He spent the morning on routine work. Round eleven Eveline Johnson called him up and said she wanted to see him. He said how about towards the end of the week. “But I’m right in the building,” she said in a hurt voice. “Oh, come on up, but I’m pretty busy… You know Mondays.”
Eveline had a look of strain in the bright hard light that poured in the window from the overcast sky. She had on a grey coat with a furcollar that looked a little shabby and a prickly grey straw hat that fitted her head tight and had a kind of a last year’s look. The lines from the flanges of her nose to the ends of her mouth looked deeper and harder than ever. Dick got up and took both her hands. “Eveline, you look tired.”
“I think I’m coming down with the grippe.” She talked fast. “I just came in to see a friendly face. I have an appointment to see J.W. at eleven fifteen… Do you think he’ll come across? If I can raise ten thousand the Shuberts will raise the rest. But it’s got to be right away because somebody has some kind of an option on it that expires tomorrow… Oh, I’m so sick of not doing anything… Holden has wonderful ideas about the production and he’s letting me do the sets and costumes… and if some Broadway producer does it he’ll ruin it… Dick, I know it’s a great play.”
Dick frowned. “This isn’t such a very good time… we’re all pretty preoccupied this morning.”
“Well, I won’t disturb you any more.” They were standing in the window. “How can you stand those riveters going all the time?”
“Why, Eveline, those riveters are music to our ears, they make us sing like canaries in a thunderstorm. They mean business… If J.W. takes my advice that’s where we’re going to have our new office.”
“Well, goodby.” She put her hand in its worn grey glove in his. “I know you’ll put in a word for me… You’re the white haired boy around here.”
She went out leaving a little frail familiar scent of cologne and furs in the office. Dick walked up and down in front of his desk frowning. He suddenly felt nervous and jumpy. He decided he’d run out to get a breath of air and maybe a small drink before he went to lunch. “If anybody calls,” he said to his secretary, “tell them to call me after three. I have an errand and then an appointment with Mr. Moorehouse.”
In the elevator there was J.W. just going down in a new overcoat with a big furcollar and a new grey fedora. “Dick,” he said, “if you’re late at the Plaza I’ll wring your neck… You’re slated for the blind bowboy.”
“To shoot Bingham in the heart?” Dick’s ears hummed as the elevator dropped.
J.W. nodded, smiling. “By the way, in strict confidence what do you think of Mrs. Johnson’s project to put on a play?… Of course she’s a very lovel ywoman… Sheused to be a great friend of Eleanor’s… Dick, my boy, why don’t you marry?”
“Who? Eveline? She’s married already.”
“I was thinking aloud, don’t pay any attention to it.” They came out of the elevator and walked across the Grand Central together in the swirl of the noontime crowd. The sun had come out and sent long slanting motefilled rays across under the great blue ceiling overhead. “But what do you think of this play venture? You see I’m pretty well tied up in the market… I suppose I could borrow the money at the bank.”
“The theater’s always risky,” said Dick. “Eveline’s a great girl and all that and full of talent but I don’t know how much of a head she has for business. Putting on a play’s a risky business.”
“I like to help old friends out… but it occurred to me that if the Shuberts thought there was money in it they’d be putting it in themselves… Of course Mrs. Johnson’s very artistic.”
“Of course,” said Dick.
At twelve thirty he was waiting for J.W. in the lobby of the Plaza chewing sensen to take the smell of the three whiskeys he’d swallowed at Tony’s on the way up off his breath. At twelve fortyfive he saw coming from the checkroom J.W.’s large pearshaped figure with the paleblue eyes and the sleek strawgrey hair, and beside him a tall gaunt man with untidy white hair curling into ducktails over his ears. The minute they stepped into the lobby Dick began to hear a rasping opinionated boom from the tall man.
“… never one of those who could hold my peace while injustice ruled in the marketplace. It has been a long struggle and one which from the vantage of those threescore and ten years that the prophets of old promised to man upon this earth I can admit to have been largely crowned with material and spiritual success. Perhaps it was my early training for the pulpit but I have always felt, and that feeling, Mr. Moorehouse, is not rare among the prominent businessmen in this country, that material success is not the only thing… there is the attainment of the spirit of service. That is why I say to you frankly that I have been grieved and wounded by this dark conspiracy. Who steals my purse steals trash but who would… what is it?… my memory’s not what it was… my good name… Ah, yes, how do you do, Mr. Savage?”
Dick was surprised by the wrench the handshake gave his arm. He found himself standing in front of a gaunt loose-jointed old man with a shock of white hair and a big prognathous skull from which the sunburned skin hung in folds like the jowls of a birddog. J.W. seemed small and meek beside him. “I’m very glad to meet you, sir,” E. R. Bingham said. “I have often said to my girls that had I grown up in your generation I would have found happy and useful work in the field of publicrelations. But alas in my day the path was harder for a young man entering life with nothing but the excellent tradition of moral fervor and natural religion I absorbed if I may say so with my mother’s milk. We had to put our shoulders to the wheel in those days and it was the wheel of an old muddy wagon drawn by mules, not the wheel of a luxurious motorcar.”
E. R. Bingham boomed his way into the diningroom. A covey of palefaced waiters gathered round, pulling out chairs, setting the table, bringing menucards. “Boy, it is no use handing me the bill of fare,” E. R. Bingham addressed the headwaiter. “I live by nature’s law. I eat only a few nuts and vegetables and drink raw milk… Bring me some cooked spinach, a plate of grated carrots and a glass of unpasteurized milk… As a result, gentlemen, when I went a few days ago to a great physician at the request of one of the great lifeinsurance companies in this city he was dumbfounded when he examined me. He could hardly believe that I was not telling a whopper when I told him I was seventyone. ‘Mr. Bingham,’ he said, ‘you have the magnificent physique of a healthy athlete of fortyfive’… Feel that, young man.” E. R. Bingham flexed his arm under Dick’s nose. Dick gave the muscle a prod with two fingers. “A sledgehammer,” Dick said, nodding his head. E. R. Bingham was already talking again: “You see I practice what I preach, Mr. Moorehouse… and I expect others to do the same… I may add that in the entire list of remedies and proprietary medicines controlled by Bingham Products and the Rugged Health Corporation, there is not a single one that contains a mineral, a drug or any other harmful ingredient. I have sacrificed time and time again hundreds of thousands of dollars to strike from my list a concoction deemed injurious or habitforming by Dr. Gorman and the rest of the splendid men and women who make up our research department. Our medicines and our systems of diet and cure are nature’s remedies, herbs and simples culled in the wilderness in the four corners of the globe according to the tradition of wise men and the findings of sound medical science.”