The Vagabonds (10 page)

He and Ford and Burroughs had engaged beforehand in this argument, yet Burroughs disagreed with them and said all nature consists of dependency, subordination, rank. We pretend to pure equivalence but it is unnatural. Similarity, yes, similarity I grant you, and that root and trunk and leaf and branch belong to the one tree. But the arrangement, Harvey, is hierarchical and you yourself cannot deny it; the man who oversees the overseer of the factory is godlike in ascendancy over the third worker from the corner. It is a ladder, not line.

Yet if that worker shirk, Ford interrupted, if he be corrupt or she prove careless the edifice comes crashing down; the least is indispensable to the largest component thereof. When we speak of a linked system we are no stronger finally than is the weakest link. And
that’s
why I embrace what you scoff at as mere prudence—a good behavior, a decent comportment—and that’s why I insist there be no rutting here. The wormy apple will destroy the peck if left long enough in the barrel to rot; let looseness continue undeterred and everything is lost.

October 30, 1916

Dear Harvey Firestone, Esq.,

You may not remember me, and I beg pardon in advance for troubling your business hours with business that’s not properly yours but I don’t know how else to proceed with the matter or whom else to address. You did us the great honor two months since of visiting, of coming to our campsite outside of Saratoga Springs and spending the night with several companions whom you called the Vagabonds, and a member of that party—the one who sang—whose name I never caught is someone I would willingly contact if you could assist me in this business, please.

My nephew William commended our campsite and would no doubt be privy to the information but he is gone to train to fight abroad and cannot be contacted, so I am told, for weeks. Nor would I wish to involve you except insofar as necessary to procure the information. It is a matter of some delicacy, having to do with my daughter, and I don’t wish to trouble you with the particulars thereof. Some urgency also, it seems. But Elizabeth herself is ignorant—a willful girl, resolutely discreet—and either unable or unwilling to furnish the gentleman’s name. He was five foot ten or thereabouts, brown-haired and well- proportioned, and since it is with him I’d speak I’ll trouble you no further but await your prompt response.

In the hope that you and yours will soon return to this region where many who remember you await with eagerness the prospect of reunion I am, sir, yours sincerely

William Dancey

163 North Broadway

Saratoga Springs

New York

November 30, 1916

Harvey Firestone, Esq.,

Last month I asked a question of you, at the office address furnished by your vintner here, and now am resolved to do so again. I have not had an answer; perhaps you are away. No doubt you are busy with pressing affairs, both public and private, of commerce and state—but it is not polite, not gentlemanly to ignore the letter of someone who not three months ago served as your host and who requires assistance.

I am a blunt man, sir, as you no doubt remember, and I will be blunt with you: our daughter is with child. Please write me at your earliest convenience the name of the man at your side. He sang for us; I plan to make him do so again and in the meantime remain yours truly

William Dancey

163 North Broadway

Saratoga Springs

New York

Time passed. Ford hoped that it might pass according to the workweek and the sequence of the balance sheet (more profitable with each succeeding quarter), and not that inner calendar whose completion requires nine months. Elsewhere there was loud alarm and much business to tend to: a conspiracy of financiers, those beetle browed moneylenders and mercantile grubbers on Wall Street and those Jews he so disdained who filled their fleece-lined pockets at the trough of America’s banks. The “Wall Street Tories” and “armor-plate patriots” hoped for war at any price, whereas his peace ship,
Oscar II,
ran fruitlessly aground. These matters weighed on him—he was considering, for instance, an entry into politics—yet always in Ford’s busy mind there proceeded the bill of particulars and of payment due.

It was winter now. The autumn leaves had gone. Aware of what might well eventuate a season thereafter as issue, the millionaire collected himself and bade Firestone approach.

Blithely, politely, his associate did so; blithely, politely, he pulled at his pants leg and smoothed out the crease from the cuff. Of late in the office at Dearborn he had been occupied with rubber, preoccupied with how best to produce it in guaranteed abundance and deliver the product with ease. The great thing is, he was convinced, to know beforehand how the supply may be made systematic, and Ford approved of this and urged his younger colleague to apply the selfsame rationale to matters of the single body as opposed to the collective; why should we not behave, he asked, as though the outcome of what seems like chance encounter may be prearranged? The River Rouge assembly, as he was fond of saying, is a whole made of component parts, a random-seeming sequence in the service of rigidity: predestined, preordained.

“Ordination?” Firestone asked. “Would you have me a subscriber to such indolence in action, such self-limiting progress as
ordination
? I had thought your every action militated, mili
tates
against such casual construction. It has been preplanned, admittedly, but you are the sole author of the planning and the system.”

“Oh?”

“To your worker in the factory the assembled result may well be inconceivable; to your foreman dimly apprehensible . . .”

“Correct,” said Ford.

“But surely you yourself can see it steadily and whole!”

This flattering diversion failed; Ford smiled and let it pass. Supervision in such matters enables strict morality; it is an adult’s duty to watch children at their play. What some might label prurience in the engineer was instead, or so he told himself, precision; insatiable for knowledge, he could not bear not to know. The playful scene by now was distant both in time and place, and it might have been permissible to let the watcher blink: out of sight is out of mind. Yet rumored sport at the encampment worried Ford persistently and nipped at his heels, refusing to obey—as though rumor itself were an ill-trained dog—his repeated injunction: “Down, down!”

Harvey his “pup” was wearing tweeds and reading glasses, every inch the courtly gentleman and only by association guilty of a dalliance; Barclay remained on the payroll and had not been dismissed. Meantime, Firestone bruited a business plan. He had notebook and fountain pen in hand; he was organizing information on the rubber plant and speculating bravely on what it might entail to harvest the material and where to establish plantations. To organize the supply, they agreed, would be to confirm the demand, and Firestone intended—though the outline of his project was at this stage but sketchy—to institute a system of production and delivery that might benefit the commonweal: a public husbandry. So natives would be nourished by the very plant they planted and—happy accident of opposition!—enlarged by what they cropped. When the young visionary took, as it were, the rhetorical bit between teeth he could speak and speak without pause for breath, expanding phrase to paragraph and paragraph to page with a facility for utterance that swept doubt before it like dust.

Yet on the matter of indulgence he proved silent still. In private interview the orator proved scarcely more forthcoming on his man’s behalf than earlier had been the case in Plattsburgh and September. Though he chatted willingly of natives and their rubber plants, of the fertility in Ecuador and tropical heat of Brazil—though he continued in this vein till lunch he mined no other quarry and tilled no other field. When Ford at length and interview’s end positioned the “Plantation” file in its wooden cabinet and inquired of the girl again, again he met with opposition, the same pursed moustachioed lips.

“He has done nothing,” Firestone said, “to which I am privy or would not in the presence of ladies repeat.”

“Then why not speak of it?”

“Because there’s so little to say!”

“Say on . . .”

“I
did
receive a letter. Two.”

“From?”

“From the girl in question’s father. But he was uncivil, and what he wrote me failed to signify . . .”

“Might I look at the letters?”

“Unhappily, no. They struck me as presumptuous, and I tossed the things aside.”

“Presumptuous?”

“Requesting information to which he was not entitled”—Firestone stood, capping his pen, collecting his briefcase—“and of which he had no need. With a whiff of the blackmailer also . . .”

“Sit one more minute, will you?” Ford rallied and moved to retain him. “Let us call your Barclay in to join this conference. He waits outside?”

“He does.”

“Invite him, if you please.”

And so Peter Barclay came in. His shirt was pressed, his suit new-brushed, his brown shoes polished to the point of gleaming. Yet the man’s posture was visibly strained, and he stood at shaken attention till his employer pointed to an empty chair. Silent, the libertine sat.

Henry Ford regarded the ceiling. Then he remonstrated with the air, reminding it (or so it seemed, his eyes half-closed, his expression speculative) how their reputations—not to mention that of the nameless she who had occasioned this interview—must remain unsullied. Or else, he said, we cannot have free access to the countryside, to such continued vagabonding as has made our party welcome wherever we elect to travel; next year, for example, we hope to go south, and southern gentry are notorious for umbrage in the issue of honor assaulted, and all the more so, it goes without saying, if the honor assaulted is that of their issue as such. Having said that it goes without saying, however, the elder repeated himself: they keep daughters safe.

“Agreed,” said Firestone. “I am wholly in agreement with your admirable caution, sir.” This emphasis on “sir” was lost on neither of the two, for in casual colloquy they used each other’s names.

“Is there something you wish to report?” Ford asked of Peter Barclay. “Something you might better tell us?”

The deponent shook his head. As though sight itself were a duster, the engineer stared at the spot on his sleeve; there was nothing to do but accept, at face value, their young employee’s word. All further questions seemed predictable, beside the point or at least too far after the fact to alter the fact of the matter, and he was weary, wanting tea, and made short work of this amorous business; he proposed to Firestone that they provide a gift.

“A gift?” said Harvey. “I’m not sure I follow.” And Ford said, “Contrariwise, my friend, it’s appropriate you lead.”

“How so?”

“A cottage?” Ford inquired. “Was there not a cottage?” Taking silence and the fellow’s flush on cheek as blushing acquiescence, he said to Firestone, “Very good. Let’s buy it. Let’s give it to the girl.”

Peter Barclay demurred. “It’s already in the family. ‘Grandmother’s place,’ they call it.”

“Oh?”

“It’s her grandmother’s house.”

Of a sudden he appeared to see how this piece of privy information argued, if not intimacy, at least a degree of familiarity hitherto unadmitted; that he should possess such knowledge suggested the possession of other knowledge also. “What else do you know?” Ford inquired, and if he were John Burroughs would have asked not what but whom, and this in the biblical sense.

“Excuse me, sir?”

“Answer him,” Firestone warned.

“Oh, nothing special.” Blushing full-bloom, Barclay smoothed his moustache. “Nothing very much.”

“But?”

“Only that they spoke of Granny as unwilling to relinquish it, and Mr. Dancey offered up the use of the place.”

“The use?” repeated Ford.

“If Mr. Edison or Mr. Burroughs wished to lie in comfort . . .”

“Scarcely their purpose.”

“No, sir.”

“But yours?”

Once more the man went mute. What happened in the cottage was not a matter of which he would speak, and grudgingly his interlocutors credited this reticence and determined to probe it no further. Instead Ford sent him from the room to tarry in the outer office, intending that he cool his heels and enjoining him to wait.

Alone together yet again, but in substantial agreement, the two men conferred. Now when Firestone recalled the letters sent by William Dancey, their contents seemed persuasive; once the girl became a mother—so the Vagabonds concluded—her child should be provided for in time and times to come. “A sum of money, possibly,” the elder said, “sufficient to have purchased the cottage if it
had
been for sale. What think you, Harvey?”

Harvey thought. “Deposited to which account?”

“Not—what did you call him?—Dancey’s. To hers, of course,” said Ford.

“We could establish a fund,” mused Firestone, “not for the girl herself to squander, not as a reward for
her . . .
”

“No. But for the child, if any . . .”

“Yes!”

“That her child and her child’s children might be well provided for. Educated, clothed and fed . . .”

“Precisely so. An act of kindness, Henry . . .”

Thus in ten minutes it was done—a period of time, the magnate reflected, that might well have equaled that of the action itself. The engendering spurt of existence, he knew, requires at most a split second of contact; bright manhood’s stream is but a droplet in that dark lake, the womb. And there are some who pay and pay, who spend a lifetime ministering to what a precipitate moment has precipitated: life. But he and Firestone were managers, both; the decision, once arrived at, was rapidly achieved.

“Agreed?” asked Ford.

“Agreed.”

That night at dinner they conferred with Edison as to their shared intention. The Sage of Menlo Park was visiting his friends in Dearborn, and he concurred with their purpose and soon enough proposed a means whereby to implement the plan. The mood of the three men was one of easy conviviality, not to say collective relief, for there was self-interest also entailed; there had been music once again, schoolchildren playing violins, and Yukio the cook did honor to the fowl. At a given moment over cheese the eldest of the three averred that General Electric might prove a useful
vehicle
—at which word he winked at Ford—since we do not want our names too broadly bruited here. But General Electric is now a public company and anyone can buy; what I propose, he told them, is a gift of stock.