The Embezzler (7 page)

"But not you, sir!"

"No, Guy, not me." He shook his head almost wearily. "But I am a privileged person. At de Grasse we are small enough and old enough to do our own picking and choosing. It is not really a moral choice. It's more that life's too bloody short not to do the worthwhile thing. That's a rich man's luxury."

How he inspired me! The detached contemplation, the bemused induction, the ultimate decision taken in silence and calm; that was how I pictured him at work. A great, grave doctor by the bedside of our economy, finger on pulse, meditating a transfusion. Was it wrong of me to have plotted to share that with Rex? I never fooled myself that I was Mr. de Grasse's intellectual equal, but I was convinced that Rex was. It seemed logical to suppose that if I brought him into my relationship with the older man, he might fill in its empty corners, and indeed for a time it worked out just this way. The start, however, was inauspicious.

We were asked to lunch at the big house on the first Sunday after Rex's arrival. I persuaded my friend that this was not really "social life," so he reluctantly went. Our host, unfortunately, was in one of his sullen, silent moods, and Rex plunged into a similar one in the unfamiliar atmosphere of the dining room with its yellow and brown clothed walls, its dark angry lithographs of bears and lions in their native habitats (Mr. de Grasse did not waste his taste on country abodes) and its bay window through which shimmered the glory of Frenchman's Bay, but unreally, like the view from a prison castle in a child's picture book. Mrs. de Grasse, Boston bred, whose father had built "The Eyrie," presided benignly but uncommunicatively over our sparsely enjoyed meal, and the three girls, still shy but now grown sentimental, like so many of the daughters of intellectual men, giggled at private jokes among themselves. In desperation, I brought up a topic that Rex had forbidden me.

"It might interest you to know, Mr. de Grasse, that my friend here is the winner of the Bennett award."

"Oh, for pity's sake, Guy!" Rex hissed.

"And what, pray tell, is the Bennett award?"

"It is a prize for the best Harvard economic paper of the year," I persisted. "Rex wrote his on the Sherman Act. You know, the law that's putting the fear of God into all those highhanded tycoons you complain about?"

"I know the Act," Mr. de Grasse said drily, "and I admit the complaints. But I wonder if the cure isn't worse than the disease. It may be one thing to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous magnates, but it's quite another to live in a police state where no man is allowed to distinguish himself from the mob." He turned one eye now on Rex. "I suppose, Mr. Geer, as a young intellectual, and no doubt as a radical, you approve of this legislation?"

"I think the weak should have some protection from the strong, sir. If that makes me a radical, I suppose I must be a radical."

"And the constitution, what of that?" Mr. de Grasse had flared a bit at Rex's tone. "Or do you subscribe to Wendell Holmes' theory that it is a mere barometer of public opinion, to be interpreted according to the whim of the prevailing majority?"

"I don't understand that to be Justice Holmes' theory, sir, but then I don't claim to be an expert on constitutional law. Still, I can't see why it should be wrong to save little businesses from being eaten up by big ones. Unless the founding fathers meant to codify the law of the jungle."

"You don't think a man should look out for himself? You think he should run to the government every time he takes a licking?"

"Do you know what you put me in mind of, Mr. de Grasse?" Rex had by now lost what little awe and reticence he may have had. "An expert swordsman in an age of musketeers. You know there are bullies about, but so long as you can defend yourself, you don't worry about those who can't. And you oppose any ban on dueling on the ground that it will turn men into fops."

"One can make a very good case for dueling..." I was beginning, but nobody listened to me. Mr. de Grasse and Rex were too thoroughly engrossed in their own fight.

"You would run society, Mr. Geer, for the benefit of its weakest members?"

"For them, sir, as well as the strong."

This was Rex Geer speaking! Rex, who in another quarter century would be one of the principal critics of the New Deal, one of the last champions of
laisser faire!
But we should not be surprised. Such transitions are common enough. The twentieth century has moved much faster than its citizens.

"That attitude spells to me the end of everything exciting and colorful in the world," Mr. de Grasse now protested. "I don't say that I want a world populated only by Borgias and Medicis, but if you legislate them out of existence, don't you lose your Da Vincis and your Michelangelos too? There must have been some connection between the two."

"If there was, we've lost it today. I doubt if Saint-Gaudens makes up for Jay Gould." Here Rex actually slapped his hand on the table as he moved into the offensive. "But the real point against the Borgias, Mr. de Grasse, is not so much that they rob us as that they corrupt us. You think, sir, that you can conduct a gentleman's banking business in a world of swindlers. But you can't. In a market place the lowest permitted standard is bound to become the prevailing one."

Mr. de Grasse at this turned away from Rex altogether. "Of course, if you're going to call a man a swindler in his own house," he muttered, and then he said no more.

This was very bad, and for the balance of the wretched meal I made nervous conversation about the new pool at the swimming club with Mrs. de Grasse.

Rex apologized to me in sulky fashion on the way home, but I told him, a bit shortly, to forget it. That afternoon I took my copy of his award paper up to the big house and left it with a note for Mr. de Grasse saying: "It may be better to read Rex than to hear him."

In the morning I went up again and found the old boy in his study, actually reading the paper. I say "old," for so he always seemed to me, though I doubt if he was more than fifty-five at the time.

"I heard a great horned owl at two this morning," I told him. "I have an idea he sleeps in the big elm by the old stable. Would you care to walk down and see?"

"What about your friend? Won't he come?"

"He thinks he's not exactly
persona grata.
"

"Is he such a sensitive plant?"

"Not in the least. He simply doesn't like to push in where he's not wanted."

Mr. de Grasse sighed. "Doesn't he know anything about the petulance of the elderly? Tell him to make allowances. And give him this." He opened the superb leather-bound copy of Herbert Spencer's
Social Statics
that was always on his desk and wrote on the fly-leaf: "From d'Artagnan to Richelieu: 'Almost thou persuadest me to give up dueling.'" "There. Bring him up for lunch. If he'll come. I don't feel up to the great horned owl today."

From then on, for the rest of Rex's visit, everything went beautifully between him and Mr. de Grasse. Inevitably, I felt excluded from their technical discussions of economic matters, but I consoled myself by remembering that they owed their friendship to my machinations. My satisfaction was complete when, after Rex's return to Vermont, on a Sunday night after supper in the big house, Mr. de Grasse asked me:

"Do you think your friend would be interested in coming to work at de Grasse?"

"Why don't you write him and ask?"

"Because he's so prickly. But I'll certainly try."

My scheme, however, was still not implemented. Back at Harvard I found that Rex had received Mr. de Grasse's offer but had not yet accepted it. He was suspicious.

"I can't owe
everything
to you, Guy. You get me a prize that keeps me in college..."

"I had nothing to do with that."

"Well, anyway, that's the way it's beginning to seem to me. You give me a summer vacation, you launch me in a swank resort, and now you get me a job. You'll probably fix me up with an apartment in New York and a rich wife!"

"But don't you see what you do for
me?
" I retorted with mock gravity. "I was a libertine, and you've made me serious. I was a prodigal, and you've made me respectable."

"You don't even know me," Rex continued gloomily. "You've never met my family. You probably can't imagine how different they are."

"Why don't you invite me to your home?"

"Would you come?"

"Ask me!"

And so it was arranged that we should go to Vermont on the first weekend when Rex thought he could properly cut his Saturday classes, which was not until November. In East Putnam I shared his bedroom on the third floor of the old Gothic rectory that was attached to the church, and, for the first and last time, I met his parents. It was not, in later years, that Rex was ashamed of them. On the contrary, he was tremendously devoted and tender. But they were simple folk, very pure and very silent, and he saw nothing to be gained by disturbing them with the company of more sophisticated souls. He did not hide them; he protected them.

Jude Geer was afraid that his son would be corrupted by New York sharks; his wife, that he would be corrupted by New York women. I thought they were both very dear and very naive; later, I was to wonder if they were not rather shrewd. The girl whom they favored, the girl "next door," Lucy Ames, as bright and pert and good as the heroine of a Trollope novel, was obviously in love with Rex, and he, equally obviously, was not in the least in love with her. The three of them made rather pathetic efforts to win my favor, as if I represented Rex's future and they only his past. They did not understand that nobody represented Rex, I perhaps less than any.

It was nice of them, however, not to identify me with the evils and temptations that would await Rex in New York. They seemed charmingly to take for granted that his best friend must have all the virtues and not the vices of the dangerous new world that he hoped to conquer. Lucy discussed with me whether or not Rex should go to law school before becoming a banker, his mother asked me if he ate regular meals at Cambridge, and the Reverend Geer, to whom I devoted my particular attention, ended by consulting me about his next week's sermon. When Rex discovered me with his father, in the latter's study, examining on a biblical map the route of Moses from Egypt to the promised land, he burst into a hoot of laughter.

"I think, Dad, we're giving the poor man quite a dose of East Putnam!" he exclaimed. "But he's passed every test with flying colors." As he led me forcibly away, he spoke in a tone that was almost gentle: "You win, Guy. You've seen me everywhere now: at school, in Bar Harbor, at home. You've seen me every place I've ever been! If you think de Grasse is the spot for me and that I'll fit in there, well then, let's try de Grasse. Who am I to slam the door in opportunity's face?"

R
EX AND
I took an apartment together when we came down from Harvard to work in de Grasse. My uncle Lewis Prime let us have the commodious third story of his carriage house just off Lexington Avenue in Sixtieth Street for a nominal rent, and I decorated it gaily, as I hoped, with
art nouveau
theatrical posters and odd bits of Tiffany glass. Father wanted me to live at home, and he looked askance at my continued friendship with Rex, whom he had found a surly, socially unprepossessing fellow in Bar Harbor, but he was much too wise openly to oppose the arrangement. He thought it entirely fitting when Rex informed him that he would always regard the apartment as mine and himself as merely the subtenant of a single bedroom. But I, of course, could have none of that. I would have shared anything with Rex, even my girls.

Most fathers of that day worried that their sons' friends would lure them to pleasures; mine was afraid that Rex might entice me to overwork. Father seemed to see my poor subtenant as a clerkish Lorelei with an account book instead of a golden comb, and, as an antidote to Rex's influence, he reminded me constantly of my duty to take up what he called my "position" in New York society.

"Success, my boy, isn't only a matter of grinding away at the office. That's all very well for a fellow like Rex Geer who hasn't any other way up. You mustn't forget that we live in an overpopulated, overeducated world where it's always possible to hire a hack to do the technical job. It's
getting
the job that counts. And where do you get the big jobs? Where the big people are, of course!"

I pointed out that Mr. de Grasse seemed to care very little about the business that his clerks brought in and quite a lot about how they did their work.

"I don't say you're not to do your work properly," Father retorted testily. "Of course, you are. And de Grasse is an excellent place to be apprenticed. But I have greater plans for you than to spend your life as junior partner to some de Grasse heir or nephew, looking after old Marcellus' daughters' money!"

I knew what Father's "greater plans" for me were: he wanted to set me up in a brokerage house to be called "Guy Prime & Company." My next question was indiscreet enough to bring on one of our rare quarrels.

"Will there be room for Rex in those greater plans?"

"My dear boy," Father answered, with his most provoking condescension, "you will forgive me for saying that you seem to be quite infatuated with that young man. If I am to set you up on Wall Street, it will be with men of your own class. I haven't worked all my life for the future of Reginald Geer."

"Worked!" I could not help exclaiming. "Excuse me, sir, but when did you work?"

Father's face turned a faint pink, a most unusual phenomenon with him, and those long agile fingers twined and re-twined themselves around the silver handle of his walking stick. "Never mind how I've worked," he reproved me sharply. "One day you'll find out and beg my pardon for your impertinence. One day you'll learn which is your truer friend: your father or that young man."

"Do you imply that he's using me?"

"Certainly, he's using you, and I don't blame him in the least. These things aren't done in cold blood, mind you. The circumstances create them. You will understand that when you've watched the human ant heap as long as I have. Young Geer is by nature a self-aggrandizing animal. He moves upwards wherever you put him. Of course, he'll crawl over you, if you let him. He can't help himself. He wants the moon. He wants to be first in de Grasse, first in Wall Street, first in society."