The Trespassers (34 page)

“Vee, listen, I’ve got the damnedest news.” Had she heard about Chamberlain’s announcement? She had not, and he told her. Instantly her whole mood was electric, just right for his own private bombshell.

“So, darling, we’re starting right away—going on the air in about forty hours.”

“Oh—oh, Jas—
no
—oh, how grand—when did you—how can you possibly?”

Quickly he told her.

“So God knows when I can see you,” he ended. “I’ll snatch an hour sometime tonight or tomorrow night, and run up.”

“It doesn’t matter, darling—don’t even phone—I’ll know—oh, this is too wonderful, I’m so happy for you, I know what it must feel like.”

“Well, anyway, better get up early Friday. Want to come down here for the first actual broadcast?”

“Do I just!”

“Breakfast at seven. Good-by now, darling, it sounds as if the whole company’s outside my door, waiting to get in.”

Twenty people were waiting to come into Jasper’s office. When he had them all together, all his major people, each charged with one branch of this intricate business, he told them the decision. They cheered it, they discussed it, and then they went back to their separate responsibilities to make it happen.

Hour raced after hour. The operators at the switchboard nearly collapsed before relief girls could be called in. Calls to Los Angeles, to Dallas, to Boston, to Chicago and St. Louis, every large city in every part of the country. Calls to London, to Berlin, to Prague. Calls to RCA Short-Wave Department, to A.T. & T. Wire-Service Department, to any and every company connected with the world of radio. The head operator at the switchboard wanted desperately to listen in long enough to find out why insanity had burst into the lines, but the red lights gave no more than a second here and there for eavesdropping.

Into every floor, every corner throughout the organization—into the studios, the control rooms, the business offices, the advertising office, the news rooms—everywhere the insanity burst. But it was an insanity only on the surface; under it a cool, directed expertness operated toward one carefully and lengthily planned end.

Far into the night, all next day, and again into the night, it went on. Everything worked, everything clicked into place. One by one the far-flung stations of the country were called by phone and notified of the swift decision. One by one, the reaction thrummed back along the wires—“Ready, go ahead, good luck.” Konhardt, head of Station Relations, called all the independents first, with no contractual obligations to hold them back. Then he began on every one of the remaining eighty-five, on the chance that something had changed and that they could be hooked up at once. Hour after hour at the telephone, his pencil making marks on the chart before him.

As the hours wore on, as report after report came back to him, from man after man in his employ, from department after department, Jasper Crown felt a triumph, an elation he had never before known in his life.

A world network was emerging, and it was his. Once it had been only sheets of typed paper, printed contracts, engraved certificates of stock. Once it had been only endless talks and interviews for money, for talent, for executives. Once it had been only ceaseless strain and tension and anger and enthusiasm. But now from all these chromosomes a creature was at last being born. He had conceived it, he had developed it, and now it was emerging into a life, a power of its own. It was his, forever his. And he himself would be, forever would be, its slave as well as its master.

By the last day of September, a new phenomenon of success had been recorded in the phenomenal history of radio.

From the moment the nine-o’clock signal had sounded on Friday, the sixteenth, from the moment the words came forth from receiving sets, “This is JCN—the Jasper Crown Network,” from then onward in time there had been only a mounting, flaring recognition of something big and new and good on the air.

By the end of the month, “The Crown Network calling from London”—from Paris, from Berlin, from Prague—was a phrase familiar to millions of radio listeners. JCN was a new password in radio stations throughout the land, in the radio departments of all advertising agencies, and in the advertising departments of all radio’s commercial sponsors.

To Jasper and his executives and stockholders came the quick. reports, “listening” surveys, audience polls that told the heady story. The thing was a miracle—its success was clear, solid, dazzling.

When the whole network was in operation, by the middle of October, scarcely a quarter hour of sellable time would remain to be sold. It looked as if they couldn’t miss a gross of ten million dollars in their very first year; if they grossed eleven million, they would be paying interest on the debentures, and dividends on the preferred. And if the skyrocketing luck of the first weeks should by some chance continue to flare for them, they might even gross fifteen—which would also leave a million for the common stock, and a net profit of over three million for the company in its first year.

Wherever Jasper went, people thumped congratulations no his shoulder, shook them, into his willing hand. They looked into his face while they praised him, as if they would read his secret in the very lines of his features. Overnight, he had become a national figure, a “name” to every owner of a radio.

He was dazed with lack of sleep, yet he never had known so strong and vigorous a current flow through him. This was good. This was food and drink to him, to that something inside which had always driven him on, looking, searching out the road that should prove to be the one right road for him.

Almost, his life was at its peak. The exultant thought came to him as he walked up Madison Avenue in the late afternoon of the last day of September. There was to be no war, not yet, and so one could again think of one’s own triumphs without any flick of guilt. And this was triumph on the grand scale. “He’s a great man, this Crown.” He had heard Frank Terson say that this afternoon, and he felt that through the network he could live up to that over-enthusiastic praise. Yes, almost at its peak. Not quite. Not until—

He frowned. Time went on, and on, he never missed his appointments with Dr. Gontlen, and still it remained just a theory, a conviction. It was not a fact. He hadn’t thought much about it these past two weeks, he hadn’t thought of anything personal these past two weeks. When he had seen Vee, even then he had talked about nothing but the network. She seemed as absorbed in it as he, as hilariously happy over the first reports of the unpredictable success as he. “She’s a good girl.” The words welled up in him suddenly, and he found himself moved by her understanding of what things meant to him. Most women—

And then he thought of Beth. Beth who was still in New York. Beth from whom he had heard not a word since that day early this month when he’d gone to force a showdown. He snorted. Everything else he could do, everything else he could manage, succeed at. But not this. “Great man,” indeed.

He stopped at a corner and stood thinking. This would have to be ended now, once and for all. Beth’s face came before him, the soft listlessness of it. He brushed it impatiently away from his mind. Cruel, ruthless—no matter what she thought about him, this nonsense of delay must stop. Today was the day. Now, while he felt this current, this torrent roaring through him which told him there was nothing he could not do.

He began to walk again, he could get there in ten minutes. He would not telephone. Better to take his chances on finding her in; even a few minutes’ warning would only serve to stiffen her resistance, that fibrous growth of inertia and indecision. He felt anger stir in him. And in the next moment a sense of just indignation. This had to be—for Vee’s sake, if for nothing else.

Vee must have thought often how it would be if the thing actually happened before—before Beth had gone to Nevada. He had thought of it himself, and always shoved it aside as too unlikely. But time had passed; three months now since that day he’d gone to Gontlen for the first time.

No, by God, it was enough. Even Beth, if she knew, could see that.

He pressed hard on the bell, and waited impatiently for the clicking that would assure him she was there. When it came, he went upstairs with his face set.

“Beth, this time, everything’s different,” he began almost at once.

She nodded. He had received her congratulations about the network with obvious impatience to get on to his real subject.

“Has something happened, Jas?”

He opened his mouth to answer her, and then closed it abruptly.

In one gleaming flash, he saw the way. In one second, the plan leaped into his mind. This was the way he had decided to start the network a month early; this was his particular flare, this, the split second decision, the bold leap into action.

“Yes, something has happened, something big.”

It would not even be a lie, in principle. It was going to happen, just as the network had been going to happen a few weeks before it actually did. “My network is this or that”—had anyone thought him a liar for saying the words back in August or July?

Beth was waiting for him to tell her. Her right hand had gone up to her throat; the left was spraddled over her breast.

“I’m—I’m in love with a woman, Beth—and—and she’s going to have a baby.” Going to have—that was true even in the phrasing.

“Oh—I—oh, God—” She stood up suddenly. “Jas—but you can’t—”

“I’ve been to doctors again. I’m all right now.”

“I—oh, this is—I just never expected anything like this. I—”

“I had to come here today, Beth, I can’t just be patient any longer. I’m sorry if it’s shocking, but don’t you see it couldn’t have gone on—being put off and put off?”

“Is it—is she anyone I know?”

“No.”

She lowered her head and covered her face with both hands. For perhaps three minutes neither spoke.

“I’ll pack and leave on the first plane,” she said. “I—it’s—this does make everything different. Now if—if there’s going to be a baby and I knew I just waited until—”

Her voice dangled like a limp ribbon. A gnarled, knotted resentment formed somewhere within him. Damn her months of quiet resistance—it drove a man to desperate measures and then it was he who felt the guilt. But this was in essence true; he could not wait and wait on Beth’s reluctance until the essential truth was a technical truth.

She stood up uncertainly, looked about her, and then went to the telephone. She dialed Information and said in a cottoned voice, “Can you give me the number of United Airlines, please?”

While she waited, she half turned to him.

“Would you—please, just go now, Jas? I’ll take a plane in the morning.”

It was good to have Jas in this easy mood again. Vee watched him as one watches a convalescent child, with a rushing gratitude and relief that the dark hours are done and the danger over. He was pouring himself a drink, and every move had the lazy sluggishness of relaxation.

These last weeks had been feverish as a sickness. When he’d returned from Cleveland, he had come at once to beg her to forgive his “irrational outburst” in the country. He had pleaded, with a kind of straining humility, for patience until the network was finally launched and he free of this constant tension. There had been abandon in his very pleading, and it bewildered her.

Then came the days and nights of the past two weeks; from the moment he had telephoned her his decision until tonight, he had been like a man possessed. The responsibility, the thousand strands that he held in his hand, the waiting—and then the unbelievable overnight success.

Now he was calmer again. They had dined together at his apartment, his radio tuned in to WJCN and turned low so that they could ignore it when they chose. It was nearly ten o‘clock; he had loosened his tie and taken his coat off, for the night was hot though it was October.

He came back with his drink, and stretched out on the sofa.

“Beth left this morning,” he said somberly. “I guess you’d want to know that.”

“Oh.” She set down her own drink.

“She’s going to Reno.” His eyelids closed, and without his eyes, his face looked whitely exhausted. “I saw her that Sunday I left for Cleveland, and then again yesterday. It couldn’t just go on with her vague agreement to do it. It wasn’t fair to you or Beth or me.”

“Is—was it all right for her? I mean—”

He moved uneasily, but he did not raise his eyelids.

“It’s always hard for everybody,” he said. “But, after all, the main thing happened over two years ago when we separated, so it shouldn’t make you feel—involved. I sent her flowers and a note at the airport this morning.”

Within his closed eyes, he saw the words his pencil had written, crossed out, written more warmly. “You’ll soon find it better this way, Beth. I’m deeply sorry my news last night distressed you. Not on my behalf, but for the baby, I am asking one last favor of you. Please keep what I told you secret—if you can still be as generous as I know you are. Jas.”

Vee waited for him to go on. He did not. She sat quietly thinking about what he had told her, remembering snatches of her own feelings during the tired, dragging first hours of getting her own divorce.

But it was senseless to go off into long, Russian-novel thoughts about the pain and failure that lay like secret worms at the core of people’s lives. Even sheltered and protected lives. And so many lives were neither sheltered nor protected.

Her mind went to the Vederles and to Bronya’s mother. Bronya had been watching hourly for a cable and it had not come. She herself had wondered a hundred times why she had heard nothing from Dr. Vederle.

She looked at Jas. His eyes were still closed, and the quieter rhythm in his breathing told her he was half asleep. This time, she felt no astonishment or rebuke. He had scarcely found four hours of sleep in any twenty-four for the past two weeks.

She sat thinking for another ten minutes. Then she tiptoed into his bedroom and closed the door softly behind her. She went to the telephone and called the apartment of her friends, the Martins. They were always up late, and they were so delighted with Bronya as a governess for their two children that they would not mind this late call for her.