my money alone, you see. It's all the other fellows'. The stock has been sold and resold. The people who bought it didn't invest in shares in an automobile company. They took stock in me—in my reputation. You see, the whole big enterprise is pyramided on me. I've got to stay and make good for everybody that reposes a dollar's worth of confidence in me. I have—in honor, you know."
As he said this, his eyes glowed with a fine light. Fay saw that he was right, and was willing to try to be patient and resigned.
"And how long will it take to work the thing out?" she asked hopefully.
"Only five to seven years," responded George in accents of cheer.
"Oh, my God!" Fay groaned. Her face had become gray and frightened. "Seven years?" she whispered the words to herself as if weighing them in her mind, pronouncing the numeral as if it had been seventy instead of seven. "I'll—George!" and she clutched at him helplessly. "I'll be an old woman then. I'll be past thirty."
It was only her profound seriousness that saved her husband from jeering, from ejaculating "Rats!" or some other such disrespectful and unfeeling expletive. Instead he expostulated with sweet reasonableness: "Why, Fay! You'll just be coming into your prime. What a wonderful woman you'll be at thirty! No woman gets to her real beauty before that."
But the wife sat pulling her hands restlessly, with the gray look again in her face, and George had recourse to an old expedient for rallying her spirits. He painted the picture of his ultimate ideal for the plant—a huge hive for a happy industrial brotherhood, in which the man who's wept the floor, the man who worked at the lathe, the stenographer at the typewriter—every last employee, in fact—was also to be an owner. The factory was to be a noble social enterprise in which everybody worked for everybody else and each made profit for himself. And Fay was carried away by this fine enthusiasm as she had frequently been before.
"Just to think of doing that for so many, many people!" she cried, and clung to his hand. "I guess I can stick it out just for that, George," she confided to him earnestly.
But she could never hold a vision and a purpose like this for long. After a few days.
"I'm too weak, George," she would confess despairingly; "too selfish. I'm only a sybarite after all."
"No, you're not, honey; no, you're not," he would comfort. "Sybarite? Why, I should say not. You do your share of the world's work by just helping me do mine."
But when it became apparent to him that by no stretch of the imagination was she helping him to do his work, he decided the time had come for a little straight talk.
"But I get so bored with just—just nothing to do but be a wife," she broke out at him one day, and he whipped back with,
"For heaven's sake! What's the matter with being a wife? If you'd try to be the kind of wife that Eleanor Hickson is, for example, you'd have something to occupy you, all right. Why don't you do the kind of things with me that I want to do—for example—the things that rest me—the things that soothe my nerves—the things that make me fit to go back in the morning and put up a fight? God knows I need it. My job gets tougher every year. Now just look at Eleanor. She waits for old Charlie to come home like a mother for an only son. The first thing she does is to feel him out. If he craves golf, she's for it, if he'd rather smoke on the back porch and go to the theater in the evening she's for that; or if he just feels like shucking off into loose clothes and slippers and sitting around and playing five hundred with a pipe in his mouth that you can smell a mile, why she's for that and she plays the game with him, till he goes to sleep in his chair. If there's a dinner on when he doesn't feel up to a dinner, think she drags him out? Why, say, she'd make a thousand excuses to get him off. She'd lie like a devil to save him—save him, you understand!"
"You idiot!" reproached Mrs. Fay Judson, with a look of hot disdain. "To think of comparing me with a spiritless little echo like Eleanor Hickson."
But George was just getting warmed up to a whole series of helpful suggestions.
"Or," and he described a graceful circle with his cigarette hand; "why can't you be a wife like Norma Howes then. Look at Norma with her stock farms and her horse shows and her operatic star venture and her penchant for hanging round race tracks—and her far flung battle line of social engagements. She sails the seas like a privateer. She unpacks her trunks at Palm Beach or Newport or Coronado and she has a wonderful time. I doubt if she has a lonely minute.
"And do you think she spends much time fretting because her husband isn't along? Not much, she don't. She knows he's got to be at his desk chiseling out money for her to spend—good old Tom Howes, with the best set of selling brains under his bald bean that there is in the automobile industry save and excepting only one."
"Which modesty forbids you to mention," cut in his wife with biting scorn.
"Exactly," conceded George with the utmost complacency and blundered on with: "Think Tom crabs her when she comes home, broke and tired of the world, and ready to settle down to a long spell of connubial bliss? Not on your life. Tom's face lights up like factory windows at sunset and he gathers her into his arms like Romeo reaching for Juliet. They're happy, darn it! That's partnership—that's mutual accommodation—that's live and let live, that's—"
George was embarrassed and interrupted by perceiving that his wife was containing herself with difficulty, a prey to surprising, unreasonable anger, while he was innocently and stupidly unaware of having given her cause for anger. He had merely—merely tried to make himself plain—was all. Patient, long-suffering man that he was, he decided to try again. "You don't want to be a vampire, do you, Fay?" he inquired tenderly reproachful. "Just sucking all the business blood out of me—and trying to make me into a sort of—a sort of social lapdog?"
"Lapdog? . . ." and her tones quivered with scorn and wrath as she rose silently and ominously to a very climax of rage in which she exploded upon him with "You—you hedgehog!"
She accomplished a terrific sound of smashing something by a sudden crumpling of the evening paper which had lain in her lap, and flounced out of the room.
"Hedgehog! Whew!" chuckled George. "That was a hot one."
But the very next day Fay had lapsed into her most bewitching mood, that of languorous, challenging love.
"Oh, do come away to Daphnean groves, George, and play with me," she pleaded, with her most captivating smile, glancing up so coquettishly from under the long lashes, so ravishingly beautiful, so warm and palpitant and enticing, and withal so naïve that he could only pretend to resist her.
"Cleopatra pleading with Antony madly to throw a world away," he intoned jestingly. "Away, temptress! Avaunt!"
But he belied his words by drawing her into his arms with her laughing exultantly because her power to charm was still supreme when she chose to exert it. Yet when she could not charm him into a promise to give her more time from his business, she flew into a tantrum; then lapsed into quivering remorse.
"Oh, George! I do believe I'm the most unjust, unreasonable, ungrateful woman in the world," she confessed, weeping in despair over herself.
This was followed by a pitiful period in which Fay Judson tried to be the kind of wife that Eleanor Hickson was; but she couldn't keep it up. The cool-headed, warm-hearted, steady-nerved standing by required of a wife who would be a help-meet to George Judson, seasoned as he had been seasoned, doing what he was doing, had not been bred into Fay Judson—not yet.
"I'm too weak, George!" she confessed again. "I'm just a sybarite after all."
And there came a time when George no longer disputed this. He thought she was a sybarite, and he was willing to let her be a sybarite, if she would be just that and nothing else; but she wasn't. An eternal restlessness possessed her. She was always wanting to go somewhere—to do something that had never been done before. She had a fertile imagination and proved what an astonishing number of absurd enterprises one young woman can think of to propose when she has upward of three millions at her back and abundance of time upon her hands. But one day these proposals appeared to reach the climax of absurdity.
"Wha-a-at!" George ejaculated with coarse incredulity, his heavy brows lifted, his black comb-back seeming to rise along a ridge in its center, so great was his astonishment. "Head an expedition to search for the Garden of Eden? Me!"
Fay flushed but stood her ground. "Why, yes, George!" she enthused, sweetly radiant with innocent enthusiasm. "The Mesopotamian Valley is the most romantic place—cradle of history, you know—all full of ruins and cute little inscriptions on sun-baked bricks—important political records mixed in with letters schoolboys wrote to their fathers asking for money—thousands of years ago—letters of lovers to sweethearts, too."
"Oh, I see," scoffed George. "When a girl wanted to write a letter to her sweetheart, she heaved a brick at him."
"George! You ignoramus!" she rebuked. "Don't get funny, now. Those ruins are wasting away with every rain, being pillaged by every ignorant, roaming brigand. Precious knowledge may be lost to the world at any moment. Think how fine it would be for George Judson, the automobile manufacturer, to organize and lead a party up the valley of those two ancient rivers on the banks of which civilization was born—take a professor or two along, of course, to direct the excavations and read inscriptions. It would be such a lark, and besides it would be in the interest of science!"
"Science! Gosh, oh, gosh!" exploded George, who had restrained his impatience to the limit while he listened. "Say! Are you getting nutty? Are your I want to know." He seized her by the shoulders and looked into her eyes. "You'd better see a doctor," he decided. "You had—really."
Fay was naturally indignant at such irreverent scoffing at the dearest project she had conceived for a long, long time. "That's the way you always receive every suggestion I make—you—you stupid, old business drudge!" she reproached. "You haven't got a bit of interest in science!" Her tone of accusation was weepy. "I'll try going alone sometime—and then see how you like it!"
This was flung tauntingly from the door as an exasperated and bewildered husband stood staring after the departure of an exasperated and indignant wife.
As for Fay, she said not another word about an excursion to the cradle of civilization, but she had other words to say about other projects as wild, as mad, and to as distant points of the compass for other excuses just as invalid. A mania for far journeyings had taken hold of her.
"Jee-rusalem, where does she hear of 'em all—these countries, I mean?" George would rant. "Gosh! I'm going to burn all the geographies and encyclopedias before she digs up any new places to go. What is it? What is it?"
He tried to make light of that whole phase of Fay's life with him, and did. He laughed away her proposals; he kissed away her tears—he permitted no base suspicions to enter his mind. He was glad of Sir Brian around occasionally to take her places and entertain her and keep her mind from brooding on his inability to be always her escort.
It was not until he realized that Fay's love moods had become so rare that they had almost disappeared; that there were no more of those attacks of quivering remorse; that there was only listlessness and despondency verging on despair that he waked up to the fact that there was something absolutely abnormal in the state of relations with his wife.
"What the devil is the matter with me," he burst out savagely at himself, "that I can't make one little woman happy?"
That was his position in general upon this matter until there happened into Detroit an eminent practitioner of psychoanalysis, summoned from New York as an expert witness in a will case of Ralph Tracey's in which subconscious mental histories were involved. For three days it was a cause célèbre, and for that period of time the Detroit papers were full of talk about this strange science of diagnosis by dreams.
On the evening before the specialist's departure, the Traceys gave him a little dinner at their home. Among the dozen guests were George and Fay and Sir Brian. The noted guest, large of face and body, proved also a large-brained person with engaging manners and a most agreeable willingness to discourse about his favorite theme.
"Beware how you tell me your dreams!" he challenged, and at once every one was offering what he deemed a discreetly censored sample of his dream life; but the doctor's ready interpretations and keen deductions were disconcerting as well as intriguing. Some he interpreted fully, some guardedly; some he did not interpret, causing the narrators a certain feeling of discomfort as wondering what it might be they had unwittingly revealed that was so terrible it might not be stirred into the potpourri.
At first every one was vastly entertained, and then some were thoughtful and reserved and introspective or restless, as if they heard skeletons rattling or had unintentionally submitted themselves to the disclosures of an X-ray eye and would be ill at ease until they would wriggle out of range of this blazing searchlight of the under soul.
But one cannot run away from a dinner, and one cannot sit forever dumb. Presently, when those with misgivings in their breast perceived that to fall suddenly quiet was to confess some vague sense of guilt, everybody began laughing and chatting and bantering each other and the doctor. But a skilled psychoanalyst is a dangerous man with whom to bandy wits. Where the subject trenches on his special field, he is sure to suspect if not actually discern the truth which so often lies behind the jest.
As the evening wore on, the doctor gathered an astonishing amount of information about these perfectly respectable people; things their neighbors had never been permitted to know; in a few instances, things they did not even know about themselves. One guest in particular excited his interest because of a mental state peculiarly ripe for analysis and because such swift deductions as he could make aroused his keenest sympathy. This person also attracted him because of her unusual beauty. He said to himself that he would like to help that disturbed, wistful little woman if he could, and to that end he favored her with special attention and a discussion cunningly calculated to draw out more of what lay behind those violet eyes.
But there were two guests of the Traceys who told the doctor none of their dreams. One was Sir Brian Hook. The other was George Judson. He was too frankly interested in the doctor's marvelous display of his powers and the possibilities which they raised in his mind to intrude anything concerning himself. He knew all about himself anyway. Accustomed always in his business to the employment of experts, whether in science of technology, to solve problems that his organization could not solve of itself, he was quick to grasp the fact that here was an expert in a new department of human knowledge whose good intent he could trust implicitly and whose skill might be of profound and grateful assistance to him.
In the confusion, exclusions, and contacts incident to the departure of a number of guests, George made opportunity to get the doctor's ear for a moment.
"You are leaving at eight in the morning, I believe," he postulated. "Don't do it, please, Doctor! You have impressed me tremendously, and I feel that I must consult you upon a matter of grave importance. Money is absolutely of no consideration if you can help me."
And the doctor gave surprising proof of his powers when he slanted a sympathetic eye directly into the earnest, anxious face before him and answered straight, "Yes, Mr. Judson, I agree with you that you must consult me."
"You—you know something?" stammered George, and gripped him by the hand.
The doctor returned the grip appreciatingly, but "Tomorrow at eleven," was all he whispered.