The Mrs. Willoughby Plan

by MARY ELIZABETH PLUMMER

1

MRS. PETER WILLOUGHBY long had wished to devise and to contribute to the world a personal plan for the solution of its ills. This would be known as the Mrs. Willoughby Plan. It would cover such points as the prevention of friction between nations, the economic rehabilitation of distressed areas, and the preservation of the amenities.

Idie Plan was, briefly, for everyone on the earth to behave himself. Needless to say, this embraced the thought that no person was to covet lands, goods, or persons which were not Ins. The genius of the Plan was its utter simplicity.

“From now on, everything will be better,” said Mrs. Willoughby’s husband, after she explained the broad outlines of the Plan to him one evening.

“I do hope so,” said Mrs. Willoughby.

“How did you happen to hit upon this nostrum?” asked James Peter Willoughby, who was dividing his attention between the Plan and the evening paper.

Mrs. Willoughby said modestly that it had simply come to her, as she was going about her daily rounds.

“The idea is superb,” said Jim. “I am aroused. How will you make it work? ”

Mrs. Willoughby explained that there would be a council of experts, and some kind of steering committee. These would be provided for in the Plan, yet to be drafted. Later, codicils would be added, containing guaranties.

“One of the codicils should provide for a large, sturdy committee with fixed bayonets,” said Jim.

Mrs. Willoughby considered a moment, and then said that he had missed the whole point of the Plan, the purpose of which was to dispense with such needs.

“Well, in the event of trouble — an incident of nationalistic nastiness — what would you do?” he inquired.

Mrs. Willoughby pondered. “Under my plan,” she said intelligently, “trouble spots of the world would be given special attention. Spots where natural resources are located. Such as deposits of various kinds, including manganese.”

She was not sure what manganese was, but anyway it. was fraught with trouble. As soon as it was mentioned, a current of desire passed through the nations. Under the Mrs. Willoughby Plan, illicit desire for manganese would be outlawed.

She saw herself rising at luncheon meetings, having been called upon to explain the finer points of her plan, and stating: —

“My plan took shape during long evenings at my own fireside. . . . No man or groups of men shall desire illicitly. . . . No flag or flags shall be advanced with a view to having trade follow it or them. ... I am not mentioning any nation by name, but all of us know. . . . My plan calls for the creation of a council. . . .”

There would be a murmur of voices afterward: “Her plan is so simple. Why didn’t we think of it ourselves?”

But how to implement her recommendation for a cure-all for man’s distresses? Prom day to day, as the international picture changed, she tried to think of something — some suggestion that could be offered through the proper channels, to the proper authority in Washington.

For a while she considered a general evacuation of all seaboards in all nations, to a depth to be decided upon by the steering committee.

This idea was drastic. It meant legislating the Port of New York out of existence, for example. Mayor La Guardia would raise a great stir. However, there was a germ of good in this proposal — because many people, as soon as they saw a ship, were determined to go somewhere in it and bring home something. This led to conflict. Strife over possessions.

“Tungsten!” thought Mrs. Willoughby. Tungsten was a thing people struggled over.

“Are ships a good thing?” she asked herself coldly. Yes, on the whole, they were. Without them, America never would have been discovered and the world would be in a hopeless snarl. Man must have his seaboards and look beyond them. Mrs. Willoughby abandoned her plan for their evacuation — with relief, because now she would not have to propose where all the people in New York would go, not to mention those in Baltimore,

Another proposal called for the cessation of all communication here and abroad for a period of months or years, to be determined by the steering committee. The idea underlying this recommendation was that many persons were at their spiritual best when incommunicado.

She abandoned this, too, having decided that everyone would simply resume his former activities when the stated period was over, like the palace cooks when they awakened after a century, in “The Sleeping Beauty.”

2

Distressed by her inability to help fix things internationally, she retreated into the lives of the great, to sec what they had in mind for the human race. One book that she looked into was Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography; and she came across his Plan for Moral Perfection.

With great interest, she read about Franklin’s little blank book, in which he allotted a page to each of the virt ues, and in which he marked his errors with a little black spot.

Mrs. Willoughby wished she had some of these little books. She would send them to some of her acquaintances, saying, “With best wishes for your improvement.” Immediately she knew that Franklin would have worked to weed out such a thought. It was captious.

Franklin had been concerned not so much about world behavior as about his personal behavior. He was toiling to make himself a better Franklin: “I wished to live without committing any fault at any time.”

There indeed was a bold plan. If each person had this bright dream, how many international difficulties would be eliminated! Franklin had begun at the right end — with himself. Mrs. Willoughby resolved to modify and abridge her world plan into a compact plan applying only to herself. She made a mental note: —

“1. Keep the Christmas card list where I shall absolutely be able to find it next year.”

In the next weeks, Mrs. Willoughby read Law’s A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life, with a view to perfecting her ways, and dipped into the sayings of various mystics. Jim would come home in the evening and find her fair face bent over a book about Buddha, and would tell thoir friends that Janie was sitting under the banyan tree.

As the international picture darkened, Mrs. Willoughby’s personal rectitude mounted by leaps and bounds. “This,” she told herself, “is the least, and the most, I can do.”

She strove valiantly to make each day better than the one before, and to have no truck with slander and talking nonsense. By rising late and dawdling in the morning, she could have a perfect day until lunch time. Then she went forth into the New York streets, with all their cross-currents of carnality. There was a progressive softening of purpose in the afternoon. Evening often found her flinging austerity to the winds. The sun rose unsullied over Sutton Place South, and set besmirched, with her having uttered needless remarks and having engaged in activities which could only be called boondoggling.

The Janet Willoughby Theory of the Upward Reach and the Downward Pull evolved about this time. Mrs. Willoughby thought of it one day while she was in a bookstore, leafing through two beautiful volumes reproducing Blake’s Illustrations for the Book of Job. What nobility was expressed in the great upward surge of the long lines in Blake’s angels, musicians, and shepherds! Some persons and things uplifted one like that; others hauled one down, into a sphere of pure triviality.

“You are hauling me down,” Mrs. Willoughby thought one afternoon when Lolly Winters called and engaged in what Benjamin Franklin called “prattling.” Looking at her friend dispassionately, Mrs. Willoughby felt that Lolly was not trying to be better. She was proud and covetous. She was slothful. There she sat, spreading reports of others and bearing false witness. Lolly should be home, rooting out her own faults.

And where was the Upward Reach in Mrs. Valentine Sledd’s character? Mrs. Willoughby considered this question when she went to Mrs. Sledd’s one afternoon. Mrs. Sledd sat jangling on a little gilt chair. She was a far cry from Blake’s angels.

Back home, delving more deeply into the thoughts of the sages, Mrs. Willoughby noted that some virtues had been esteemed highly in nearly all times and places. Prudence, for example. It was good in any era. “I should like to be known for my prudence,” thought Mrs. Willoughby.

Another trait highly esteemed by all peoples was poise. Serenity. Freedom from perturbation. She noted that Confucius said, “The superior man has neither anxiety nor fear. The ordinary man is always full of distress,” and that Marcus Aurelius praised the man who was neither perplexed nor dejected. She believed Erasmus also had something to say on this point, but she couldn’t find it.

Indubitably, this personal peace which philosophers praised was a step toward world peace. She would inaugurate the revised Mrs. Willoughby Plan with a Personal Peace Week.

3

Mrs. James Peter Willoughby’s quiet, unobtrusive Personal Peace Week came in like a lion, with a disagreement between Mrs. Willoughby and her two younger children.

The incident began with an ominous announcement from four-year-old Joyce that she had got up on the wrong side of the bed. Young Peter then told Joyce that he would put her in the goose coop, as the witch did the children in Hänsel und Gretel.

“We have no goose coop,”Joyce pointed out, “because we have no geese.”

Young Peter said they had two: her and his sister Jane. He made moves to seize her and put her in an invisible coop, and Joyce started howling.

Mrs. Willoughby became embroiled on the plane of earthly conflict. “Joyce and Peter,” she began patiently, “you are not coöperating.”

The incident progressed from a model parent-child conversation to a crisis over Mrs. Willoughby’s authority. “I shall have to preserve this authority or evacuate,” she decided. There was a soul-shaking scene.

Soon afterward, Bernadette appeared from the kitchen, to report that the eggs delivered by the milkman were stamped 89 cents on the box.

Mrs. Willoughby went firmly to the telephone. Not even the great Stoics would have paid 89 cents a dozen for eggs. She called the dairy company. No, the label was on upside down. It was 68 cents for white, 60 for mixed. She had spent five cents on the call, which brought the price of the eggs to 73.

Mrs. Willoughby felt that the practical application of her plan had begun inauspiciously; and later events bore out this view. It was a week in which the quality of goods and services in general declined markedly, because of the situation abroad. No patriotic citizen would complain about this; still, the consumer had to be somewhat more vigilant, lest his dollar go for defective goods or for service unrendered.

Vexation over several household incidents marred her contemplation of personal peace as an abstract ideal.

One morning, there came an anguished wail from Bernadette. The laundry had kept the hemstitched sheets and had substituted inferior sheets belonging to another family. Also, the laundry had not returned James Peter Willoughby’s plaid Scottish socks in any form.

Mrs. Willoughby telephoned the laundry. “I wish to speak to the complaint department,” she said belligerently. Then she remembered a saying of Confucius: “The superior man does not wrangle.”

With forced serenity, she explained about the sheets. The laundry was deeply sorry. It would be rectified. “Of course, in these times, madam — ”

“I understand,” said Mrs. Willoughby. “There is one other matter. My husband’s socks —”

There followed a request for a description of the missing socks. Mrs. Willoughby explained in detail, in so far as she remembered, and added that they were in the plaid of her husband’s ancestral tartan.

“Could you send us a sample?” asked the laundry. Mrs. Willoughby replied impatiently that neither the ancestors nor the tartans were in this country; that, moreover, the ancestors were dead.

“I mean, could you send us a sample of the socks?” asked the laundry resourcefully.

“Ordinarily,” said Mrs. Willoughby, “I keep samples of all my husband’s socks for such emergencies as this; but unfortunately at the moment I am out of samples. ”

The conversation ended with Mrs. Willoughby in a rage.

Hardly had she cooled when Bernadette appeared gloomily and reported that the watercress for the dinner salad had foreign bodies in it.

Mrs. Willoughby went to investigate, and found among the cress a pair of small, aqueous creatures with claws.

Spiritually shattered, she called the market and informed the vegetable man of this outrage. “I am disappointed in this market,” she said with dignity.

There was a sound, from the other end, of the vegetable man trying to cope with Mrs. Willoughby’s disappointment.

“They are water crabs,” he said, when Mrs. Willoughby finally ceased describing her state of mind, “and they are perfectly clean.” There followed an attempt on his part to persuade her that all the best watercress had water crabs in it. Mrs. Willoughby was irate.

Her Personal Peace Week, under the Plan, ended with one of the most unfruitful shopping expeditions in Mrs. Willoughby’s experience. Ordinarily she evaluated merchandise quickly, judiciously. Salespersons recognized this and, with obvious enjoyment, showed her only good quality.

Today she encountered disgruntled salespersons who brought her inferior merchandise, with the hems already coming out. She considered protesting to the section head, but decided it would be more in line with the Plan to commend the store’s good work rather than to criticize its bad work. So she made her way through a morass of shoppers and told a section manager, “You have a particularly good notion department. Miss Spenke has always been unusually helpful.”

The section manager gulped. It was the first kind word his department had had from a customer in thirty years.

Mrs. Willoughby did not feel that this enterprise had turned out well, because on the way she had to pass the stocking counters, where consumers were pawing, with avaricious expressions on their faces. Even looking at this scene was a reckless expenditure of spiritual energy.

She stopped in a little hat shop, laid her hat down for a moment , and another woman seized it, thinking it was for sale. On the way home, a fellow passenger entering the bus inadvertently knocked her hat off; and the bus would not stop at Mrs. Willoughby’s corner, but. determinedly went up two blocks away.

Next morning, Mr. and Mrs. James Peter Willoughby sat peacefully in St. Thomas’s. The discourse had ended, “Great and marvelous are Thy works, O Lord.” The Sevenfold Amen echoed through the church.

Mrs. Willoughby’s hands, beautifully gloved in brown suede, were folded in her lap. Her face was tranquil; her thoughts soared with the Blake angels. It was true, sho thought, that she had found a solution to world problems: namely, for each person to look rigorously to his own st ate of grace. This was more easily said than done, but one could keep trying.

As they left the church, the idea occurred to her of doing all her shopping during two weeks in the year, in order to be sure of living in grace in the remaining fifty. She would revise the Plan to that effect.

Somewhat sadly, she realized that the Plan, which she had envisaged as a covenant, now was only the size of a sampler; so she proceeded to embroider it in sheer fancy. For the two weeks, she could take a room in a hotel near one of the retail centers, and advertise in the Times that merchandise was to be brought there and shown to her: —

“Mrs. James Peter Willoughby of Sutton Place South is at the McAlpin. Tomorrow she will see garments in size 14.”