Peyton Place (47 page)

“Excuse me, Napoleon,” said the doctor. “The doorbell is ringing.”

“If every man,” declared Seth, ignoring the doctor's remark, “ceased to hate and blame every other man for his own failures and shortcomings, we would see the end of every evil in the world, from war to backbiting.”

Matthew Swain, who had gone to answer the bell, re-entered the room followed by Charles Partridge, Jared Clarke and Dexter Humphrey.

“All of us in the same leaky boat,” said Seth, by way of greeting.

“What's the matter with him?” demanded Jared Clarke unnecessarily.

“He has found the solution to the world's problems,” said Dr. Swain.

“Humph,” said Dexter Humphrey, who was notoriously lacking in a sense of humor. “He was all right when I saw him this afternoon. Well, I came to play cards. Are we going to play?”

“Help yourselves, gentlemen,” said Seth, waving a generous hand. “Make yourselves at home. I, for one, shall sit here and meditate.”

“What the hell got into you, Seth, to make you start in so early on the bottle?” asked Partridge.

Seth eyed the lawyer. “Did it ever occur to you, Charlie, that tolerance can reach a point where it is no longer tolerance? When that happens, the noble-sounding attitude on which most of us pride ourselves degenerates into weakness and acquiescence.”

“Whew!” exclaimed Partridge, wiping exaggeratedly at his forehead. “You sound like somebody at a fraternity bull session. What're you trying to say?”

“I was referring,” said Seth with dignity, “to you and me and all of us, in conjunction with Leslie Harrington.”

There was an uncomfortable silence while Seth looked owlishly from one of his friends to the other. At last, Dexter Humphrey coughed.

“Let's play cards,” he said, and led the way to Seth's kitchen.

“All of us, every last, damned one of us hating Leslie because of our own inadequacies,” said Seth, and slumped back into his chair and drank slowly from his glass.

If Seth Buswell and Leslie Harrington had a trait in common, it was that Seth, like Leslie, was not a worrier. The difference between them, on this point, was that where Leslie had taught himself not to be, Seth had never had to be. George Buswell, Seth's father, had been as wealthy as Leslie Harrington's father, and much more prominent in the state, and he had cast a long shadow. But where Leslie had suffered from a compulsive need for success, Seth had abandoned all hope of making his own mark at an age so young that he could no longer remember when it had been, and this had saved him the worry of failure with which Leslie had had to learn to cope. Seth could not recall a conscious memory of his decision, for over the years it had faded into the vaguest of feelings.

No one will ever be able to say that I do not measure up to my father in spite of my efforts, for I shall never try to measure up to him.

This feeling in young Seth was the beginning of what his father was later to deplore as “Seth's laziness,” and his mother to label as “Seth's total lack of ambition.”

Whatever its name, the unremembered decision had resulted in Seth's calm drifting. He had drifted through his youth and through four years at Dartmouth in much the same way he had later drifted into the ownership of the
Peyton Place Times.
He had drifted, as if detached, through the death of his parents and the loss of his sweetheart, and soon after that Seth's detachment had become known in Peyton Place as Seth's tolerance.

“If you don't care a damn about anything, it is easy to be tolerant,” Seth had once said to his friend young Doc Swain. “Neither side of any picture disturbs you, which enables you to see both sides clearly and sensibly.”

Young Doc Swain, who had been married two weeks before to a girl by the name of Emily Gilbert, had said: “I'd rather be dead than not care a damn about anything.”

And since it is difficult, if not impossible, for a man to survive without loving something, Seth had turned his love to Peyton Place. His was a tolerant, unbiased love which neither demanded nor expected anything in return, so that to everyone else it seemed more like interest and civic pride than love.

“We ought to have a new high school,” Seth had written in an editorial, “but of course, it'll cost us something. Taxes will go up. On the other hand, we're not going to turn out many bright kids with the inadequate facilities which we now have. Looks to me like it's up to you folks with kids, and those of you who ever expect to have kids, to decide whether we'll pay $1.24 more per thousand in property taxes, or whether we'll settle for second-rate education.”

The people of northern New England were Seth's people, and he knew them well. His tolerance, his seeming indifference, succeeded with them where force and salesmanship would have failed. Everyone in Peyton Place said that Seth never used the
Times
as a weapon, not even during political campaigns, and this was the truth. Seth published items of interest to the residents of his town and the surrounding towns. Whatever world news he printed came from the wires of the Associated Press, and Seth never commented or enlarged upon it in his editorials. “Social items and town gossip of a watered down nature, that's what you get in the
Times,”
other newspaper owners in other parts of the state were apt to say. Yet, during the first few years during which Seth had owned the paper, he had not only succeeded in getting a new high school built in his town, but also in getting Memorial Park built and funds appropriated for its care and maintenance. He had raised much of the money that went into the building of the Peyton Place hospital, and through the pages of the
Times
volunteers were recruited for the building of a new firehouse. For years, Seth, in his tolerant, unforceful fashion, saw to it that his town grew and improved, and then Leslie Harrington's son was born. It was as if Leslie, having succeeded in one field, turned now to new interests. In the year following Rodney's birth, voices were raised against Seth's for the first time at town meeting, and the voices raised were those of the mill hands. Year after year, when items dear to Seth's heart such as a new grade school and town zoning came up to a vote at the meeting, the newspaper owner was defeated by overwhelming numbers. Seth retired behind his tolerant detachment and allowed Leslie Harrington to assume a position in Peyton Place which had the dimensions of dictatorship, and he steadfastly refused to use the
Times
as an extension of his own voice. Seth shrugged and said that the people would soon tire of Leslie's dictatorial methods, but in this he was wrong for Leslie did not dictate, he bargained. When Seth realized this, he shrugged again, and everyone in Peyton Place said that his tolerance was of heroic proportions. Seth had believed it himself until one day in 1939 when Allison MacKenzie had come, white faced and with fists clenched, into his office.

“The Ellsworths are suing Leslie Harrington,” Allison had said, “and everyone is saying that they'll never get a dime because the jury will be made up almost entirely of mill hands. What are we going to do?”

Seth had looked at this girl, too tense and fine drawn for a child of sixteen, and had tried to explain to her why they were going to do nothing about the case of Ellsworth
vs.
Harrington.

“I get riled up the same as you,” he had said. “In fact, I've often threatened to use the paper as an instrument of exposure. I threaten to do it every year, just before town meeting, when I know that I'm going to get beat on an issue that I don't want to get beat on, like zoning, or a new grade school. But I never do it. Why? Because I believe in tolerance, and one of the requirements of tolerance is not only that you will listen to the other fellow's viewpoint, but also that you won't try to cram yours down his throat. I'll say what I think to anyone who is willing to listen, but I won't force anyone to read about it in the pages of my paper.”

“Even when you know that your viewpoint is the right one?” Allison had demanded, her voice rising in angry disbelief.

“That isn't the point, is it? One's viewpoint and a man's right to defend himself against it are two different things. When I print something in the paper, and a man reads it later in his own home, I am not there for him to disagree with if his viewpoint is not in accordance with mine. The only recourse he has then is to sit down and write a ‘Letter to the Editor,’ and then he is being unfair to me because he is not here for me to argue with if I wanted to do so.”

“I don't know,” Allison had said in a tightly controlled voice, “how you came to think the way you do, and I don't care. I have something here which I've written. I'm not asking you to print your own words in your paper. Print mine, with my name at the head of it. I'm not afraid to write what I think, and I don't care who reads it or who might disagree with me. I know when I am right.”

“Let's see what you've written,” Seth had said, extending his hand.

Allison had written a great deal, much of it to do with the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, and the individual's God-given right to a fair trial by jury. She had written also of the miser's desire to make money to a point where he grossly overlooked the means by which he made it. She charged Leslie Harrington with negligence and carelessness, and said that if he were any kind of man, he would never have waited to be sued. He would have put his money at the disposal of the Ellsworths, and he would carry the marks of what he had done to Kathy on his conscience for the rest of his life. It was time, Allison had written, for men of honor to stand up and be counted. When the time came that an individual in a free American town was forced to fear a prejudiced hearing, it was indeed a time to try men's souls. Altogether, Allison had written seventeen typewritten pages expressing her opinion of Leslie Harrington and the grip in which he held Peyton Place. When Seth had finished reading, he put the manuscript down carefully.

“I cannot print this, Allison,” he had said.

“Cannot!” the girl had cried, sweeping up the typewritten pages. “You mean will not!”

“Allison, my dear–”

Angry tears had rushed to the girl's eyes. “And I thought that you were my friend,” she said, and had run out of his office.

Seth's cigarette burned his fingers and he sat up with a jerk. For a moment, his mind refused to comprehend his circumstances, but then his eyes fell on a bookcase at the opposite side of the room and he understood that he was sitting in a chair in his own living room.

“Goddamn it,” he muttered, and began to search the floor around his chair for the cigarette end which he had dropped. When he found it, he ground it into the carpet with the toe of his shoe, then he settled back and picked up his half-finished drink.
From
the kitchen, there came a low murmur of men's voices and the whisper of new playing cards.

“Raise you.”

“I'll pass.”

“Call.”

“Full up.”

“Christ, and me sitting with three kings.”

My friends, thought Seth, swallowing a nausea caused by too much to drink on an empty stomach, and caused, too, by unpleasant remembrances. My good, tried and true blue friends, thought Seth, and like a phantom a voice from the past struck him.

“And I thought that you were my friend!”

Seth finished his stale drink and poured himself another I was, you know, he thought, addressing an Allison MacKenzie' of long ago If you had listened to me, you would have been spared a lot of hurt. I was trying to teach you not to care too much. That business of caring too much was always obvious in you, my dear. It showed in your writing, and that, my dear, my too young, my sweet, my talented, my beautiful Allison, does not make for clear, coolheaded, analytical prose.

“Straight, queen high and all black, by God! In spades!” came the enthusiastic voice of Charles Partridge.

My friend, thought Seth drunkenly, my good friend Charlie Partridge. What excuses we have made to one another in our time, Charlie. What beautiful, noble, high-sounding excuses!

And suddenly Seth was back in 1939. October, 1939. Indian summer, 1939, and a crowded courtroom, with his friend Charlie Partridge talking softly to his friend Allison MacKenzie.

“Now, my dear, remember that you are sworn to tell the truth. I want you to tell the court exactly what happened on the evening of Labor Day of this year. Do not be afraid, my dear, you are among friends here.”

“Friends?” The child's voice was not the voice of a child, not the same voice which had thanked Seth for a chance to write for the paper. For money. “Friends?” Such a tense, tightly controlled voice for a little girl of sixteen. “Kathy Ellsworth is my friend. She is the only friend I have in Peyton Place.”

Seth had comforted himself later with the thought that he had only imagined that Allison MacKenzie's eyes had found his in that packed courtroom.

“Now,” said the remembered voice of Charles Partridge, Leslie Harrington's attorney, “could it not be that your friend Kathy became dizzy as she looked down into the moving wheels of the machinery in that building at the carnival?”

“Objection, your Honor!” It was the voice of Peter Drake, a young lawyer who had set up an office in Peyton Place, for God only knew what reason. He came from “away from here,” as the townspeople put it, and until the case of Ellsworth
vs.
Harrington, he had handled nothing but deeds and the petty problems of the mill hands. And here he was, daring to object to something that Charlie Partridge, who had been born in town, was saying.

Honorable Anthony Aldridge, who stubbornly refused to live on Chestnut Street, although he was a judge and could afford it, upheld Peter Drake. The court was not interested in what Allison thought, but only in what she had seen. Seth looked surreptitiously at the jury to see what damage Charlie's question had done, for the jury was comprised of people who would surely favor Leslie Harrington. It would have been impossible to find twelve people in Peyton Place who neither worked at the mills nor owed money on mortgaged property at the Citizens’ National Bank where Leslie was chairman of the board of trustees, and Leslie had acted quickly, once legal proceedings had been instigated against him. He had fired John Ellsworth, Kathy's father, and had suddenly found a buyer for the house which the Ellsworths rented. No wonder the mill hands fastened so thankfully on a morsel of evidence in favor of Leslie Harrington, thought Seth, as he turned his eyes from the jury to Allison MacKenzie on the stand.