Works of Robert W Chambers

by Robert W. Chambers

  “All right.... Much obliged for pulling me through. Wish you’d pull me through this Amalgamated Electric knot-hole, too — some day!”

  “Do — do you mean it?” ventured Plank, turning red with delight.

  “Mean it? Indeed I do — if you do. Sit here; ring for whatever you want — or perhaps you’d better go down to the sideboard. I’m not to be trusted with the odour in the room just yet.”

  “I don’t care for anything,” said Plank.

  “Whenever you please, then. You know the house, and you don’t mind my being unceremonious, do you?”

  “No,” said Plank.

  “Good!” rejoined Siward, laughing. “I expect the same friendly lack of ceremony from you.”

  But that, for Plank, was impossible. All he could do was to care the more for Siward without crossing the border line so suddenly made free; all he could do was to sit there rolling and unrolling his gloves into wads with his clumsy, highly coloured hands, and gaze consciously at everything in the room except Siward.

  On that day, at Plank’s shy suggestion, they talked over Siward’s business affairs for the first time. After that day, and for many days, the subject became the key-note to their intercourse; and Siward at last understood that this man desired to do him a service absolutely and purely from a disinterested liking for him, and as an expression of that liking. Also he was unexpectedly made aware of Plank’s serenely unerring business sagacity.

  That surface cynicism which all must learn, sooner or later, or remain the victims of naive credulity, was, in Siward, nothing but an outer skin, as it is in all who acquire wisdom with their cynicism. It was not long proof against Plank’s simple attitude and undisguised pleasure in doing something for a man he liked. Under that simplicity no motive, no self-interest could skulk; and Siward knew it.

  As for the quid pro quo, Siward had insisted from the first on a business arrangement. The treachery of Major Belwether through sheer fright had knocked the key-stone from the syndicate, and the dam which made the golden pool possible collapsed, showering Plank’s brokers who worked patiently with buckets and mops.

  The double treachery of Quarrier was now perfectly apparent to Plank. Siward, true to his word, held his stock in the face of ruin. Kemp Ferrall, furious with the major, and beginning to suspect Quarrier, came to Plank for consultation.

  Then the defence formed under Plank. Legal machinery was set in motion, meeting followed meeting, until Harrington cynically showed his hand and Quarrier smiled his rare smile; and the fight against Inter-County was on in the open, preceded by a furious clamour of charge and counter-charge in the columns of the daily press.

  That Quarrier had been guilty of something or other was the vague impression of that great news-reading public which, stunned by the reiteration of figures in the millions, turns to the simpler pleasures of a murder trial. Besides, whatever Quarrier had done was no doubt done within the chalk-marked courts of the game, though probably his shoes may have become a little dusty.

  But who could hope to bring players like Quarrier before the ordinary umpire, or to investigate his methods with the everyday investigations reserved for everyday folk, whose road through business life lay always between State’s prison and the penitentiary and whose guide-posts were policemen?

  Let the great syndicates join in battle; they could only slay each other. Let the millions bury their millions; the public, though poorer, could never be the wiser.

  Siward, at his desk, the May sunshine pouring over him, sat conning the heaps of typewritten sheets, striving to see between the lines some sign of fortune for his investments, some promise of release from the increasing financial stringency, some chance of justice being done on those high priests who had been performing marvellous tricks upon their altar so that by miracle, mine and thine spelled “ours,” and all the tablets of the law were lettered upside down and hind-side before, like the Black Mass.

  Gumble knocked presently. Siward raised his perplexed eyes.

  “Miss Page, sir.”

  “Oh,” said Siward doubtfully; then, “Ask Miss Page to come up.”

  Marion strolled in a moment later, exchanged a vigorous hand shake with Siward, pulled up a chair and dropped into it. She was in riding-habit and boots, faultlessly groomed as usual, her smooth, pale hair sleek in its thick knot, collar and tie immaculate as her gloves.

  “Well,” she said, “any news of your ankle, Stephen?”

  “I inquired about my ankle,” said Siward, amused, “and they tell me it is better, thank you.”

  “Sit a horse pretty soon?” she asked, dropping one leg over the other and balancing the riding-crop across her knee.

  “Not for awhile. You have a fine day for a gallop, Marion,” looking askance at the sunshine filtering through the first green leaves of the tree outside his window.

  “It’s all right — the day. I’m trying Tom O’Hara’s new mare. They say she’s a little devil. I never saw a devil of a horse — did you? There may be some out West.”

  “Don’t break that pretty neck of yours, Marion,” he said.

  She lifted her eyes; then, briefly, “No fear.”

  “Yes, there is,” he said. “There’s no use looking for trouble in a horse. Women who hunt as you hunt take all that’s legitimately coming to them. Why doesn’t Tom ride his own mare?”

  “She rolled on him,” said Marion simply.

  “Oh. Is he hurt?”

  “Ribs.”

  “Well, he’s lucky.”

  “Isn’t he! He’ll miss a few drills with his precious squadron, that’s all.”

  She was looking about her, preoccupied. “Where are your cigarettes, Stephen? Oh, I see. Don’t try to move — don’t be silly.”

  She leaned over the desk, her fresh young face close to his, and reached for the cigarettes. The clean-cut head, the sweetness of her youth and femininity, boyish in its allure, were very attractive to him — more so, perhaps, because of his isolation from the atmosphere of women.

  “It’s all very well, Marion, your coming here — and it’s very sweet of you, and I enjoy it immensely,” he said: “but it’s a deuced imprudent thing for you to do, and I feel bound to say so for your sake every time you come.”

  She leaned back in her chair and coolly blew a wreath of smoke at him.

  “All right,” he said, unconvinced.

  “Certainly it’s all right. I’ve done what suited me all my life. This suits me.”

  “It suits me, too,” he said, “only I wish you’d tell your mother before somebody around this neighbourhood informs her first.”

  “Let ‘em. You’ll be out by that time. Do you think I’m going to tell my mother now and have her stop it?”

  “Oh, Marion, you know perfectly well that it won’t do for a girl to ignore first principles. I’m horribly afraid somebody will talk about you.”

  “What would you do, then?”

  “I?” he asked, disturbed. “What could I do?”

  “Why, I suppose,” she said slowly, “you’d have to marry me.”

  “Then,” he rejoined with a laugh, “I should think you’d be scared into prudence by the prospect.”

  “I am not easily — scared,” she said, looking down.

  “Not at that prospect?” he said jestingly.

  She looked up at him; and he remembered afterward the poise of her small head, and the slow, clear colour mounting; remembered that it conveyed to him, somehow, a hint of courage and sincerity.

  “I am not frightened,” she said gravely.

  Gravity fell upon him, too. In this young girl’s eyes there was no evasion. For a long while he had felt vaguely that matters were not perfectly balanced between them. At moments, even, he had felt an indefinable uneasiness in her presence. The situation troubled him, too; and though he had known her from childhood and had long ago learned to discount her vagaries of informality, her manners sans façon, her careless ignoring of convention, and the unembarrassed terms of her speech
, his common-sense could not countenance this defiance of social usage, sure to involve even such a privileged girl as she in some unpleasantness.

  This troubled him; and now, partly sceptical, yet partly conscious, too, of her very frank liking for himself, he looked at her, perplexed, apprehensive, unwilling to credit her with any deeper meaning than her words expressed.

  She had grown pink and restless under his gaze, using her cigarette frequently, and continually flicking the ashes to the floor, until the little finger of her glove was blackened.

  But courage characterised her race. It had required more than he knew for her to come into his house; and now that she was there loyalty to her professed principles — that a man and a woman were by right endowed with equal privileges — forced her to face the consequences of her theory in the practise.

  She had, with calm face and quivering heart, given him an opening. That was a concession to her essential womanhood and a cowardice on her part; and, lest she turn utterly traitor to herself, she faced him again, cool, quiet, and terror in her heart:

  “I’d be very glad to marry you — if you c-cared to,” she said.

  “Marion!”

  “Yes?”

  “Oh — I — it is — of course it’s a joke.”

  “No; I’m serious.”

  “Serious! Nonsense!”

  “Please don’t say that.”

  He looked at her, appalled.

  “But I — but you don’t love — can’t be in love with me!” he stammered.

  “I am.”

  Gloved hands tightening on either end of her riding-crop, she bent her knee against it, balancing there, looking straight at him.

  “I meant to tell you so,” she said, “if you didn’t tell me first. So — I was rather — tired waiting. So I’ve told you.”

  “It is only a fancy,” he said, scarcely knowing what he was saying.

  “I don’t think so, Stephen.”

  But he could not meet her candour, and he sat, silent, miserable, staring at the papers on his desk.

  After a while she drew a deep, even breath, and rose to her feet.

  “I’m sorry,” she said simply.

  “Marion — I never dreamed that—”

  “You should dream truer,” she said. There was a suspicion of mist in her clear eyes; she turned abruptly to the window and stood there for a few moments, looking down at her brougham waiting in front of the house. “It can’t be helped, can it!” she said, turning suddenly.

  He found no answer to her question.

  “Good-bye,” she said, walking to him with outstretched hand; “it’s all in a lifetime, Steve, and that’s too short for a good, clean friendship like ours to die in. I don’t think I’d better come again. Look me up for a gallop when you’re fit. And you might drop me a line to say how you’re getting on. Is it all right, Stephen?”

  “All right,” he said hoarsely.

  Their hands tightened in a crushing clasp; then she swung on her spurred heel and walked out, leaving him haggard, motionless. He heard the front door close, and he swayed forward, dropping his face in his hands, arms half buried among the papers on his desk.

  Plank found him there, an hour later, fumbling among the papers, and at first feared that he read in Siward’s drawn and sullen face a premonition of the ever-dreaded symptoms.

  “Quarrier has telephoned asking for a conference at last,” he said abruptly, sitting down beside Siward.

  “Well,” inquired Siward, “how do you interpret that — favourably?”

  “I am inclined to think he is a bit uneasy,” said Plank cautiously. “Harrington made a secret trip to Albany last week. You didn’t know that.”

  “No.”

  “Well, he did. It looks to me as though there were going to be a ghost of a chance for an investigation. That is how I am inclined to consider Harrington’s trip and Quarrier’s flag of truce. But — I don’t know. There’s nothing definite, of course. You are as conversant with the situation as I am.”

  “No, I am not. That is like you, Plank, to ascribe to me the same business sense that you possess, but I haven’t got it. It’s very nice and considerate of you, but I haven’t it, and you know it.”

  “I think you have.”

  “You think so because you think generously. That doesn’t alter the facts. Now tell me what you have concluded that we ought to do and I’ll say ‘Amen,’ as usual.”

  Plank laughed, and looked over several sheets of the typewritten matter on the desk beside him.

  “Suppose I meet Quarrier?” he said.

  “All right. Did he suggest a date?”

  “At four, this afternoon.”

  “Do you think you had better go?”

  “I think it might do no harm,” said Plank.

  “Amen!” observed Siward, laughing, and touched the electric button for the early tea, which Plank adored at any hour.

  For a while they dropped business and discussed their tea, chatting very comfortably together. Long ago Siward had found out something of the mental breadth of the man beside him, and that he was worth listening to as well as talking to. For Plank had formed opinions upon a great many subjects; and whatever culture he possessed was from sheer desire for self-cultivation.

  “You know, Siward,” he was accustomed to say with a smile, “you inherit what I am qualifying myself to transmit.”

  “It will be all one in a thousand years,” was Siward’s usual rejoinder.

  “That is not going to prevent my efforts to become a good ancestor to my descendants,” Plank would say laughingly. “They shall have a chance, every one of them. And it will be up to them if they don’t make good.”

  Sipping their tea in the pleasant, sunny room, they discussed matters of common interest — Plank’s recent fishing trip on Long Island and the degeneracy of liver-fed trout; the North Side Club’s Experiments with European partridges; Billy Fleetwood’s new stables; forestry, and the chance of national legislation concerning it — a subject of which Plank was very fond, and on which he had exceedingly sound ideas.

  Drifting from one topic to another through the haze of their cigars, silent when it pleased them to be so, there could be no doubt of their liking for each other upon a basis at least superficially informal; and if Plank’s manner retained at times a shade of quaint reserve, Siward’s was perhaps the more frankly direct for that reason.

  “I think,” observed Plank, laying his half-consumed cigar on the silver tray, “that I’d better go down town and see what our pre-glacial friend Quarrier wants. I may be able to furnish him with a new sensation.”

  “I wonder if Quarrier ever experienced a genuine sensation,” mused Siward, arranging the papers before him into divisional piles.

  “Plenty,” said Plank drily.

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Plenty,” repeated Plank. “It’s your thin-lipped, thin-nosed, pasty-pale, symmetrical brother who is closer to the animal under his mask than any of us imagine. I—” He hesitated. “Do you want to know my opinion of Quarrier? I’ve never told you. I don’t usually talk about my — dislikes. Do you want to know?”

  “Certainly,” said Siward curiously.

  “Then, first of all, he is a sentimentalist.”

  “Oh! oh!” jeered Siward.

  “A sentimentalist of the weakest type,” continued Plank obstinately; “because he sentimentalises over himself. Siward, look out for the man with elaborate whiskers! Look out for a pallid man with eccentric hair and a silky beard! He’s a sentimentalist of the sort I told you, and is usually utterly remorseless in his dealings with women. I suppose you think me a fool.”

  “I think Quarrier is indifferent concerning women,” said Siward.

  “You are wrong. He is a sensualist,” insisted Plank.

  “Oh, no, Plank — not that!”

  “A sensualist. His sentimental vanity he lavishes upon himself — the animal in him on women. His caution, born of self-consideration, is the cautio
n of a beast. Such men as he believe they live in the focus of a million eyes. Part of his vanity is to deceive those eyes and be what he is under the mask he wears; and to do that one must be the very master of caution. That is Quarrier’s vanity. To conceal, is his monomania.”

  “I cannot see how you draw that conclusion.”

  “Siward, he is a bad man, and crafty — every inch of him.”

  “Oh, come, now! Only characters in fiction have no saving qualities. You never heard of anybody in real life being entirely bad.”

  “No, I didn’t; and Quarrier isn’t. For example, he is kind to valuable animals — I mean, his own.”

  “Good to animals! The bad man’s invariable characteristic!” laughed Siward. “I’m kind to ‘em, too. What else is he good to?”

  “Everybody knows that he hasn’t a poor relation left; not one. He is loyal to them in a rare way; he filled one subsidiary company full of them. It is known down town as the ‘Home for Destitute Nephews.’”

  “Seriously, Plank, the man must have something good in him.”

  “Because of your theory?”

  “Yes. I believe that nobody is entirely bad. So do the great masters of fiction.”

  Plank said gravely: “He is a good son to his father. That is perfectly true — kind, considerate, dutiful, loyal. The financial world is perfectly aware that Stanley Quarrier is to-day the most unscrupulous old scoundrel who ever crushed a refinery or debauched a railroad! and his son no more believes it than he credits the scandalous history of the Red Woman of Wall Street. Why, when I was making arrangements for that chapel Quarrier came to me, very much perturbed, because he understood that all the memorial chapels for the cathedral had been arranged for, and he had desired to build one to the memory of his father! His father! Isn’t it awful to think of! — a chapel to the memory of the briber of judges and of legislatures, the cynical defier of law! — this hoary old thief, who beggared the widow and stripped the orphan, and whose only match, as a great unpunished criminal, was that sinister little predecessor of his, who dreamed even of debauching the executive of these United States!”

  Siward had never before seen Plank aroused, and he said so, smiling.

  “That is true,” said Plank earnestly; “I waste little temper over my likes and dislikes. But what I know, and what I legitimately infer concerning the younger Quarrier is enough to rouse any man’s anger. I won’t tell you what I know. I can’t. It has nothing to do with his financial methods, nothing to do with this business; but it is bad — bad all through! The blow his father struck at the integrity of the bench the son strikes at the very key-stone of all social safeguard. It isn’t my business; I cannot interfere; but Siward, I’m a damned restless witness, and the old, primitive longing comes back on me to strike — to take a stick and use it to splinters on that man whom I am going down town to politely confer with!... And I must go now. Good-bye.... Take care of that ankle. Any books I can send you — anything you want? No? All right. And don’t worry over Amalgamated Electric, for I really believe we are beginning to frighten them badly.”