Dangerous Business/Chapter 10
"Where is he?" asked Jay.
"Downstairs, sir," replied the bell-boy. "He came in this morning."
"With his family?"
"Three ladies are with him."
"I see," said Jay, while recollection of the incident at the office stole over him.
"What do I tell him, sir?" appealed the boy patiently.
Lida extended her slim, white hand for the card.
"How quaint! Who are they," she inquired.
"I know the man," said Jay, as casually as he could.
"Know the three ladies, too, Jay?"
"No."
"Nice of him to include them," Lida commented, brushing with her restless finger-tip the written inscription. "Is it a Chicago calling custom?" she inquired, turning over the card as though hopeful of a list of the ladies on the back.
"He's from Chicago," admitted Jay.
"Unquestionably," said Lida. "He makes me feel drawn to the place. Take me to your home soon, Jay."
He turned away, uncomfortable because of his memory of Phil Metten's warm greeting of him and the man's frank enthusiasm at a chance to better his family acquaintance through golf in the South. Jay remembered that he had praised Tryston and advised Metten to try it. So here he was, with his family.
"Tell him I'll be right down," Jay dismissed the boy.
"Not we?" suggested Lida.
"I'll see 'em," offered Jay.
"Expect me," warned Lida.
He descended, with no mind for Phil Metten and family. Lida, he plainly recognized, was in a mood for amusement.
In the lounge, near the doors, waited a bald, plaid-clad golfer with two black-haired girls, very slender and in very new sport suits, and a black-haired woman of ampler girth and girdle, all standing in a close, uneasy covey, overaware of the eyes upon them.
"Hello, Mr. Metten," hailed Jay, hurrying toward them with never a thought in his head of that which, at this difficult moment, sustained and comforted Phil Metten—his possession, as yet unsigned, of a business of five hundred thousand dollars for the coming year.
"Ah; here you are!" cried Phil, warm with his relief and extending both his big hands. "Here he is, mamma!" Triumphantly Phil introduced to Jay, in order, mamma, Ruby and Rosita, who each in turn congratulated him upon his marriage.
"Mrs. Rountree, the lovely bride," reminded mamma with coy boldness. "She is not up yet, so?"
"Is it a good picture of her in the papers?" inquired Phil, flatteringly.
"The one of him is not so good, is it, mamma?" appealed Rosita, shyly.
"Hardly would I have known it was him," complimented mamma.
"My wife will be down in a minute," promised Jay, but with a pulse of panic which he sought to assuage by initiating a migration of the Mettens toward the veranda.
"She will meet us outside?" inquired mamma, suspicious of some evasion.
It was a moment, Phil felt sure, to mention, as if inadvertently, that his business of five hundred thousand gross for next year had not been pledged to the Slengels.
"It does a business man good to get a good holiday, Mr. Rountree," he observed. "Always I like a little golf before making a big decision. I say to my secretary: 'Let everything wait, even the purchase contracts for next year, till I get back.' My brother Sam, he does the buying, but I must O.K. all orders over ten thousand dollars."
"Should a man like him give personal attention to such details?" mamma grandly referred the matter to Jay.
He shook his head, as he caught sight of his wife upon the stairs. At full view of the Mettens, Lida had halted. Whatever had been her anticipations, plainly they had been exceeded by the reality; but now she approached and Jay, as simply as possible, made the introductions.
Coolly and charmingly, Lida shook hands when hands were proffered and smiled and bowed when they were not. Perfectly she did it, so perfectly that mamma and Rosita, who had shaken hands, flushed with satisfaction that they had done just right and with embarrassment for papa and Ruby at their remissness; precisely contrary was papa's and Ruby's impression. Every Metten blushed, not for self, but for another of the family. Each felt personally approved, personally preferred and thrillingly uncomfortable.
It was strangely agreeable and reassuring to feel so ill-at-ease and inferior; for it removed any possible doubt of the social superiority of this girl with whom each Metten felt in a privileged position. This was the sensation they had hoped for; this was why they had come. So mamma and her daughters blushed far beyond the borders of their overgenerous rouge, in the delight of this embarrassed meeting.
Jay, watching his wife, drew a bit into the background. Lida was amusing herself, he saw, but also doing something more. What? What was she after? Bother over the Mettens' sensitiveness was fled from him. Lida completely enchanted them. He realized that he, in comparison with his wife, had disappointed them. Closcly and eagerly, they clustered about Lida.
Over mamnia's substantial shoulder, Lida smiled at him with her lips and with her dark, flashing eyes, she laughed at him. What did she mean to do next?
No use trying to guess. He noticed how her eyes, although almost the match of these Mettens' in color, yet in no way were reproduced by theirs; he noticed how she stood out from them, as she did from most women, not merely in smartness and manner, but with more vitality. It was remarkable in contrast to these people, characterized, as they were, by extraordinary energy and eagerness. Lida was quicker, lighter, incomparably pleasing, incomparably alive.
Thrills of admiration and envy warmed Phil Metten as his brown eyes searched her for her secret. It was altogether too late for him to make over mamma into such a woman as she should be, even if Phil at this moment discovered the formula of "class"; too late, even for Ruby and Rosita, Phil realized with something of dismay; but not too late for mamma, as well as Ruby and Rosita, greatly to profit from their privileges of association with this girl, based upon his five hundred thousand dollar gross business.
"She is just the wife of this boy, whose papa had from me four hundred and forty-five thousand last year," Phil assured himself; and he considered, with increasing confidence, how much more important was his account to Rountree and Company this year.
Did this girl know it? Phil wondered. Had Jay Rountree told her who Phil Metten was? Unquestionably he had, Phil thought; and if he had not, it was no moment to bring up business. Not before ladies, at their first meeting. Besides, everybody was liking everybody else. Phil, catching mamma's eye, flushed with pride and his proprietary satisfaction in spreading before his wife and daughters such a social opportunity. Beyond even what he had boasted on Christmas morning, was this reception by the Rountrees.
Mamma drew beside him for a moment and, under his hand, Phil whispered instruction: "Pay for her lunch."
"Certainly," said mamma.
"Don't let her buy anything."
"Where are you going?" appealed mamma, in a bit of a panic.
"Mr. Rountree, how is your golf game?" inquired Phil boldly. "Shall we leave to themselves the ladies?"
Jay, looking back at his wife, moved off with Phil Metten, leaving to themselves the ladies. Eagerly Ruby and Rosita seized the offer to have Lida alone; and mamma, after her moment of panic at being deserted by her more sophisticated mate, applied herself to the advantages of personal companionship with Mrs. Rountree.
Lida, Jay felt sure, for the present was dependable. He did not yet know what she was doing but she was not merely amusing herself.
It was a glorious morning for golf, cool and clear except for a light, midwinter haze hanging in the air, softening the slopes of the distant hills and screening the glare of the sun. There it stood in the sky, a great, gleaming copper plate, half noon high.
Jay sent to the lockers for his bag; Metten picked up his from the veranda and, as a torrent of negro caddies surged about them, Phil followed his own advice in regard to permitting no Rountree, in a Metten presence, to pay for anything.
"I hire you and you," he engaged two boys, handing each, in advance, a dollar. "You carry Mr. Rountree's clubs. . . . Well," he observed genially to Jay, "a nice place this is, just like you said it. A nice change from the north. A nice change from business. . . . A man sticks too close to business these days, I say. . . . You, perhaps," Phil ventured, "are going now into business?"
"Next week," said Jay, "if not sooner."
"So?" asked Phil, with some surprise. "With your papa, perhaps? What will you do in the firm? Sell?"
Jay shook his head.
"Not sell?" rebuked Phil, kindly. "Believe me, there is the money for a young man."
"I don't know what I'm going to do," Jay explained, halting and swinging at a clump of grass, as he felt suddenly the relation of buyer and seller between Phil Metten and himself. Of course, he was not yet a salesman, but he was returning to Chicago to work for the firm. He had told his wife so. This man was a customer of the firm and a most important one. Moreover, at this moment, his business was "in the air"; the Slengels were after it, Ellen Powell had said, as they had been after the Nucast account in New York. The Nucast business which, after having been nearly lost to Rountree, had become "safe" for the next year, through Lida!
Jay turned toward the Tavern, at recollection that he had not told Lida that these people were customers of his father's company. When they had been announced, he had thought of them only as people out of their place and looking to him for help. But they were, of course, customers. He must tell Lida. What would she think of him, if she learned it from them?
Lida and the Mettens had disappeared; and Jay, regarding Phil's paternal, friendly face, dismissed any comparison of his character with Nucast's. There was no likeness at all between the two men, except that both were buyers and each used the power of his position. What was it that Phil Metten meant when he mentioned, in the first minute after meeting Jay here, that he had left Chicago without signing up his order for next year? He was holding it open, in other words, as a possible reward to Jay and Lida Rountree for good behavior.
Jay went on with Metten to the tee where a couple of young men, guests at the Tavern, were waiting for a foursome. Ramsey and Harris were their names; from Pittsburgh, both of them, and here at Tryston with their wives. Jay had played a few rounds with them, spotting them six strokes on eighteen holes. At that he had made a little money.
Phil Metten was delighted to meet them and preferred greatly playing foursome, as partner of Jay Rountree. He gave the impression, indeed, that he had come to Tryston to team with Jay.
"How do you shoot?" Harris inquired of Phil, cautiously.
"Me," said Metten, temporizing, as the fairway, the bunkers and the distant, very distant flagged hole (to be reached in five par strokes) for the moment dismayed him. He realized, with a sudden sinking, how completely he was out of his class. Yet at all costs he would play as partner with Jay Rountree and against these nice young society men. Prominent, probably, they were, too; at least in Pittsburgh. Phil Metten's name might be with theirs in newspapers to-morrow. "I don't know just how I will shoot this course," said Phil modestly. "I just came this morning. Is it very sporty?"
"Par is seventy-two," explained Jay.
"Par is little in Rountree's life," commented Ramsey, ruefully. "He's cracked it twice. He averages seventy-six. Harris and I kid ourselves that we're steady eighty-two."
Phil, with his assurance in his boots, calculated how recklessly he dared endorse himself. Once, memorable day, when the Gods of Fair Beginnings had bounced back to the fairway, from trees out of bounds, four badly sliced drives and when Phil, privately, had subtracted several swings which, having missed the ball, he had called mere practice, he had broken a hundred. In fact, he had given himself a ninety-six. But even such a score, he could not bring himself to mention in this company. He subtracted ten.
"I can crack eighty-six," he asserted boldly, yet with a slight catch of breath. "Oh yes," he confirmed, more easily, once he had said it, "on a par seventy-two course."
Ramsey again looked him over. "Suppose we allow your friend eighty-eight," he suggested to Jay, sportingly and politely. "That just evens the sides. You play your total scores on each hole against our total," Ramsey explained to Metten carefully. "We aren't playing your best ball, you know. Harry and I don't mind riding to Pittsburgh in a box car, but our wives may mildly object. Ten dollars a hole all right for you, with fifty on the round?"
Phil Metten was caught. He tried to encourage himself with thought of Jay Rountree's, his partner's, miraculous shots; he tried to persuade himself to the imagined possibility of himself shooting the eighteen best holes of his career, one after the other, seriatim; but his thumping heart told him that at golf he could not make good. He must back down before these society people or his boast of the minute ago would cost him much money. Phil Metten would not back down; and he had the money. What was a hundred, even two hundred dollars, to him now? More than that he made every morning. Whatever he betrayed at golf, he would show them that with money he was no piker.
"Twenty a hole will be all right for me," he raised the stake recklessly.
"Then you want a hundred on the round?"
Phil, somewhat choked, nodded.
Harris and Ramsey both made another inspection. Appearances, they knew, might deceive but not this much. If Phil Metten could crack eighty-eight on this, or any other par seventy-two course, cheerfully they would pay for the demonstration.
"Twenty and a hundred are all right with us," Ramsey accepted. "Right with you, Rountree?"
Jay was staring at his partner, somewhat staggered. He wished he had more accurate reckoning of the relics of his thousand dollars upon which he depended to pay his hotel bill and fare for Lida and himself to Chicago. He had been cutting it close, he knew, and here was a chance—a chance was a mild way of putting it, certainty was nearer it—of dropping in one round of eighteen holes, three or four hundred dollars; and if he merely lost the round, without counting costs of holes at twenty dollars each, he was stranded. However, here he was, forty dollars ahead on yesterday's rounds with Ramsey and Harris; his own partner had made the new proposition.
"All right?" Jay referred to Metten; and, boldly, Phil nodded.
"Let's start," said Jay; and they gave Phil the honor.
In three, he was off the tee; hole high in eight; down in eleven. Jay shot four for a birdie. Harris and Ramsey took six apiece. The second was short, a par three, so Phil stayed inside double figures; he sank a six. Jay's midiron from the tee went to the edge of the green and he putted twice, for a three. His opponents were down in fours.
"My God," breathed Ramsey sympathetically, as he walked close to Jay toward the third tee. "I'll scratch stakes with you—after I'm square for yesterday—and split with Harry the proceeds from your friend. That'll satisfy me."
"Let my partner get started," retorted Jay, the fight in him aroused. "He's nervous and'll improve."
"He'll have to, old top," agreed Harris, appreciatively. "You can't, unless you're counting on cutting out putts altogether and sinking your approach shots."
"This game is young," returned Jay, stubbornly.
"Oh, all right," Harris accepted, "if you're pleased. We got to look out, Ram. We'd have lost that hole, d'you realize, if Rountree had just sunk his drive. That's all he had to do."
Jay hurried on to his partner, who was walking alone, and patted him on the back.
Phil flushed gratefully and responded with a terrific, smacking swing which soared his ball a clean two hundred yards, out of bounds. On the seventh hole, a similar smack stayed on the course and Harris lost a ball; Metten and Rountree won that hole and halved the ninth, so they turned only six down. Phil, on the nine, had taken sixtyeight strokes.
"Pardon the not unnatural curiosity," appealed Ramsey, accompanying Jay down the fairway from the tenth tee. Phil's second swing on his drive had sliced his ball into a forest at the right and, with uncountable crashes; he was hacking his way out. "Who is yon bald Bobby Jones? Do you mind taking us into the secret of your mercy? Why do you let him live?"
"Why?" asked Jay.
"It will make it more comfortable for us, when cashing your check, if we know what's in it for you," explained Ramsey. "You take him with such superhuman calm when homicide would shock nobody."
Jay was wondering about it, himself. He was sure to lose and, at the end of another hour, have to pay a couple of hundred dollars which he could not at all afford. He would be short on his hotel bill and obliged therefore, if he would not borrow from his wife, to wire his father.
He would not ask or receive a loan from Lida; upon that, he was determined. He had resolved, also, not to send to his father for money; he would not have remained until he had run up a bill which he could not pay; but here he was, put in that situation by Phil Metten—more than enough to anger any one.
Jay did not anger easily; but he could not assign his calmness this morning to the score of mere good temper or manners, nor could he credit it, entirely, to his feeling that, having advised Phil Metten to come to Tryston, he was responsible for certain consequences. Another element entered; and this was the fact, which his partner never for a moment forgot and had mentioned at the minute of meeting, that Phil Metten was a buyer and Jay Rountree was a Seller of the same thing; prospectively as yet rather than actually, but already, and surprisingly, it influenced: their relations. Jay Rountree was restraining his exasperation this morning because he knew that, when his pockets again were empty, he must refill them by his own efforts in business; and rewards, in the Rountree line of business, came from friendly relations with Phil Metten and others like him.
That was why Lowry, the salesmanager, had been so full of fidgets when Jay had met Metten in the office and forgotten his name. Jay had not yet progressed to the point where he felt fidgets over Metten; but he was on the way. Here he was, enduring the man's boastings and foozlings with a tolerance which consisted, in part at least, of prospect of future favor from Phil Metten; here he was, partnered with Metten in a game, for business advantage.
He colored slowly as he considered it and replied to Ramsey, frankly:"Metten's a big buyer from my father's firm."
"Oh," said Ramsey, preparing to play his ball. "Then you can charge it to the firm."
Jay turned, thoughtfully, and watched his partner emerge from the wood, hot and disheveled, pecking at a ball with dirt and divots flying. Phil dubbed on and on, bunkered and out of bounds in the very depths of despond. The hotter and more humiliated he got, the worse he played; but Ramsey and Harris had a certain mercy and when Rountree and Metten had any chance at winning or halving, their opponents yielded; yet the score at the eighteenth was appalling.
Phil demanded the right to liquidate both his own and his partner's losses, but Jay paid his money before Phil made out a check. Momentarily, Jay felt sick—suppose he received no response to a wire to Chicago!
His opponents noticed nothing of this reaction, after he had paid; they supposed he merely would charge it to entertaining and, in any case, that expenses were no problem to him; but Phil, in this matter, was more perceptive and he bobbed up a bit from the very bottom of his humiliation. Since money meant something to young Rountree, Phil possessed means to rehabilitate himself.
He marched toward the Tavern with his partner, seizing Jay's arm familiarly as they paraded past the peopled verandas. Everyone should see that he had been Jay Rountree's partner. A few later might learn the disastrous scores; but most of this swell gallery would know only what they now saw. So Phil felt his assurance returning. He was getting here something for his money and he wanted Jay to have something, too.
"My boy," he promised heartily, patting Jay on the back as though in congratulation at their golf score, "you will lose nothing by this morning. Not for playing partner to Phil Metten. No! I said it."
Mrs. Metten rushed down from the steps to greet them. Her girls were not in sight. "Ruby and Rosita, they are horseback riding," mamma announced loudly, "with Mrs. Rountree, of New York."
Jay went up to his room and, from his own, opened the door of Lida's where the sun, cleared of its morning haze, was pouring in yellow and warm. There was no sound; no motion; no ordinary proof of presence; yet, at the opening of the door, more liveness in this room than merely the light of the sun.
He had believed that his wife was riding; now he knew she had returned. There was something electric in the air of the room. Lida was here; but he did not at first see her.
He would not test his impression by calling to her; he would discover her, so he entered and came upon her in the startling way she liked. Black and white and crimson contrasted in the yellow sunlight. Lida lay at full length in the sun. The white was her skin; the crimson, the silk of a scarf below her. She had flung pillows on the floor and spread over them the scarf upon which she lay, her black kimono half covering her.
Flown were all thoughts of the Mettens and what she might have done with them. He gasped, standing over her; and she, looking up at him, said: "Let's go to Levuka."
"Where's that?" whispered Jay.
"The Fiji. I just found out. I've always known the verse. It's in Kipling:
As one some Surrey glade,
Or one the palm-grove's droned lament,
Before Levuka's Trade.'
"He means the trade wind. Let's go to palm groves and trade winds, Jay. I'd like a lamenting wind and palms and shore and south seas."
"So would I," said Jay.
"Kiss me," said Lida; and he knelt and seized her, warm with the sun. "Then let's go! . . . Why not? Why not?" she challenged, clinging to him, lifted in his arms from her crimson scarf. "One day we'll be beachcombers, bathing bare in the shining sea; and sleep under stars which'll be strange. Even the stars, Jay. No Dipper; no old, stale northern stars. The Southern Cross!
"We'll awaken and sail—we must have a sail, Jay, no spluttering motor—and skim into the lagoon of a coral island on the rim of a crater of a sunken volcano. They're round, you know, a circle of sand with palm trees and parrots; and frigate birds and albatrosses over the sea. Let's shoot an albatross with a cross-bow, Jay, and for our punishment have the wind drop down.
'Twas sad as sad could be;
And we did speak only to break
The silence of the sea!'
"We'll parch on the painted ship, Jay, upon the painted ocean. Then the wind'll rise:
The furrow followed free;
We were the first that ever burst
Into that silent sea!'
"There's some place, Jay, where no one's ever sailed, some path in the sea! Let's sail it, you and me!"
"Let's, Lida," he whispered with lips on hers and holding her close, trembling as she; more, in fact, than she, for she ceased to quiver.
"It's merely a matter of nerve enough to break away from this crazy thing called civilization. Have you the nerve, man married to me?"
"It's not nerve," denied Jay.
"What is it?"
He held her, staring into her black eyes, aware of her heart beats in her white, warm body. "It's what has come down to you; it's what is put up to you," at last he said. "Something like honor."
"What makes honor for you?"
He could not think, holding her; with her heart beating, beating against his. He had never imagined, when he had married her, this. He shut his eyes but it only increased the intoxication of the thump, thump, thump of their hearts together, hers hurrying, hurrying and now his after it. He lost his breath and, in order to breathe again, he let her go, releasing her to her crimson couch, where she lay, breathless like him, and looking up at him.
"You'd like," Lida gibed, "to love me. You're my sort, inside you. I felt it a second ago. You'd like to go with me to Levuka; but I know you won't . . . yet . . . because, because . . ."
"Because why, Lida?"
"You don't dare," she taunted him. "You don't dare even to love me yet. But you'd like to let go and love me."
"You were born a barbarian, Lida," he said.
"Thank God for that. What d'you feel you were born to be? A merchant of Chicago like your friends the Mettens?"
With a start, he recollected them and that he had not mentioned to her that Metten was a buyer, as Nucast had been. Now he told her, but without referring to Nucast.
"Yes," said Lida. "Mr. Metten gave your papa a business of four hundred and forty-five thousand dollars last year." Plainly it was an indirect quotation. "He has a bigger business this year; and he likes you very much. The whole family likes you very much; also, they like me. By the way, we're lunching with them."
"No," objected Jay.
"Oh, yes we are. I accepted. For you're not letting go yet; you're not," she flung at him, "leaving with me this morning for Levuka."
Barbarously black and crimson and half-covered white, she lay before him; and the languor in the sun of her smooth, shining limbs was like the languor of the sea. She was restored to her rim of sand under the palms lamenting in the winds of the Fiji; but he, with his hand upon a pocket where his banknotes had been—one thousand dollars, when it had been handed him a few days ago by Ellen Powell in his father's office—he was returned to Chicago.