The Lockwood Concern (4 page)

don't know exactly what it is, but men and women feel compelled to talk too much. I'm afraid the reason is that they want to test the other person's love, and they do it in a way that's cruel to the other person and self-destructive to themselves. Have you still got your apartment?" "Yes." "Would you like to meet me there at four o'clock this afternoon?" "No, I wouldn't." "Well, then you're free of me. It's as simple as that, Marian." "What if I had said yes?" "Would you like to try saying yes? You're just as attractive to me as ever." "But there's nothing in it for either of us, is there?" "Pleasure. That's all it was before." "Yes, that's true. That's really all it was." "And after me there were others that were no more than pleasure, weren't there? Before this man." "Yes, there were two others. He knows about them." "Then the reason you haven't told him about us was that you don't want to give up your job, for fear he'll think you're my mistress." "I've never been anybody's mistress. I certainly wasn't yours, was I?" "Hardly, considering the intervals between the three nights we spent together. As a friend of yours, and quite a bit older, I suggest that you marry this man and keep your job here, and put your trust in me as a gentleman. I mean that. I'll give you my word now that I'll never again ask to see you outside the office." "I'm probably making too much of the whole thing." "No, not if it bothers you. But I think you're so close to happiness that you ought to act decisively. Get yourself married, keep your job here, and let the future take care of the rest." "I think that's good advice." "You're a very attractive woman, Marian." "You're a very attractive man." "Come over here," he said. "No, I don't think I'd better. And I think you'd better have one of the other girls take your letters, at least today." "All right. Make it Miss Thorpe. She won't distract me." She returned to the outer office, and Daisy Thorpe said to her, "What did he say this time?" "Oh, he's always teasing or making jokes." "Does he talk dirty?" "George Lockwood? He's above that." They saw him, a few minutes later, going from his office to the larger, more elegant room occupied by his brother. "Hello, George," said Penrose Lockwood. "Good morning, Pen. Are you free for lunch?" "No, I'm not free, but you can come along. I'm having lunch with Ray Turner and Charley Bohm." "What do they want?" "Oh, don't take that tone. I don't know for sure what it is they have, but the way those two have been going, I want to be in on it. You don't have to come in if you don't want to." "Are you going there for the Company or for yourself?" "Both. "I hope you go slow about involving the Company." "Well, because before you involve the Company, I think you ought to hear what I have to say." "I always do, but you've touted me and the Company off some pretty good things. You've been so God damn busy with this country estate of yours. How's it coming along, by the way?" "It's finished. Ready to move the furniture in." "October. Well, I'll give you credit. You said the first of November. But I started to say, why do you think your judgment is more reliable, sitting there in Swedish Haven, and I'm right here where things happen?" "My judgment isn't more reliable, Pen, and I never claimed it was. And I never really touted you off anything." "Oh, the hell you didn't." "Now don't say that. I didn't. All I've done, and will continue to do, is make you count to ten, so to speak. And while yoifre counting, consider all the factors. In this market today, generally speaking, if you miss out on something good, something equally good will be along tomorrow." "If you hear about it in time," said Penrose Lockwood. "It isn't quite as good, you know, if a lot of others have heard about it too." "At the moment, almost everything is good, if you're not too greedy." "Well, then, you can call me greedy if you like, but I've made money for you, haven't I?" "Yes, and I've made some for you. But Pen, it isn't only a question of making money, I hear of all sorts of people making pots of it these days, so it isn't any great accomplishment." "What is?" "Holding on to it." Penrose Lockwood laughed. "Holding on to it? What's this house of yours going to cost, if it's any of my business?" "It isn't any of your business. I don't ask you what you do with yours, and you know damn well that isn't what I meant. Holding on to it means having it twenty-five, fifty years from now. For instance, things get a little bad in the automobile industry, and that man Ford orders an eight-hour day and a five-day week. He doesn't have anybody but himself to think of. But suppose all the big industries behaved that way?" "It may not be so bad after all. He cut down over-production and made new jobs." "That's what he wants you to think. But don't you see what this inevitably leads to? The immediate effect of course is to cut down over-production. But if every big industry followed suit, all production would slow down. All production, and this is a high-production country. You can't run this country on a five-day week. That is socialism in disguise. The labor union people know it, and they welcome it." I don't follow you." "Look, Pen. Put this country on a five-day week, and you have to employ more men. But they won't be skilled men. They'll be incompetent, lazy bastards, getting the same money as the skilled men. That's the way I feel about spreading the work over a greater number of men. You have to hire the incompetents. That's something I've been learning with my new house. I don't mind paying a good carpenter good wages, but I've had to pay lazy men the same money I paid good men. I'm talking now about unskilled labor. I wanted some fences removed, so I hired some ordinary laborers. Were they uniformly good workers? No. About half of them did an honest day's work, and the other half did as little as they could, as slowly as they could." "What's this got to do with the stock market?" "Oh, Pen! What's any stock going to be worth if an industry has to overpay its labor? All materials will be overpriced because labor is overpaid, and the country will have inflation, just as they have it in Germany and Austria. You can buy a fine Mauser for fifteen cents today, in our money." "Thank you. I've heard about their inflation." "Well, then you know what I mean by holding on to it. I sometimes wonder if I want to make any more money in the market." "What?" "Oh, I will. I'm greedy, too. But I wish people like us would get out of the stock market and stay out for a while. We won't. It's foolish to think of it. But there are a great, great many stocks that are selling for much more than their earnings justify. That isn't healthy. What it means is that people like us, with money to buy stocks, are just as bad as labor. Labor inflates by being overpaid. We inflate by sending up the prices of common stocks, far beyond their real worth." "I hear plenty of that down here. Bear talk." "I don't see it as only bear talk. That's the trouble with being here, around the corner from the Stock Exchange. Any comment a man makes is either bearish or bullish. That's the only way you fellows think." "I'm not a broker. Kindly don't confuse me with one." "It's easy to. You talk Eke one. Frankly, I don't like the stock market. I don't like margin trading. I wish that I could find two or three investments. Buy the stock at the full price and hold on to it for twenty years, thirty years. But I don't want to pay these prices for stocks that aren't worth it. I say too many prices are already too high, and I just wish I were strong enough to resist the temptation to buy any more. "You have no more objection to easy money than I have." "I'm afraid not. I'm stingy at heart, and what I object to is being a sucker, paying fifty dollars for fifteen-dollar stocks. What's going on today, by the way?" "In the market?" said Penrose Lockwood. "Have a look. Here's Allied Chemical, 124. Dodge Brothers, 221. American Radiator, off two, at 108. Yellow Truck, 271." "I see," said George Lockwood. "Where are you meeting your cronies?" "Ray's office. He's having lunch sent in. I ought to call him if you're going over there with me. Do you want to go?" "They're not going to like what I have to say." "Then shut up, or don't come." "I'll shut up and listen, for a change," said George Lockwood. Penrose Lockwood had his secretary call Ray Tumer's secretary, to say that Mr. George Lockwood would be an added guest at lunch. "How is Geraldine? She came for dinner last week, you probably know." "Yes." "Wilma thought she looked a little tired." "She was tired. She's been buying furniture for the new house. How is Wilma?" "Fine. Do you want to come for dinner? How long are you planning to be in town?" "About a week. I had to get the hell out of Swedish Haven." "Why?" "Some God damn farmer's kid got killed on my place." "When?" "Yesterday. Yesterday afternoon. The house was finally finished. The last Italian carpenters had left, and I went home and had tea. Just getting ready to have my bath and the watchman phoned. The kid fell from a tree onto my wall. Impaled on a couple of spikes." "Impaled? On spikes?" "I had spikes set in along the top of the wall. This kid fell on them." "How horrible! How old was the kid?" "Thirteen or fourteen. One of a large family. Farmers named Zehner. None of it was my fault. The kid was trespassing, probably wanted to see what he could steal. But I got the hell out of Swedish Haven because I didn't want to be questioned or have to appear at an inquest. I've spoken to Arthur McHenry and I'm legally okay. But I stay clear of any doings with the townspeople. Oh, our friends. But I've always avoided getting on familiar terms with the grocery clerks and people like that, and I didn't want to have to talk to reporters, or answer questions at the inquest. That's all been taken care of. By the way, Geraldine doesn't know a thing about this, so not a word to her." "Of course not." "The house would get off to a bad start. You know Geraldine." "She's going to hear." "But not right away. If I can put this thing in the past, she won't be shocked. If she'd known about it last night she might very easily have said she'd never live in the house. The Curse of Lockwood Hall." "You're not calling it that?" "Of course not, but that's the general idea. Romanticizing a nasty accident to a young thief," said George Lockwood. "What are you thinking about? Do you object to my calling him a thief?" "No. He probably was," said Penrose Lockwood. "Well, what's eating you? You're miles away." "No I'm not. I'm right here," said Penrose Lockwood. "I have a problem of my own making. Nothing at all like this one of yours, but it's a problem." "Can I do anything?" "Well - yes. You've always been smarter than I am about women. Maybe you can think for me. I seem to have lost the power to think, at least about his. And I'm not so sure it doesn't affect my thinking about other things." "Let's have it, Pen," said George Lockwood. "Just don't call me the kid brother." "It's all right if I think it, though, isn't it? I want to help, and there aren't very many people I can say that about. You have a lady friend." "As long as I've been married to Wilma, that's well over twenty years, I've never had anything to do with any other woman. There were times when I think I could have had a fling or two. I very nearly did during the war, when I was stationed at League Island. A girl, a woman, in Philadelphia, wife of a friend of mine that you don't know. But we both saw how foolish it would be, and down deep she was in love with her husband and I was with Wilma. So we stopped seeing each other, and when I think of it, there was nothing that her husband or Wilma could object to. We just liked to talk, and I only kissed her once. That's when we realized that our affection for each other had this other side to it. And we stopped then and there." "You never slept with her?" "I told you. I kissed her exactly once. I'm not like you, George." "You don't know what I'm like, but go on." Penrose Lockwood stood up and went to the window, but it was at his past and not at Lower New York that he gazed. "Three years ago, a little over three years ago, I met a young woman. She was in her early twenties. Handsome. Quite intelligent. Some education, and I imagine came from a typical good middle-class family, not New York. I had occasion to see her quite frequently, and while I never thought of her that way, not consciously, I suppose that seeing her as often as I did, I was attracted to her physically. She was a young woman that was like a thousand other young women who have jobs in New York, and you notice them because they're pretty, but you never think of them again. But in this case, seeing her day after day, exchanging a few words now and then, she stopped being just one more anonymous pretty girl, and on days when I didn't see her, I missed seeing her." "Propinquity." "Of course," said Penrose Lockwood. "As you must have guessed, she, uh, had a job in the financial district, and one afternoon I gave her a lift uptown in a taxi, and since I was in no hurry, I stopped in for a drink at her apartment." "This was three years ago?" "Almost four, as a matter of fact. Until that day, there never had been anything personal in our relationship. She was Miss So-and-so, and I was Mr. Lockwood." He came away from the window and seated himself in the big leather revolving chair, folded his hands and looked at his shoes. "She was quite an extraordinary young woman. Although she was only twenty-three, she'd been married and divorced and had taken her maiden name again. Her husband had been a professional gambler in a city out West, but she didn't find that out until they went on their wedding trip. Saratoga. She saw the kind of men his friends were, and he admitted that he'd lied to her. He wasn't a bond salesman at all. He was an out-and-out professional gambler, and in less than a year she'd had all of that sort of life that she could put up with. He wouldn't change his ways, it was too late, he said. So she left him and he agreed to a divorce. He was in his late thirties and he'd been married three or four times, and in fact he'd lied to her about that and made false statements in applying for the marriage license. So naturally he didn't want any trouble, and he gave her the divorce readily enough. But she didn't want to go back to her home town and her parents, and so she took a course in shorthand and typewriting and with her looks and personality, and ability as a stenographer, had no trouble getting a job in New York. She's also had three years at one of the state universities, was far superior to the ordinary typist and was put in charge of several other stenographers." "You're having a hard time getting to your part of the story, Pen," said George Lockwood. "I've never told the story before, that's why.