Kitabı oku: «Windy McPherson's Son», sayfa 11
“I presume you are right about women,” he said musingly, “it must be a stiff game for you if you like winning on your own hook.”
“Winning! We don’t win.” The lips of the actress drew back showing her white teeth. “No woman ever won who tried to play a straight fighting game for herself.”
Her voice grew tense and the lines upon her forehead reappeared.
“Woman can’t stand alone,” she went on, “she is a sentimental fool. She reaches out her hand to some man and that in the end beats her. Why, even when she plays the game as I played it against the colonel some rat of a man like Frank Robson, for whom she has given up everything worth while to a woman, sells her out.”
Sam looked at her hand, covered with rings, lying on the table.
“Let’s not misunderstand each other,” he said quietly, “do not blame Frank for this. I never knew him. I just imagined him.”
A puzzled look came into the woman’s eyes and a flush rose in her cheeks.
“You grafter!” she sneered.
Sam called to a passing waiter and ordered a fresh bottle of wine.
“What’s the use being sore?” he asked. “It’s simple enough. You staked against a better mind. Anyway you have the ten thousand, haven’t you?”
Luella reached for her purse.
“I don’t know,” she said, “I’ll look. Haven’t you decided to steal it back yet?”
Sam laughed.
“I’m coming to that,” he said, “don’t hurry me.”
For several minutes they sat eyeing each other, and then, with an earnest ring in his voice and a smile on his lips, Sam began talking again.
“Look here!” he said, “I’m no Frank Robson and I do not like giving a woman the worst of it. I have been studying you and I can’t see you running around loose with ten thousand dollars of real money on you. You do not fit into the picture and the money will not last a year in your hands.
“Give it to me,” he urged; “let me invest it for you. I’m a winner. I’ll double it for you in a year.”
The actress stared past Sam’s shoulder to where a group of young men sat about a table drinking and talking loudly. Sam began telling an anecdote of an Irish baggage man in Caxton. When he had finished he looked at her and laughed.
“As that shoemaker looked to Jerry Donlin so you, as the colonel’s wife, looked to me,” he said. “I had to make you get out of my flower bed.”
A gleam of resolution came into the wandering eyes of Luella London and she took the purse from the back of the chair and brought out the roll of bills.
“I’m a sport,” she said, “and I’m going to lay a bet on the best horse I ever saw. You may trim me, but I always would take a chance.”
Turning, she called a waiter and, handing him a bill from her purse, threw the roll on the table.
“Take the pay for the spread and the wine we have had out of that,” she said, handing him the loose bill and then turning to Sam. “You ought to beat the world. Anyway your genius gets recognition from me. I pay for this party and when you see the colonel say good-bye to him for me.”
The next day, at his request, Sue Rainey called at the offices of the Arms Company and Sam handed her the paper signed by Luella London. It was an agreement on her part to divide with Sam, half and half, any money she might be able to blackmail out of Colonel Rainey.
The colonel’s daughter glanced from the paper to Sam’s face.
“I thought so,” she said, and a puzzled look came into her eyes. “But I do not understand this. What does this paper do and what did you pay for it?”
“The paper,” Sam answered, “puts her in a hole and I paid ten thousand dollars for it.”
Sue Rainey laughed and taking a checkbook from her handbag laid it on the desk and sat down.
“Do you get your half?” she asked.
“I get it all,” answered Sam, and then leaning back in his chair launched into an explanation. When he had told her of the talk in the restaurant she sat with the checkbook lying before her and with the puzzled look still in her eyes.
Without giving her time for comment, Sam plunged into the midst of what had been in his mind to say to her.
“The woman will not bother the colonel any more,” he declared; “if that paper won’t hold her something else will. She respects me and she is afraid of me. We had a talk after she had signed the paper and she gave me the ten thousand dollars to invest for her. I promised to double it for her within a year and I want to make good. I want you to double it now. Make the check for twenty thousand.”
Sue Rainey wrote the check, making it payable to bearer, and pushed it across the table.
“I cannot say that I understand yet,” she confessed. “Did you also fall in love with her?”
Sam grinned. He was wondering whether he would be able to get into words just what he wanted to tell her of the actress soldier of fortune. He looked across the table at her frank grey eyes and then on an impulse decided that he would tell it straight out as though she had been a man.
“It’s like this,” he said. “I like ability and good brains and that woman has them. She isn’t a good woman, but nothing in her life has made her want to be good. All her life she has been going the wrong way, and now she wants to get on her feet and squared around. That’s what she was after the colonel for. She did not want to marry him, she wanted to make him give her the start she was after. I got the best of her because somewhere there is a snivelling little whelp of a man who has taken all the good and the fineness out of her and who now stands ready to sell her out for a few dollars. I imagined there would be such a man when I saw her and I bluffed my way through to him. But I do not want to whip a woman, even in such an affair, through the cheapness of some man. I want to do the square thing by her. That’s why I asked you to make that check for twenty thousand.”
Sue Rainey rose and stood by the desk looking down at him. He was thinking how wonderfully clear and honest her eyes.
“And what about the colonel?” she asked. “What will he think of all this?”
Sam walked around the desk and took her hand.
“We’ll have to agree not to consider him,” he said. “We really did that you know when we started this thing. I think we can depend upon Miss London’s putting the finishing touches on the job.”
And Miss London did. She sent for Sam a week later and put tweny-five hundred dollars into his hand.
“That’s not to invest for me,” she said, “that’s for yourself. By the agreement I signed with you we were to split anything I got out of the colonel. Well, I went light. I only got five thousand dollars.”
With the money in his hand Sam stood by the side of a little table in her room looking at her.
“What did you tell the colonel?” he asked.
“I called him up here to my room last night and lying here in bed I told him that I had just discovered I was the victim of an incurable disease. I told him that within a month I would be in bed for keeps and asked him to marry me at once and to take me away with him to some quiet place where I could die in his arms.”
Coming over to Sam, Luella London put a hand upon his arm and laughed.
“He began to beg off and make excuses,” she went on, “and then I brought out his letters to me and talked straight. He wilted at once and paid the five thousand dollars I asked for the letters without a murmur. I might have made it fifty and with your talent you ought to get all he has in six months.”
Sam shook hands with her and told her of his success in doubling the money she had put into his hands. Then putting the twenty-five hundred dollars in his pocket he went back to his desk. He did not see her again and when, through a lucky market turn, he had increased the twenty thousand dollars she had left with him to twenty-five, he placed it in the hands of a trust company for her and forgot the incident. Years later he heard that she was running a fashionable dressmaking establishment in a western city.
And Colonel Tom Rainey, who had for months talked of nothing but factory efficiency and of what he and young Sam McPherson were going to do in the way of enlarging the business, began the next morning a tirade against women that lasted the rest of his life.
CHAPTER V
Sue Rainey had long touched the fancy of the youths of Chicago society who, while looking at her trim little figure and at the respectable size of the fortune behind it, were yet puzzled and disconcerted by her attitude toward themselves. On the wide porches at golf clubs, where young men in white trousers lounged and smoked cigarettes, and in the down-town clubs, where the same young men spent winter afternoons playing Kelly pool, they spoke of her, calling her an enigma. “She’ll end by being an old maid,” they declared, and shook their heads at the thought of so good a connection dangling loosely in the air just without their reach. From time to time, one of the young men tore himself loose from the group that contemplated her, and, with an opening volley of books, candy, flowers and invitations to theatres, charged down upon her, only to have the youthful ardour of his attack cooled by her prolonged attitude of indifference. When she was twenty-one, a young English cavalry officer, who came to Chicago to ride in the horse show had, for some weeks, been seen much in her company and a report of their engagement had been whispered through the town and talked of about the nineteenth hole at the country clubs. The rumour proved to be without foundation, the attraction to the cavalry officer having been a certain brand of rare old wine the colonel had stored in his cellar and a feeling of brotherhood with the swaggering old gun maker, rather than the colonel’s quiet little daughter.
After the beginning of his acquaintanceship with her, and all during the days when he stirred things up in the offices and shops of the gun company, tales of the assiduous and often needy young men who were camped on her trail reached Sam’s ears. They would be in at the office to see and talk with the colonel, who had several times confided to Sam that his daughter Sue was already past the age at which right-minded young women should marry, and in the absence of the father two or three of them had formed a habit of stopping for a word with Sam, whom they had met through the colonel or Jack Prince. They declared that they were “squaring themselves with the colonel.” Not a difficult thing to do, Sam thought, as he drank the wine, smoked the cigars, and ate the dinners of all without prejudice. Once, at luncheon, Colonel Tom discussed these young men with Sam, pounding on a table so that the glasses jumped about, and calling them damned upstarts.
For his own part, Sam did not feel that he knew Sue Rainey, and although, after their first meeting one evening at the Rainey house, he had been pricked by a mild curiosity concerning her, no opportunity to satisfy it had presented itself. He knew that she was athletic, travelled much, rode, shot, and sailed a boat; and he had heard Jack Prince speak of her as a woman of brains, but, until the incident of the colonel and Luella London threw them for the moment into the same enterprise and started him thinking of her with real interest, he had seen and talked with her for but brief passing moments brought about by their mutual interest in the affairs of her father.
After Janet Eberly’s sudden death, and while he was yet in the midst of his grief at her loss, Sam had his first long talk with Sue Rainey. It was in Colonel Tom’s office, and Sam, walking hurriedly in, found her sitting at the colonel’s desk and staring out of the window at a broad expanse of flat roofs. A man, climbing a flag pole to replace a slipped rope, caught his attention and standing by the window looking at the minute figure clinging to the swaying pole, he began talking of the absurdity of human endeavour.
The colonel’s daughter listened respectfully to his rather obvious banalities and getting up from her chair came to stand beside him. Sam turned slyly to look at her firm brown cheeks as he had looked on the morning when she had come to see him about Luella London and was struck by the thought that she in some faint way reminded him of Janet Eberly. In a moment, and rather to his own surprise, he burst into a long speech telling of Janet, of the tragedy of her loss and something of the beauty of her life and character.
The nearness of his loss and the nearness also of what he thought might be a sympathetic listener spurred him and he found himself getting a kind of relief for the aching sense of loss for his dead comrade by heaping praises upon her life.
When he had finished saying what was in his mind, he stood by the window feeling awkward and embarrassed. The man who climbed the flag pole having put the rope through the ring at the top slid suddenly down the pole and thinking for the moment that he had fallen Sam made a quick clutch at the air with his hand. His gripping fingers closed over Sue Rainey’s hand.
He turned, amused by the incident, and began making a halting explanation. There were tears in Sue Rainey’s eyes.
“I wish I had known her,” she said and drew her hand from between his fingers. “I wish you had known me better that I also might have known your Janet. They are rare—such women. They are worth much to know. Most women like most men—”
She made an impatient gesture with her hand and Sam, turning, walked toward the door. He felt that he might not trust himself to answer her. For the first time since coming to manhood he felt that tears might at any moment come into his eyes. Grief for the loss of Janet surged through him disconcerting and engulfing him.
“I have been doing you an injustice,” said Sue Rainey, looking at the floor. “I have thought of you as something different from what you are. There is a story I heard of you which gave me a wrong impression.”
Sam smiled. Having conquered the commotion within himself, he laughed and explained the incident of the man who had slid down the pole.
“What was the story you heard?” he asked.
“It was a story a young man told at our house,” she explained hesitatingly, refusing to be carried away from her mood of seriousness. “It was about a little girl you saved from drowning and a purse made up and given you. Why did you take the money?”
Sam looked at her squarely. The story was one that Jack Prince had delight in telling. It concerned an incident of his early business life in the city.
One afternoon, when he was still in the employ of the commission firm, he had taken a party of men for a trip on an excursion steamer on the lake. He had a project into which he wanted them to go with him and had taken them aboard the steamer to get them together and present the merits of his scheme. During the trip a little girl had fallen overboard and Sam, springing after her, had brought her safely aboard the boat.
On the excursion steamer a cheer had arisen. A young man in a broad-brimmed cowboy hat ran about taking up a collection. People crowded forward to grasp Sam’s hand and he had accepted the money collected and had put it in his pocket.
Among the men aboard the boat were several who, while they did not draw back from going into Sam’s project, had thought his taking the money not manly. They had told the story, and it had come to the ears of Jack Prince, who never tired of repeating it and always ended the story with the request that the listener ask Sam why he had taken the money.
Now in Colonel Tom’s office facing Sue Rainey, Sam made the explanation that had so delighted Jack Prince.
“The crowd wanted to give me the money,” he said, slightly perplexed. “Why shouldn’t I have taken it? I did not save the little girl for the money, but because she was a little girl; and the money paid for my ruined clothes and the expenses of the trip.”
With his hand on the doorknob he looked steadily at the woman before him.
“And I wanted the money,” he announced, a ring of defiance in his voice. “I have always wanted money, any money I could get.”
Sam went back to his own office and sat down at his desk. He had been surprised by the cordiality and friendliness Sue Rainey had shown toward him. On an impulse, he wrote a letter, defending his position in the matter of the money taken on the excursion steamer and setting forth something of the attitude of his mind toward money and business affairs.
“I cannot see myself believing in the rot most business men talk,” he wrote at the end of the letter. “They are full of sentiment and ideals which are not true. Having a thing to sell they always say it is the best, although it may be third rate. I do not object to that. What I do object to is the way they have of nursing a hope within themselves that the third rate thing is first rate until the hope becomes a belief. In the talk I had with that actress Luella London I told her that I myself flew the black flag. Well, I do. I would lie about goods to sell them, but I would not lie to myself. I will not stultify my own mind. If a man crosses swords with me in a business deal and I come out of the affair with the money, it is no sign that I am the greater rascal, rather it is a sign that I am the keener man.”
With the note lying before him on the desk Sam wondered why he had written it. It seemed to him an accurate and straightforward statement of the business creed he had adopted for himself, but a rather absurd note to write to a woman. And then, not allowing himself time to reconsider his action, he addressed an envelope and going out into the general offices dropped it into the mail chute.
“It will let her know where I stand anyway,” he thought, with a return of the defiant mood in which he had told her the motive of his action on the boat.
Within the next ten days after the talk in Colonel Tom’s office Sam saw Sue Rainey several times coming to or going from her father’s office. Once, meeting in the little lobby by the office entrance, she stopped and put out her hand which Sam took awkwardly. He had a feeling that she would not have regretted an opportunity to continue the sudden little intimacy that had sprung up between them in the few minutes’ talk of Janet Eberly. The feeling did not come from vanity but from a belief in Sam that she was in some way lonely and wanting companionship. Although she had been much courted she lacked, he thought, the talent for comradeship or quick friendliness. “Like Janet she is more than half intellect,” he told himself, and felt a pang of regret for the slight disloyalty of the further thought that there was in Sue a something more substantial and solid than there had been in Janet.
Suddenly Sam began wondering whether or not he would like to marry Sue Rainey. His mind played with the idea. He took it with him to bed, and it went with him all day in his hurried trips through offices and shops. The thought having come to him persisted, and he began seeing her in a new light. The odd half awkward little movements of her hands, and their expressiveness, the brown fine texture of her cheeks, the clearness and honesty of her grey eyes, the quick sympathy and understanding of his feeling for Janet, and the subtle flattery of the notion he had got that she was interested in him—all of these things came and went in his mind while he ran through columns of figures and laid plans for the expansion of the business of the Arms Company. Unconsciously he began to make her a part of his plans for the future.
Later, Sam discovered that during the days after the first talk together the thought of a marriage between them was in Sue’s mind also. After the talk she went home and stood for an hour before the glass studying herself and she once told Sam that in her bed that night she shed tears because she had never been able to arouse in a man the note of tenderness that had been in his voice when he talked to her of Janet.
And then two months after the first talk they had another. Sam, who had not allowed his grief over the loss of Janet or his nightly efforts to drown the sting of it in hard drinking, to check the big forward movement that he felt he was getting into the work of the offices and shops, sat one afternoon deeply absorbed in a pile of factory cost sheets. His shirt sleeves were rolled to the elbow, showing his white muscular forearms. He was absorbed, intent upon the sheets.
“I stepped in,” said a voice above his head.
Glancing up quickly, Sam sprang to his feet. “She must have been there some minutes looking down at me,” he thought, and had a thrill of pleasure in the thought.
Into his mind came the contents of the letter he had written her, and he wondered if after all he had been a fool, and whether the thoughts of a marriage with her were but vagaries. “Perhaps it would not be attractive to either her or myself when we came up to it,” he decided.
“I stepped in,” she began again. “I have been thinking. Some things you said—in the letter and when you talked of your friend Janet who died—some things of men and women and work. You may not remember them. I—I got interested. I—are you a socialist?”
“I believe not,” Sam answered, wondering what had given her that thought. “Are you?”
She laughed and shook her head.
“Just what are you?” she went on. “What do you believe? I am curious to know. I thought your note—you will pardon me—I thought it a kind of pretence.”
Sam winced. A shadow of doubt of the sincerity of his business philosophy crossed his mind accompanied by the swaggering figure of Windy McPherson. He came around the desk and leaning against it looked at her. His secretary had gone out of the room and they were alone together. Sam laughed.
“There was a man in the town where I was raised used to say that I was a little mole working underground, intent upon worms,” he said, and then, waving his arms toward the papers on the desk, added, “I am a business man. Isn’t that enough? If you could go with me through some of these cost sheets you would agree they are needed.”
He turned and faced her again.
“What should I be doing with beliefs?” he asked.
“Well, I think you have them—some kind of beliefs,” she insisted, “you must have them. You get things done. You should hear the men talk of you. Sometimes at the house they are quite foolish about what a wonderful fellow you are and what you are doing here. They say that you drive on and on. What drives you? I want to know.”
For the moment Sam half suspected that she was secretly laughing at him. Finding her quite serious he started to reply and then stopped, regarding her.
The silence between them went on and on. A clock on the wall ticked loudly.
Sam stepped nearer to her and stood looking down into the face she slowly turned up to his.
“I want to have a talk with you,” he said, and his voice broke. He had the illusion of a hand gripping at his throat.
In a flash he had definitely decided that he would try to marry her. Her interest in the motives of his life had clinched the sort of half decision he had made. In an illuminating moment during the prolonged silence between them he had seen her in a new light. The feeling of vague intimacy brought to him by his thoughts of her became a fixed belief that she belonged to him—was a part of him—and he was charmed with her manner, and her person, standing there, as with a gift given him.
And then into his mind came a hundred other thoughts, clamouring thoughts, come out of the hidden parts of him. He began to think that she could lead the way on a road he wanted to travel. He thought of her wealth and what it would mean to a man filled with his hunger for power. And through these thoughts shot others. Something in her had taken hold of him—something that had been also in Janet. He was curious concerning her curiosity about his beliefs, and wanted to question her concerning her own beliefs. He could see none of Colonel Tom’s blustering incompetence in her and thought her filled with truth as a deep spring is filled with clear water. He believed she would give him something, something that all his life he had been wanting. An old aching hunger that had haunted his nights as a boy came back and he thought that at her hand it might be fed.
“I—I must read a book about socialism,” he said lamely.
Again they stood in silence, she looking at the floor, he past her head and out at the window. He could not bring himself to speak again of the proposed talk. He had a boyish dread of having her notice the tremor in his voice.
Colonel Tom came into the room, bursting with an idea Sam had given him at the lunch hour and which in working its way into his mind had become to the colonel’s entirely honest belief an idea of his own. The interruption brought to Sam an intense feeling of relief and he began talking of the colonel’s idea as though it had taken him unawares.
Sue, walking to a window, began tying and untying the curtain cord. When Sam, raising his eyes, looked at her, he caught her eyes watching him intently and she smiled, continuing to look at him squarely. It was his eyes that first broke away.
From that day Sam’s mind was afire with thoughts of Sue Rainey. In his room he sat, or going into Grant Park stood by the lake, looking at the silent, moving water as he had looked in the days when he first came to the city. He did not dream of having her in his arms or of kissing her lips; he thought, instead, with a glowing heart, of a life lived with her. He wanted to walk beside her through the streets, to have her come suddenly in at his office door, to look into her eyes and to have her question him, as she had questioned, concerning his beliefs and his hopes. He thought that in the evening he would like to go to a house of his own and find her sitting there waiting for him. All the charm of his aimless, half-dissolute way of life died in him, and he believed that with her he could begin to live more fully and completely. From the moment when he had definitely decided that he wanted Sue as a wife, Sam stopped overdrinking, going to his room or walking through the streets or in the parks instead of seeking his old companions in the clubs and drinking places. Sometimes pushing his bed to the window overlooking the lake, he would undress immediately after dinner and opening the window would spend half the night watching the lights of boats far away over the water and thinking of her. He would imagine her in the room, moving here and there, and coming occasionally to put her hand in his hair and look down at him as Janet had done, helping by her sane talk and quiet ways to get his life straightened out for good living.
And when he had fallen asleep the face of Sue Rainey came to visit his dreams. One night he thought she had become blind and sat in the room with sightless eyes saying over and over like one demented, “Truth, truth, give me back the truth that I may see,” and he awoke sick with horror at the thought of the look of suffering that had been in her face. Never did Sam dream of having her in his arms or of raining kisses on her lips and neck as he had dreamed of other women who in the past had won his favour.
For all that he thought of her so constantly and built so confidently his dream of a life to be spent with her, months passed before he saw her again. Through Colonel Tom he learned that she had gone for a visit to the East and he went earnestly about his work, keeping his mind on his business during the day and only in the evening allowing himself to become absorbed in thoughts of her. He had a feeling that although he had said nothing she knew of his desire for her and that she wanted time to think it over. Several times in the evening in his room he wrote her long letters filled with minute, boyish explanations of his thoughts and motives, letters which after writing he immediately destroyed. A woman of the west side, with whom he had once had an affair, met him one day on the street, and put her hand familiarly on his arm and for the moment reawakened in him an old desire. After leaving her he did not go back to the office, but taking a south-bound car, spent the afternoon walking in Jackson Park, watching the children at play on the grass, sitting on benches under the trees, getting out of his body and his mind the insistent call of the flesh that had come back to him.
Then in the evening, he came suddenly upon Sue riding a spirited black horse in a bridle path at the upper end of the park. It was just at the grey beginning of night. Stopping the horse, she sat looking at him and going to her he put a hand on the bridle.
“We might have that talk,” he said.
She smiled down at him and the colour began to rise in her brown cheeks.
“I have been thinking of it,” she said, the familiar serious look coming into her eyes. “After all what have we to say to each other?”
Sam watched her steadily.
“I have a lot of things to say to you,” he announced. “That is to say—well—I have, if things are as I hope.” She got off the horse and they stood together by the side of the path. Sam never forgot the few minutes of silence that followed. The wide prospects of green sward, the golf player trudging wearily toward them through the uncertain light, his bag upon his shoulder, the air of physical fatigue with which he walked, bending slightly forward, the faint, soft sound of waves washing over a low beach, and the intense waiting look on the face she turned up to him, made an impression on his mind that stayed with him through life. It seemed to him that he had arrived at a kind of culmination, a starting point, and that all the vague shadowy uncertainties that had, in reflective moments, flitted through his mind, were to be brushed away by some act, some word, from the lips of this woman. With a rush he realised how consistently he had been thinking of her and how enormously he had been counting on her falling in with his plans, and the realisation was followed by a sickening moment of fear. How little he actually knew of her and of her way of thought. What assurance had he that she would not laugh, jump back upon the horse, and ride away? He was afraid as he had never been afraid before. Dumbly his mind groped about for a way to begin. Expressions he had caught and noted in her strong serious little face when he had achieved but a mild curiosity concerning her came back to visit his mind and he tried desperately to build an instant idea of her from these. And then turning his face from her he plunged directly into his thoughts of the past months as though she had been sharing talking to the colonel.
