“But is there any reason why I may not hope to go where I wish to go?”
“I think it depends upon yourself,” said Siward, “upon your capacity for being, or for making people believe you to be exactly what they require. You ask me whether you may be able to go where you desire; and I answer you that there is no limit to any journey except the sprinting ability of the pilgrim.”
Plank laughed a little, and his squared jaws relaxed; then, after a few moments’ thought:
“It is curious that what you cast away from you so easily, I am waiting for with all the patience I have in me. And yet it is always yours to pick up again whenever you wish; and I may never live to possess it.”
He was so perfectly right that Siward said nothing; in fact, he could have no particular interest or sympathy for a man’s quest of what he himself did not understand the lack of. Those born without a tag unmistakably ticketing them and their positions in the world were perforce ticketed. Siward took it for granted that a man belonged where he was to be met; and all he cared about was to find him civil, whether he happened to be a policeman or a master of fox-hounds.
He was, now that he knew Plank, contented to accept him anywhere he met him; but Plank’s upward evolutions upon the social ladder were of no interest to him, and his naïve snobbery was becoming something of a bore.
So Siward directed the conversation into other channels, and Plank, accepting another cup of tea, became very communicative about his stables and his dogs, and the preservation of game; and after a while, looking up confidently at Siward, he said:
“Do you think it beastly to drive pheasants the way I did at Black Fells? I have heard that you were disgusted.”
“It isn’t my idea of a square deal,” said Siward frankly.
“That settles it, then.”
“But you should not let me interfere with—”
“I’ll take your opinion, and thank you for it. It didn’t seem to me to be the thing; only it’s done over here, you know. The De Coursay’s and the—”
“Yes, I know.... Glad you feel that way about it, Plank. It’s pretty rotten sportsmanship. Don’t you think so?”
“I do. I — would you — I should like to ask you to try some square shooting at the Fells,” stammered Plank, “next season, if you would care to.”
“You’re very good. I should like to, if I were going to shoot at all; but I fancy my shooting days are over, for a while.”
“Over!”
“Business,” nodded Siward, absently grave again. “I see no prospect of my idling for the next year or two.”
“You are in — in Amalgamated Electric, I think,” ventured Plank.
“Very much in,” replied the other frankly. “You’ve read the papers and heard rumours, I suppose?”
“Some. I don’t suppose anybody quite understands the attacks on Amalgamated.”
“I don’t — not yet. Do you?”
Plank sat silent, then his shrewd under lip began to protrude.
“I’m wondering,” he began cautiously, “how much the Algonquin crowd understands about the matter?”
Siward’s troubled eyes were on him as he spoke, watching closely, narrowly.
“I’ve heard that rumour before,” he said.
“So have I,” said Plank, “and it seems incredible.” He looked warily at Siward. “Suppose it is true that the Algonquin Trust Company is godfather to Inter-County. That doesn’t explain why a man should kick his own door down when there’s a bell to ring and servants to let him in — and out again, too.”
“I have wondered,” said Siward, “whether the door he might be inclined to kick down is really his own door any longer.”
“I, too,” said Plank simply. “It may belong to a personal enemy — if he has any. He could afford to have an enemy, I suppose.”
Siward nodded.
“Then, hadn’t you better — I beg your pardon! You have not asked me to advise you.”
“No. I may ask your advice some day. Will you give it when I do?”
“With pleasure,” said Plank, so warmly disinterested, so plainly proud and eager to do a service that Siward, surprised and touched, found no word to utter.
Plank rose. Siward attempted to stand up, but had trouble with his crutches.
“Please don’t try,” said Plank, coming over and offering his hand. “May I stop in again soon? Oh, you are off to the country for a month or two? I see.... You don’t look very well. I hope it will benefit you. Awfully glad to have seen you. I — I hope you won’t forget me — entirely.”
“I am the man people are forgetting,” returned Siward, “not you. It was very nice of you to come. You are one of very few who remember me at all.”
“I have very few people to remember,” said Plank; “and if I had as many as I could desire I should remember you first.”
Here he became very much embarrassed. Siward offered his hand again. Plank shook it awkwardly, and went away on tiptoe down the stairs which creaked decorously under his weight.
And that ended the first interview between Plank and Siward in the first days of the latter’s decline.
The months that passed during Siward’s absence from the city began to prove rather eventful for Plank. He was finally elected a member of the Patroons Club, without serious opposition; he had dined twice with the Kemp Ferralls; he and Major Belwether were seen together at the Caithness dance, and in the Caithness box at the opera. Once a respectable newspaper reported him at Tuxedo for the week’s end; his name, linked with the clergy, frequently occupied such space under the column headed “Ecclesiastical News” as was devoted to the progress of the new chapel, and many old ladies began to become familiar with his name.
At the right moment the Mortimers featured him between two fashionable bishops at a dinner. Mrs. Vendenning, who adored bishops, immediately remembered him among those asked to her famous annual bal poudré; a celebrated yacht club admitted him to membership; a whole shoal of excellent minor clubs which really needed new members followed suit, and even the rock-ribbed Lenox, wearied of its own time-honoured immobility, displayed the preliminary fidgets which boded well for the stolid candidate. The Mountain was preparing to take the first stiff step toward Mohammed. It was the prophet’s cue to sit tight and yawn occasionally.
Meanwhile he didn’t want to; he was becoming anxious to do things for himself, which Leila Mortimer, of course, would not permit. It was difficult for him to understand that any effort of his own would probably be disastrous; that progress could come only through his own receptive passivity; that nothing was demanded, nothing required, nothing permitted from him as yet, save a capacity for assimilating such opportunities as sections of the social system condescended to offer.
For instance, he wanted to open his art gallery to the public; he said it was good strategy; and Mrs. Mortimer sat upon the suggestion with a shrug of her pretty shoulders. Well, then, couldn’t he possibly do something with his great, gilded ball-room? No, he couldn’t; and the less in evidence his galleries and his ball-rooms were at present the better his chances with people who, perfectly aware that he possessed them, were very slowly learning to overlook the insolence of the accident that permitted him to possess what they had never known the want of. First of all people must tire of repeating to each other that he was nobody, and that would happen when they wearied of explaining to one another why he was ever asked anywhere. There was time enough for him to offer amusement to people after they had ceased to find amusement in snubbing him; plenty of time in the future for them to lash him to a gallop for their pleasure. In the meanwhile he was doing very well, because he began to appear regularly in the Caithness-Bonnesdel box, and old Peter Caithness was already boring him at the Patroons; which meant that the thrifty old gentleman considered Plank’s millions as a possible underpinning for the sagging house of Caithness, of which his pallid daughter Agatha was the sole sustaining caryatid in perspective.
Yes, he was doing well; for that de
spotic beauty, Sylvia Landis, whose capricious perversity had recently astonished those who remembered her in her first season as a sweet, reasonable, and unspoiled girl, was always friendly with him. That must be looked upon as important, considering Sylvia’s unassailable position, and her kinship to the autocratic old lady whose kindly ukase had for generations remained the undisputed law in the social system of Manhattan.
“There is another matter,” said Leila Mortimer innocently, as Plank, lingering after a disastrous rubber of bridge with her, her husband, and Agatha Caithness, had followed her into her own apartments to write his cheque for what he owed. “You’ve driven with me so much and you come here so often and we are seen together so frequently that the clans are sharpening up their dirks for us. And that helps some.”
“What!” exclaimed Plank, reddening, and twisting around in his chair.
“Certainly. You didn’t suppose I could escape, did you?”
“Escape! What?” demanded Plank, getting redder.
“Escape being talked about, savagely, mercilessly. Can’t you see how it helps? Oh dear, are you stupid, Beverly?
“I don’t know,” replied Plank, staring, “just how stupid I am. If you mean that I’m compromising you—”
“Oh, please! Why do you use back-stairs words? Nobody talks about compromising now; all that went out with New Year’s calls and brown-stone stoops.”
“What do they call it, then?” asked Plank seriously.
“Call what? you great boy!”
“What you say I’m doing?”
“I don’t say it.”
“Who does?”
Leila laughed, leaned back in her big, padded chair, dropping one knee over the other. Her dark eyes with the Japanese slant to them rested mockingly on Plank, who had now turned completely around in his chair, leaving his half-written cheque on her escritoire behind him.
“You’re simply credited with an affair with a pretty woman,” she said, watching the dull colour mounting to his temples, “and that is certain to be useful to you, and it doesn’t affect me. What on earth are you blushing about?” And as he said nothing, she added, with a daring little laugh: “You are credited with being very agreeable, you see.”
“If — if that’s the way you take it—” he began.
“Of course! What do you expect me to do — call for help before I’m hurt?”
“You mean that this talk — gossip — doesn’t hurt?”
“How silly!” She looked at him, smiling. “You know how likely I am to require protection from your importunities.” She dropped her pretty head, and began plaiting with her fingers the silken gown over her knee. “Or how likely I would be to shriek for it even if” — she looked up with childlike directness— “even if I needed it.”
“Of course you can take care of yourself,” said Plank, wincing.
“I could, if I wanted to.”
“Everybody knows that. I know it, Leroy knows it; only I don’t care to figure as that kind of man.”
Already he had lost sight of her position in the matter; and she drew a long, quiet breath, almost like a sigh.
“Time enough after you marry,” she said deliberately, and lighted a cigarette from a candle, recreating her knees the other way.
He considered her, started to speak, checked himself, and swung around to the desk again. His pen hovered over the space to be filled in. He tried to recollect the amount, hesitated, dated the cheque and affixed his signature, still trying to remember; then he looked at her over his shoulder.
“I forget the exact amount.”
She surveyed him through the haze of her cigarette, but made no answer.
“I forget the amount,” he repeated.
“So do I,” she nodded indolently.
“But I—”
“Let it go. Besides, I shall not accept it.”
He flushed up, astonished. “You can’t refuse to take a gambling debt.”
“I do,” she retorted coolly. “I’m tired of taking your money.”
“But you won it.”
“I’m tired of winning it. It is all I ever do win... from you.”
Her pretty head was wreathed in smoke. She tipped the ashes from the cigarette’s end, watching them fall to powder on the rug.
“I don’t know what you mean,” he persisted doggedly.
“Don’t you? I don’t believe I do, either. There are intervals in my career which might prove eloquent if I opened my lips. But I don’t, except to make floating rings and cabalistic signs out of cigarette smoke. Can you read their meaning? Look! There goes one, and there’s another, and another — all twisting and uncurling into hieroglyphics. They are very significant; they might tell you a lot of things, if you would only translate them. But you haven’t the key — have you?”
There was a heavy, jarring step in the main living-room, and Mortimer’s bulk darkened the doorway.
“Entrez, mon ami,” nodded Leila, glancing up. “Where is Agatha?”
“I’m going to Desmond’s,” he grunted, ignoring his wife’s question; “do you want to try it again, Beverly?”
“I can’t make Leila take her own winnings,” said Plank, holding out the signed but unfilled cheque to Mortimer, who took it and scrutinised it for a moment, rubbing his heavy, inflamed eyes; then, gesticulating, the cheque fluttering in his puffy fingers:
“Come on,” he insisted. “I’ve a notion that I can give Desmond a whirl that he won’t forget in a hurry. Agatha’s asleep; she’s going to that ball — where is it?” he demanded, turning on his wife. “Yes, yes; the Page blow-out. You’re going, I suppose?”
Leila nodded, and lighted another cigarette.
“All right,” continued Mortimer impatiently; “you and Agatha won’t start before one. And if you think Plank had better go, why, we’ll be back here in time.”
“That means you won’t be back at all,” observed his wife coolly; “and it’s good policy for Beverly to go where he’s asked. Can’t you turn in and sleep, now, and amuse your friend Desmond to-morrow night?”
“No, I can’t. What a fool I’d be to let a chance slip when I feel like a winner!”
“You never feel otherwise when you gamble,” said Leila.
“Yes, I do,” he retorted peevishly. “I can tell almost every time what the cards are going to do to me. Leila, go to sleep. We’ll be back here for you by one, or half past.”
“Look here, Leroy,” began Plank, “there’s one thing I can’t stand for, and that’s this continual loss of sleep. If I go with you I’ll not be fit to go to the Pages.”
“What a farmer you are!” sneered Mortimer. “I believe you roost on the foot-board of your bed, like a confounded turkey. Come on! You’d better begin training, you know. People in this town are not going to stand for the merry ploughboy game, you see!”
But Plank was shrewdly covering his principal reason for declining; he had too often “temporarily” assisted Mortimer at Desmond’s and Burbank’s, when Mortimer, cleaned out and unable to draw against a balance non-existent, had plucked him by the sleeve from the faro table with the breathless request for a loan.
“I tell you I can wring Desmond dry to-night,” repeated Mortimer sullenly. “It isn’t a case of ‘want to,’ either; it’s a case of ‘got to.’ That old pink-and-white rabbit, Belwether, got me into a game this afternoon, and between him and Voucher and Alderdine I’m stripped clean as a kennel bone.”
But Plank shook his head, pretending to yawn; and Mortimer, glowering and lingering, presently went off, his swollen hands thrust into his trousers’ pockets, his gross features dark with disgust; and presently they heard the front door slam, and a rattling tattoo of horses’ feet on the asphalt; and Leila sprang up impatiently, and, passing Plank, traversed the passage to the windows of the front room.
“He’s taken the horses — the beast!” she said calmly, as Plank joined her at the great windows and looked out into the night, where the round, drooping, flower-like globes of th
e electric lamps spread a lake of silver before the house.
It was rather rough on Leila. The Mortimers maintained one pair of horses only; and the use given them at all hours resulted in endless scenes, and an utter impossibility for Leila to retain the same coachman and footman for more than a few weeks at a time.
“He won’t come back; he’ll keep Martin and the horses standing in front of Delmonico’s all night. You’d better call up the stables, Beverly.”
So Plank called up a livery and arranged for transportation at one; and Leila seated herself at a card-table and began to deal herself cold decks, thoughtfully.
“That bit in ‘Carmen,’” she said, “it always brings the shudder; it never palls on me, never grows stale.” She whipped the ominous spade from the pack and held it out. “La Mort!” she exclaimed in mock tragedy, yet there was another undertone ringing through it, sounding, too, in her following laugh. “Draw!” she commanded, holding out the pack; and Plank drew a diamond.
“Naturally,” she nodded, shuffling the pack with her smooth, savant fingers and laying them out as she repeated the formula: “Qui frappe? Qui entre? Qui prend chaise? Qui parle? Oh, the deuce! it’s always the same! Tiens! je m’ennui!” There was a flash of her bare arm, a flutter, and the cards fell in a shower over them both.
Plank flipped a card from his knee, laughing uncertainly, aware of symptoms in his pretty vis-à-vis which always made him uncomfortable. For months, now, at certain intervals, these recurrent symptoms had made him wary; but what they might portend he did not know, only that, alone with her, moments occurred when he was heavily aware of a tension which, after a while, affected even his few thick nerves. One of those intervals was threatening now: her flushed cheeks, her feverish activity with her hands, the unconscious reflex movement of her silken knees and restless slippers, all foreboded it. Next would come the nervous laughter, the swift epigram which bored and puzzled him, the veiled badinage he was unequal to; and then the hint of weariness, the curious pathos of long silences, the burnt-out beauty of her eyes from which the fire had gone as though quenched by invisible tears within.
Works of Robert W Chambers Page 302
