Executive Suite (45 page)

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 …?