I sat, looking at the rows of books that ran from floor to ceiling.
Many of them were in sets and, from the looks of them, in expensive
bindings.
It must be wonderful, I thought, to be, not exactly rich, but to have
enough so you didn’t have to worry when there was some little thing you
wanted, not to have to wonder if it would be all right if you spent the
money for it. To be able to live in a house like this, to line the walls
with books and have rich draperies and to have more than just one bottle of
booze and a place to keep it other than a kitchen shelf.
He handed me the glass of whisky and walked around the desk. He sat
down in the chair behind it. Raising his glass, he took a couple of thirsty
gulps, then set the glass down on the desk top.
‘Brad,’ he asked, ‘how much do you know?’
‘Not a thing,’ I said. ‘Only what I told you. I talked with someone on
the phone. They offered me a job.’
‘And you took the job?’
‘No,’ I said, ‘I didn’t, but I may. I could use a job. But what they
whoever it was had to say didn’t make much sense.’
‘They?’
Well, either there were three of them – or one who used three different
voices. Strange as it may sound to you, it seemed to me as if it were one
person who used different voices.’
He picked up the glass and gulped at it again. He held it up to the
light and saw in what seemed to be astonishment that it was nearly empty. He
hoisted himself out of the chair and went to get the bottle. He slopped
liquor in his glass and held the bottle out to me.
‘I haven’t started yet,’ I told him.
He put the bottle on the desk and sat down again.
‘OK,’ he said, ‘you’ve come and talked with me. It’s all right to take
the job. Pick up your money and get out of here. More than likely Nancy’s
out there waiting. Take her to a show or something.’
‘And that’s all?’ I asked. ‘That is all,’ he said.
‘You changed your mind,’ I told him. ‘Changed my mind?’
‘You were about to tell me something. Then you decided not to.’
He looked at me levelly and hard. ‘I suppose you’re right,’ he said.
‘It really makes no difference.’
‘It does to me,’ I told him. ‘Because I can see you’re scared.’
I thought he might get sore. Most men do when you tell them they are
scared.
He didn’t. He just sat there, his face unchanging.
Then he said: ‘Start on that drink, for Christ’s sake. You make me
nervous, just roosting there and hanging onto it.’
I had forgotten all about the drink. I had a slug.
‘Probably,’ he said, ‘you are thinking a lot of things that aren’t
true. You more than likely think that I’m mixed up in some dirty kind of
business. I wonder, would you believe me If I told you I don’t really know
what kind of business I’m mixed up in.’
‘I think I would,’ I said. ‘That is, if you say so.’
‘I’ve had a lot of trouble in life,’ he said, ‘but that’s not unusual.
Most people do have a lot of trouble, one way or the other. Mine came in a
bunch. Trouble has a way of doing that.’
I nodded, agreeing with him.
‘First,’ he said, ‘my wife left me. You probably know all about that.
There must have been a lot of talk about it.’
‘It was before my time,’ I said. ‘I was pretty young.’
‘Yes, I suppose it was. Say this much for the two of us, we were
civilized about it. There wasn’t any shouting and no nastiness in court.
That was something neither of us wanted. And, then, on top of that I was
facing business failure. The bottom went out of the farm machinery business
and I feared that I might have to shut down the plant. There were a lot of
other small farm machinery firms that simply locked their doors. After fifty
or sixty or more years as going, profitable concerns, they were forced out
of business.’
He paused, as if he wanted me to say something. There wasn’t anything
to say.
He took another drink, then began to talk again. ‘I’m a fairly stupid
man in a lot of ways. I can handle a business. I can keep it going if
there’s any chance to keep it going and I can wring a profit from it. I
suppose that you could say I’m rather astute when it comes to business
matters. But that’s the end of it. In the course of my lifetime I have never
really had a big idea or a new idea.’
He leaned forward, clasping his hands together and putting them on the
desk.
‘I’ve thought about it a lot,’ he said, ‘this thing that happened to
me. I’ve tried to see some reason in it and there is no reason. It’s a thing
that should not have happened, not to a man like me. There I was, on the
verge of failure, and not a thing that I could do about it. The problem was
quite simple, really. For a number of good economic reasons, less farm
machinery was being sold. Some of the big concerns, with big sales
departments and good advertising budgets, could ride out a thing like that.
They had some elbow room to plan, there were steps that they could take to
lessen the effects of the situation. But a small concern like mine didn’t
have the room or the capital reserve. My firm, and others, faced disaster.
And in my case, you understand, I didn’t have a chance. I had run the
business according to old and established practices and time-tested rules,
the same sort of good, sound business practices that had been followed by my
grandfather and my father. And these practices said that when your sales
dwindled down to nothing you were finished. There were other men who might
have been able to figure out a way to meet the situation, but not me. I was
a good businessman, but I had no imagination. I had no ideas. Ad then,
suddenly, I began to get ideas.
But they were not my own ideas. It was as if the ideas of some other
person were being transplanted to my brain.
‘You understand,’ he said, ‘that an idea sometimes comes to you in the
matter of a second. It just pops from nowhere. It has no apparent point of
origin. Try as you may, you cannot trace it back to anything you did or
heard or read. Somehow, I suppose, if you dug deep enough, you’d find its
genesis, but there are few of us who are trained to do that sort of digging.
But the point is that most ideas are no more than a germ, a tiny starting
point. An idea may be good and valid, but it will take some nursing. It has
to be developed. You must think about it and turn it around and around and
look at it from every angle and weigh it and consider it before you can
mould it into something useful.
‘But this wasn’t the way with these ideas that I got. They sprang forth
full and round and completely developed. I didn’t have to do any thinking
about them. They just popped into my mind and I didn’t need to do another
thing about them. There they were, all ready for one’s use. I’d wake up in
the morning and I’d have a new idea, a new mass of knowledge in my brain.
I’d go for a walk and come back with another. They came in bunches, as if
someone had sown a crop of them inside my brain and they had lain there for
a while and then begun to sprout.’
‘The gadgets?’ I said.
He looked at me curiously. ‘Yes, ‘the gadgets. What do you know about
them?’
‘Nothing,’ I told him. ‘I just knew that when the bottom fell out of
the farm machinery business you started making gadgets. I don’t know what
kind of gadgets.’
He didn’t tell me what kind of gadgets. He went on talking about those
strange ideas. ‘I didn’t realize at first what was happening. Then, as the
ideas came piling in on me, I knew there was something strange about it. I
knew that it was unlikely that I’d think of any one of them, let alone the
many that I had. More than likely I’d never have thought of them at all, for
I have no imagination and I am not inventive. I tried to tell myself that it
was just barely possible I might have thought of two or three of them, but