Tuesday to Bed. Francis Sill Wickware
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breakfast—probably just worried about the speech and everything, subconsciously.”
“It was mostly my fault, Stan. I’m sorry.”
The honking behind was growing in volume; a police whistle shrilled. At the corner the red-faced cop who was on duty at the station during rush hours shouted, “C’mon! C’mon! You can’t stay there! You’re blocking traffic!”
“What I wanted to say is, when I get back we’ll have a man-to-man talk Stanton said quickly; “take a little inventory of ourselves and look at these things we argue about, and we’ll see that they’re not worth the time of day. Because we don’t have anything at all to really argue about, Betsy. Do we?”
“No, dear,” said Betsy. “Of course we don’t.”
The whistle shrilled again, and the cop started to approach from the corner. Stanton opened the door and got out, dragging his suitcase. Then he leaned across the seat, and Betsy again tilted her face for his kiss and put her hands on the back of his neck. “All the luck, Stan, dear. I know it will be great. I am proud of you.”
“I love you, sweetheart,” he said. “You make me very happy.”
He closed the door reluctantly, and the car slid away. The approaching cop stopped halfway from the corner and said, “Lovebirds!” in a disgusted voice. Stanton smiled at him, and waved once at Betsy just before she turned and went out of sight.
He strode into the waiting room, picked up a Times at the newsstand and emerged onto the platform just as the east-bound Boston express went roaring past, sucking a small cloud of dust from the ballast on the roadbed and causing everyone on the platform to squint and retreat an involuntary inch or two. A cold, damply penetrating northeast wind was blowing, and against the solid gray sky the lower clouds bobbed about and collided with one another. Stanton rather liked mornings like this. He pictured the Sound, a wet field of rugged gray-green furrows, and the muddy whitecaps slapping on the diminishing beaches in front of the summer cottages. It wasn’t real ocean, of course; salt water, but not ocean. He could nearly visualize and hear the real thing—the booming oncoming crash and the retreating sigh of the sledgehammer breakers pounding the granite abutments of North America along the Atlantic coast. It would be nice, he thought, if Betsy arranged so that next week end we could——
“Morning, Stanton,” he heard a voice at his side. “Keeping bankers’ hours these days, I see.”
Stanton recognized the voice, and turned. “Oh, good-morning, Mr. Hazen. Is this your regular train? I usually get the eight-thirty.”
“Why don’t you drop the Mr. Hazen and just call me Chester?” Hazen inquired. “We’ve known each other a long time. I’m only old enough to be your father, after all. Why make me sound like your grandfather? Next thing, you’ll be calling me ‘sir,’ and I’ll have no more to do with you.”
“How about Sir Chester, as a compromise?” Stanton suggested. “An interim arrangement, until I get used to the Chester?”
Hazen chuckled. “Agreed. Lawyers always like a compromise—if it’s favorable.”
Stanton chuckled with him, but he was not quite at ease. Chester Hazen was a local pillar of society and one of the first citizens of Westport, and it was true that Stanton had seen a good deal of him as a fellow member of several political and civic-improvement committees which Hazen either inspired, or financed, or both. But they had associated only as fellow members, not socially. The Hazens belonged to a much older, wealthier and infinitely more settled community within the concentric communities of admen, brokers, successful artists and writers and miscellaneous entrepreneurs. There was plenty of traffic to and fro between the outer concentric rings, but virtually no social penetration of the hard, permanent core of Westport life represented by the Hazens and a few other families like them. Stanton worked constantly with Hazen on committees, yes, but the Hazens never had invited the Wylies to dinner, and the Wylies never had invited the Hazens because it went without saying that the Hazens would have prior engagements. So why, Stanton wondered, the sudden Chester? He was not the sort of man—indeed, the last sort of man—to be impressed by anything like the Chicago award.
Some people in Westport—mostly on the outer concentric rings—said that Chester Hazen was nothing but a rapacious old Wall Street lawyer who had stolen millions in his heyday and now was trying to atone for his former depredations with a pretense of good works. Stanton didn’t know whether it was true or not, and didn’t care a great deal. It seemed to him that what Hazen was doing at present for the general welfare mattered more than what he might or might not have done forty years ago. Anyway, he was a cultivated and engaging old gentleman who looked as though he might have stepped out of The Pickwick Papers or just climbed down from the top of the Liverpool-London stage in one of those old prints. He had a merry face—bright pink cheeks and clear blue eyes with white tufted brows which sprouted like spring tulips. He was half a foot shorter than Stanton, and he had a massive, leonine head of white hair which gave him the appearance of a wigged English barrister. Stanton never saw him without thinking of the lawyer in Conrad’s Youth: “. . . fine crusted Tory, High Churchman, the best of old fellows, the soul of honor. . . .” Hazen also happened to be a senior partner in a Wall Street law firm with clients like DuPont, Standard Oil and General Electric; Hazen himself had won a million-dollar patent suit for one client within the month. Even at his age he was a bit of an exquisite. He carried a cane, which he didn’t need, and he tapped Stanton’s suitcase and said, “Off to Chicago, eh?”
“Yes, Mr.—Sir Chester.” Stanton smiled.
“Ha! Sir Chester, well, that’s all right. Not going to congratulate you again, Stanton, about your honors, know all that. Think I told you last week how pleased—it’s great, great!”
“Thank you. I don’t know how great it’ll be after tomorrow night. I’m supposed to make a speech.”
“Speech! Nothing to it!” Hazen flicked his cane. “Listen—tell you a little trick. Something I learned a long time ago, when I tried cases in court. It’s a banquet, isn’t it? The speaker will introduce you?”
“Why, yes, I suppose so,” Stanton said. He was now quite perplexed. Why should Chester Hazen—?
“All right! After you’re introduced and stand up, don’t start talking right away. Wait a few seconds. Look them over. Look slowly—slowly, mind you—from left to right across the audience and then back and forth so you cover as many faces as you can. Then wait another second or two. That makes them wonder whether you’re stalling, or whether you’ve forgotten what you wanted to say, or whether—anyway, you have their attention, main thing. It works. It always works.”
“Is that the secret of your success?” Stanton said, smiling. “Hypnotizing juries by staring at them?”
“Never mind. Remember what I say when you stand up behind that table.”
“I will,” said Stanton. “And thanks for the tip. It certainly comes from one who knows.” He expected Hazen to withdraw at this point, but the old gentleman showed no disposition to leave.
“Don’t you usually go south about this time of year?” Stanton inquired. “You’re not going to sit out one of our Connecticut winters, are you?”
“No, no, I’m too old. The cold gets into my bones, and I stiffen up like a board. No, as a matter of fact, I’m leaving Sunday—be back once or twice a month, of course.”
“Mrs. Hazen going down with you, I suppose?”
“Mrs. Hazen? Oh, she’s been down all week. Left last Monday with her sister, to open the house.”
Stanton frowned in a puzzled way. “That’s funny,” he said.
“Eh? Funny? What’s funny about it?”
“Not her being down South, of course. It’s just that I thought I heard Betsy—Mrs. Wylie—say she had been talking to her on the phone this morning, about the Red Cross Drive. I must have misunderstood.”