Kitabı oku: «The Wall Street Girl», sayfa 5

CHAPTER XII
A SOCIAL WIDOW

With the approach of the holiday season, when pretty nearly every one comes back to town, Frances found her engagements multiplying so rapidly that it required a good deal of tact and not a little arithmetic to keep them from conflicting. In this emergency, when she really needed Don, not only was he of no practical help, but he further embarrassed her by announcing a blanket refusal of all afternoon engagements. This placed her in the embarrassing position of being obliged to go alone and then apologize for him.

“Poor Don is in business now,” was her stock explanation.

She was irritated with Don for having placed her in this position. In return for having surrendered to him certain privileges, she had expected him to fulfill certain obligations. If she had promised to allow him to serve exclusively as her social partner, then he should have been at all times available. He had no right to leave her a social widow–even when he could not help it. As far as the afternoons were concerned, the poor boy could not help it–she knew that; but, even so, why should her winter be broken up by what some one else could not help?

She had given her consent to Don, not to a business man. As Don he had been delightful. No girl could ask to have a more attentive and thoughtful fiancé than he had been. He allowed her to make all his engagements for him, and he never failed her. He was the only man she knew who could sit through a tea without appearing either silly or bored. And he was nice–but not too nice–to all her girl friends, so that most of them were jealous of her. Decidedly, she had had nothing to complain of.

And she had not complained, even when he announced that he was penniless. This did not affect her feeling toward Don himself. It was something of a nuisance, but, after all, a matter of no great consequence. She had no doubt he could make all the money he wanted, just as her father had done.

But of late it had been increasingly difficult to persuade him, on account of business, to fulfill even his evening engagements. He was constantly reminding her of bonds and things that he must study. Well, if it was necessary for him to study bonds and things, he should find some way of doing it that would not interfere with her plans.

The climax came when he asked to be excused from the Moore cotillion because he had three other dances for that week.

“You see,” he explained, “Farnsworth is going to let me go out and sell as soon as I’m fit, and so I’m putting in a lot of extra time.”

“Who is Farnsworth?” she inquired.

“Why, he’s the general manager. I’ve told you about him.”

“I remember now. But, Don dear, you aren’t going to sell things?”

“You bet I am,” he answered enthusiastically. “All I’m waiting for is a chance.”

“But what do you sell?” she inquired.

“Investment securities.”

He seemed rather pleased that she was showing so much interest.

“You see, the house buys a batch of securities wholesale and then sells them at retail–just as a grocer does.”

“Don!”

“It’s the same thing,” he nodded.

“Then I should call it anything but an attractive occupation.”

“That’s because you don’t understand. You see, here’s a man with some extra money to invest. Now, when you go to him, maybe he has something else in mind to do with that money. What you have to do–”

“Please don’t go into details, Don,” she interrupted. “You know I wouldn’t understand.”

“If you’d just let me explain once,” he urged.

“It would only irritate me,” she warned. “I’m sure it would only furnish you with another reason why you shouldn’t go about as much as you do.”

“It would,” he agreed. “That’s why I want to make it clear. Don’t you see that if I keep at this for a few years–”

“Years?” she gasped.

“Well, until I get my ten thousand.”

“But I thought you were planning to have that by next fall at the latest.”

“I’m going to try,” he answered. “I’m going to try hard. But, somehow, it doesn’t look as easy as it did before I started. I didn’t understand what a man has to know before he’s worth all that money.”

“I’m sure I don’t find ten thousand to be very much,” she observed.

“Perhaps it isn’t much to spend,” he admitted, “but it’s a whole lot to earn. I know a bunch of men who don’t earn it.”

“Then they must be very stupid.”

“No; but somehow dollars look bigger downtown than they do uptown. Why, I know a little restaurant down there where a dollar looks as big as ten.”

“Don, dear, you’re living too much downtown,” she exclaimed somewhat petulantly. “You don’t realize it, but you are. It’s making you different–and I don’t want you different. I want you just as you used to be.”

She fell back upon a straight appeal–an appeal of eyes and arms and lips.

“I miss you awfully in the afternoons,” she went on, “but I’ll admit that can’t be helped. I’ll give up that much of you. But after dinner I claim you. You’re mine after dinner, Don.”

She was very tender and beautiful in this mood. When he saw her like this, nothing else seemed to matter. There was no downtown or uptown; there was only she. There was nothing to do but stoop and kiss her eager lips. Which is exactly what he did.

For a moment she allowed it, and then with an excited laugh freed herself.

“Please to give me one of your cards, Don,” she said.

He handed her a card, and she wrote upon it this:–

“December sixteenth, Moore cotillion.”

CHAPTER XIII
DEAR SIR–

Don never had an opportunity to test his knowledge of the bonds about which he had laboriously acquired so much information, because within the next week all these offerings had been sold and their places taken by new securities. These contained an entirely different set of figures. It seemed to him that all his previous work was wasted. He must begin over again; and, as far as he could see, he must keep on beginning over again indefinitely. He felt that Farnsworth had deprived him of an opportunity, and this had the effect of considerably dampening his enthusiasm.

Then, too, during December and most of January Frances kept him very busy. He had never seen her so gay or so beautiful. She was like a fairy sprite ever dancing to dizzy music. He followed her in a sort of daze from dinner to dance, until the strains of music whirled through his head all day long.

The more he saw of her, the more he desired of her. In Christmas week, when every evening was filled and he was with her from eight in the evening until two and three and four the next morning, he would glance at his watch every ten minutes during the following day. The hours from nine to five were interminable. He wandered restlessly about the office, picking up paper and circular, only to drop them after an uneasy minute or two. The entire office staff faded into the background. Even Miss Winthrop receded until she became scarcely more than a figure behind a typewriter. When he was sent out by Farnsworth, he made as long an errand of it as he could. He was gone an hour, or an hour and a half, on commissions that should not have taken half the time.

It was the week of the Moore cotillion that Miss Winthrop observed the change in him. She took it to be a natural enough reaction and had half-expected it. There were very few men, her observation had told her, who could sustain themselves at their best for any length of time. This was an irritating fact, but being a fact had to be accepted. As a man he was entitled to an off day or two–possibly to an off week.

But when the second and third and fourth week passed without any notable improvement in him, Miss Winthrop became worried.

“You ought to put him wise,” she ventured to suggest to Powers.

“I?” Powers had inquired.

“Well, he seems like a pretty decent sort,” she answered indifferently.

“So he is,” admitted Powers, with an indifference that was decidedly more genuine than her own. It was quite clear that Powers’s interest went no further. He had a wife and two children and his own ambitions.

For a long time she saw no more of him than she saw of Blake. He nodded a good-morning when he came in, and then seemed to lose himself until noon. Where he lunched she did not know. For a while she had rather looked for him, and then, to cure herself of that, had changed her own luncheon place. At night he generally hurried out early–a bad practice in itself: at least once, Farnsworth had wanted him for something after he was gone; he had made no comment, but it was the sort of thing Farnsworth remembered. When, on the very next day, Mr. Pendleton started home still earlier, it had required a good deal of self-control on her part not to stop him. But she did not stop him. For one thing, Blake was at his desk at the time.

It was a week later that Miss Winthrop was called into the private office of Mr. Seagraves one afternoon. His own stenographer had been taken ill, and he wished her to finish the day. She took half a dozen letters, and then waited while Farnsworth came in for a confidential consultation upon some business matters. It was as the latter was leaving that Mr. Seagraves called him back.

“How is Pendleton getting along?” he inquired.

Miss Winthrop felt her heart stop for a beat or two. She bent over her notebook to conceal the color that was burning her cheeks. For an impersonal observer she realized they showed too much.

“I think he has ability,” Farnsworth answered slowly. “He began well, but he has let down a little lately.”

“That’s too bad,” answered Mr. Seagraves. “I thought he would make a good man for us.”

“I can tell better in another month,” Mr. Farnsworth answered.

“We need another selling man,” declared Mr. Seagraves.

“We do,” nodded Farnsworth. “I have my eye on several we can get if Pendleton doesn’t develop.”

“That’s good. Ready, Miss Winthrop.”

The thing Miss Winthrop had to decide that night was whether she should allow Mr. Pendleton to stumble on to his doom or take it upon herself to warn him. She was forced to carry that problem home with her, and eat supper with it, and give up her evening to it. Whenever she thought of it from that point of view, she grew rebellious and lost her temper. There was not a single sound argument why her time and her thought should be thus monopolized by Mr. Pendleton.

She had already done what she could for him, and it had not amounted to a row of pins. She had told him to go to bed at night, so that he could get up in the morning fresh, and he had not done it. She had advised him to hustle whenever he was on an errand for Farnsworth, and of late he had loafed. She had told him to keep up to the minute on the current investments the house was offering, and to-day he probably could not have told even the names of half of them. No one could argue that it was her duty to keep after him every minute–as if he belonged to her.

And then, in spite of herself, her thoughts went back to the private office of Mr. Seagraves. She recalled the expression on the faces of the two men–an expression denoting only the most fleeting interest in the problem of Mr. Pendleton. If he braced up, well and good; if he did not, then it was only a question of selecting some one else. It was Pendleton’s affair, not theirs.

That was what every one thought except Pendleton himself–who did not think at all, because he did not know. And if no one told him, then he would never know. Some day Mr. Farnsworth would call him into the office and inform him his services were no longer needed. He would not tell him why, even if Don inquired. So, with everything almost within his grasp, Pendleton would go. Of course, he might land another place; but it was no easy thing to find the second opportunity, having failed in the first.

Yet this was all so unnecessary. Mr. Pendleton had in him everything Farnsworth wanted. If the latter could have heard him talk as she had heard him talk, he would have known this. Farnsworth ought to send him out of the office–let him get among men where he could talk. And that would come only if Mr. Pendleton could hold on here long enough. Then he must hold on. He must cut out his late hours and return to his old schedule. She must get hold of him and tell him. But how?

The solution came the next morning. She decided that if she had any spare time during the day she would write him what she had to say. When she saw him drift in from lunch at twenty minutes past one, she took the time without further ado. She snatched a sheet of office paper, rolled it into the machine, snapped the carriage into position, and began.

MR. DONALD PENDLETON,

Care Carter, Rand & Seagraves,

New York, N.Y.

Dear Sir:–

Of course it is none of my business whether you get fired or not; but, even if it isn’t, I like to see a man have fair warning. Farnsworth doesn’t think that way. He gives a man all the rope he wants and lets him hang himself. That is just what he’s doing with you. I had a tip straight from the inside the other day that if you keep on as you have for the last six weeks you will last here just about another month. That isn’t a guess, either; it’s right from headquarters.

For all I know, this is what you want; but if it is, I’d rather resign on my own account than be asked to resign. It looks better, and helps you with the next job. Most men downtown have a prejudice against a man who has been fired.

You needn’t ask me where I got my information, because I won’t tell you. I’ve no business to tell you this much. What you want to remember is that Farnsworth knows every time you get in from lunch twenty minutes late, as you did to-day; and he knows when you get in late in the morning, as you have eleven times now; and he knows when you take an hour and a half for a half-hour errand, as you have seven times; and he knows when you’re in here half-dead, as you’ve been all the time; and he knows what you don’t know about what you ought to know. And no one has to tell him, either. He gets it by instinct.

So you needn’t say no one warned you, and please don’t expect me to tell you anything more, because I don’t know anything more. I am,

Respectfully yours,

SARAH K. WINTHROP.

She addressed this to the Harvard Club, and posted it that night on her way home. It freed her of a certain responsibility, and so helped her to enjoy a very good dinner.

CHAPTER XIV
IN REPLY

Don did not receive Miss Winthrop’s letter until the following evening. He had dropped into the club to join Wadsworth in a bracer,–a habit he had drifted into this last month,–and opened the envelope with indifferent interest, expecting a tailor’s announcement. He caught his breath at the first line, and then read the letter through some five times. Wadsworth, who was waiting politely, grew impatient.

“If you’re trying to learn that by heart–” he began.

Don thrust the letter into his pocket.

“I beg your pardon,” he apologized. “It–it was rather important.”

They sat down in the lounge.

“What’s yours?” inquired Wadsworth, as in response to a bell a page came up.

“A little French vichy,” answered Don.

“Oh, have a real drink,” Wadsworth urged.

“I think I’d better not to-night,” answered Don.

Wadsworth ordered a cock-tail for himself.

“How’s the market to-day?” he inquired. He always inquired how the market was of his business friends–as one inquires as to the health of an elderly person.

“I don’t know,” answered Don.

“You don’t mean to say you’ve cut out business?” exclaimed Wadsworth.

“I guess I have,” Don answered vaguely.

“Think of retiring?”

“To tell the truth, I hadn’t thought of it until very lately; but now–”

Don restrained a desire to read his letter through once more.

“Take my advice and do it,” nodded Wadsworth. “Nothing in it but a beastly grind. It’s pulling on you.”

As a matter of fact, Don had lost some five pounds in the last month, and it showed in his face. But it was not business which had done that, and he knew it. Also Miss Winthrop knew it.

It was certainly white of her to take the trouble to write to him like this. He wondered why she did. She had not been very much in his thoughts of late, and he took it for granted that to the same degree he had been absent from hers. And here she had been keeping count of every time he came in late. Curious that she should have done that!

In the library, he took out the letter and read it through again. Heavens, he could not allow himself to be discharged like an unfaithful office-boy! His father would turn in his grave. It would be almost as bad as being discharged for dishonesty.

Don’s lips came together in thin lines. This would never do–never in the world. As Miss Winthrop suggested, he had much better resign. Perhaps he ought to resign, anyway. No matter what he might do in the future, he could not redeem the past; and if Farnsworth felt he had not been playing the game right, he ought to take the matter in his own hands and get off the team. But, in a way, that would be quitting–and the Pendletons had never been quitters. It would be quitting, both inside the office and out. He had to have that salary to live on. Without it, life would become a very serious matter. The more he thought of this, the more he realized that resigning was out of the question. He really had no alternative but to make good; so he would make good.

The resolution, in itself, was enough to brace him. The important thing now was, not to make Carter, Rand & Seagraves understand this, not to make Farnsworth understand this: it was to make Miss Winthrop understand it. He seized a pen and began to write.

MY DEAR SARAH K. WINTHROP [he began]:–

Farnsworth ought to be sitting at your desk plugging that machine, and you ought to be holding down his chair before the roll-top desk. You’d get more work out of every man in the office in a week than he does in a month. Maybe he knows more about bonds than you do, but he doesn’t know as much about men. If he did he’d have waded into me just the way you did.

I’m not saying Farnsworth hasn’t good cause to fire me. He has, and that’s just what you’ve made clear. But, honest and hope to die, I didn’t realize it until I read your letter. I knew I’d been getting in late and all that; but, as long as it didn’t seem to make any difference to any one, I couldn’t see the harm in it. I’d probably have kept on doing it if you hadn’t warned me. And I’d have been fired, and deserved it.

If that had happened I think my father would have risen from his grave long enough to come back and disown me. He was the sort of man I have a notion you’d have liked. He’d be down to the office before the doors were open, and he’d stay until some one put him out. I guess he was born that way. But I don’t believe he ever stayed up after ten o’clock at night in his life. Maybe there wasn’t as much doing in New York after ten in those days as there is now.

I don’t want to make any excuses, but, true as you’re living, if I turned in at ten I might just as well set up business in the Fiji Islands. It’s about that time the evening really begins. How do you work it yourself? I wish you’d tell me how you get in on time, looking fresh as a daisy. And what sort of an alarm-clock do you use? I bought one the other day as big as a snare-drum, and the thing never made a dent. Then I tried having Nora call me, but I only woke up long enough to tell her to get out and went to sleep again. If your system isn’t patented I wish you’d tell me what it is. In the mean while, I’m going to sit up all night if I can’t get up any other way.

Because I’m going to make the office of Carter, Rand & Seagraves on time, beginning to-morrow morning. You watch me. And I’ll make up for the time I’ve overdrawn on lunches by getting back in twenty minutes after this. As for errands–you take the time when Farnsworth sends me out again.

You’re dead right in all you said, and if I can’t make good in the next few months I won’t wait for Farnsworth to fire me–I’ll fire myself. But that isn’t going to happen. The livest man in that office is going to be

Yours truly,

Donald Pendleton, Jr.

Don addressed the letter to the office, mailed it, and went home to dress. But before going upstairs he called to Nora.

“Nora,” he said, “you know that I’m in business now?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And you wouldn’t like to see me fired, would you?”

“Oh, Lord, sir!” gasped Nora.

“Then you get me up to-morrow morning at seven o’clock, because if I’m late again that is just what is going to happen. And you know what Dad would say to that.”

The next morning Don stepped briskly into the office five minutes ahead of Miss Winthrop.