His dreams hovered about the many happy weeks he spent in the great square house on Fifth Avenue. Each summer he accepted a job that Mr. Cameron offered him. He went to Europe with Jeremy, a combination secretary and guide, and they shared a valet. Together the two young men wandered about old cities and sailed the Mediterranean. It was a matter of course that William would always go home with Jeremy when the journey was over. He had his own two rooms in the vast Cameron house. They opened into Jeremy’s suite. From there he seldom wrote to or heard from his sisters and his grandparents, and Peking he had nearly forgotten. The Camerons had become his family.
He thought about the Camerons a great deal, pondering again the question of how, through them, he might reach vague heights he imagined but could not see. Among the many things he discussed with Jeremy this was not one. William was not crude. He had lived too long among Chinese, even though only servants. He felt crudity in his mother and shrank from it, but he forgave her because of her willingness to sacrifice. His mother was “for” him, as he put it, and when he discovered this quality in any person, he overlooked all else. Nevertheless he was glad that during his college years his mother was remote in Peking. He was still not yet sure that the Camerons were entirely “for” him, not even Jeremy. This uncertainty made him pleasantly diffident and unselfish in his dealings with each of them. To Jeremy, he gradually became someone always willing to spare him tiresome stairways when he wanted a book from the library, and so he wore away dislike. To William’s listening silence Jeremy in vacations talked more freely than at college, uncovering a delicate and poetic mind, racked with questions, and a spirit confounded by conscience. Thus Jeremy spoke on the solid matter of money.
“I know that if my father had not been rich I would now have been dead. But I wish I could owe my life to something else.”
“Perhaps you might say that you owe it to your father’s being so able as to get rich,” William had suggested.
“I don’t know that merely being able to get rich is anything particularly noble,” Jeremy had replied.
“Not everyone can do it, nevertheless,” William said. “Your father must have had some natural gift.”
A look of aversion came upon Jeremy’s pale and too mobile face. “The gift is only that of being able to overcome someone less strong in the competitive game.”
To this William put up silence, and into the silence Jeremy continued to talk. “Sons of rich men always complain of their father’s riches, I suppose. Yet there ought to be some way of living without stamping all the ants to death.”
Still William made no answer. Jeremy had come to no grips with life. The trouble with Jeremy was that he wanted nothing. He himself wanted everything; success with the newspaper he meant to have, and after that a wife beautiful and wealthy, a mansion to live in, a place in the world where he could be unique in some fashion he did not yet know, and the means to all this, he perceived, was money. He was perfectly sure that money was what he wanted first of all.
In his quiet way he reflected further upon the Cameron family. His brotherly relation to Jeremy he could easily develop. Quite honestly, he liked Jeremy. Candace he would consider as time passed. He was too nearly an intellectual to be in haste for marriage. Mrs. Cameron he understood and did not fear. His thoughts, flying like tentative gray hawks, now lit warily near the image of Mr. Cameron. This man was the central figure, the most important man, the one whom he must approach with real finesse. Mr. Cameron knew secrets. Pondering upon that vague and unimpressive person, William perceived that behind the nondescript face, the long and narrow mouth, there was something immense, a power strong and profoundly restrained. He guessed by some intuition of like mind that Mr. Cameron never told his true thoughts to his family, certainly at least not to women, and probably not to his delicate and oversensitive son. Into that loneliness William determined to go, not with deceit but with honesty.
“Mr. Cameron,” he said on Easter Sunday, “I would like to ask your advice about something.”
“Why not?” Mr. Cameron replied. Sunday was a day on which he drowsed. It was now afternoon, however, and late enough for him to have recovered from the immensities of dinner. He had slept, had waked, had walked in the garden with his wife and daughter to see the promise of some thousands of daffodils, and had come in again to reread the newspaper in the small sitting room off the drawing room, which was his favorite resting place. There William had come, after waiting patiently in his own room, from which he could see the prowling among the daffodils. Jeremy and Candace had gone with their mother to see their grandparents.
He sat down at a respectable distance from Mr. Cameron and upon a straight-back chair. His childhood in Peking had taught him deference to elders, and he would not have been comfortable had he chosen one of the deep chairs upholstered in brown leather.
“I would like to talk about my future, sir,” he said.
“What about it?” Mr. Cameron asked. His eyes roved to the newspaper at his feet. The financial section was uppermost and he was disgusted to see that the profits of a rival company had risen slightly above those of his own.
“I want to get rich,” William said simply.
Mr. Cameron’s gray eyebrows, bunched above his eyes, quivered like antennae. “What do you want to get rich for?” he demanded. He stared at William with something more than his usual careless interest.
“I see that here in America a man cannot get any of the things he wants unless he is rich,” William replied.
Mr. Cameron smiled and agreed suddenly. “You’re damn right!” He kicked the newspaper from his feet, sat back, and felt in his pocket for a cigar. It was a short thick one, and he lit it and puffed out a cloud of blue and fragrant smoke. The vague barrier that stood always between himself and his son’s friends fell away. He felt he could talk to William. He had always wished that he could talk to young men and tell them the things he knew. If an older man had talked to him when he was young he would have got along faster.
“I’ll tell you.” He shifted his cigar to the corner of his mouth. “If you want to get rich, William, you’ll have to quit thinking about anything else. You’ll have to concentrate. You have to put your mind to it.”
“Yes, sir.” William sat at attention, his hands folded upon his crossed knees. They were small hands, as Mr. Cameron remembered his wife had said they were, and they were already covered with surprisingly heavy black hair. William’s hair on his head was black, too, in contrast to his light gray-green eyes. An odd-looking boy, Mr. Cameron reflected, though so handsome.
“Have you thought of any special line?” Mr. Cameron asked.
William hesitated. “Did you, sir, at my age?”
“Yes, I did,” Mr. Cameron replied. “That’s the trick of it. You have to think of something that people want — not a few rich people, mind you, but all the ones who don’t have much money. You have to think of something that they must buy and yet that won’t cost too much. That’s how I thought of the Stores. I was clerk in a general store.”
William knew the Cameron Stores very well. There was one in almost every city. He had wandered about them more than once, looking at the piles of cheap underwear and kitchen utensils and groceries and dishes and baby carriages and linoleum, everything that an ordinary family might want and nothing that Mrs. Cameron would have had in her own house. It was repellent stuff.
“I’ve thought of a newspaper,” William said.
Mr. Cameron looked blank. “What about a newspaper?”
“A cheap newspaper,” William said distinctly. “With lots of pictures so that people will first look and then read.”