Dangerous Business/Chapter 12
Lowry proved to be a prophet; the Metten family, reduced to insignificance at Tryston, promptly entrained, and upon the morning of the second day, resumed the occupation of their five hundred dollar suite in Chicago.
While mamma was still scanning the society columns, in hope of a personal Metten mention, Phil phoned the Rountree office, inquiring not at all for Mr. Rountree but for Jay and his wife. The call was referred to Ellen, who replied that Jay was not in the office, though he was in the city.
"Certainly; I know it," said Phil. "His wife, too. Last night they were entertained at 999 Lake Shore Drive. But where are they stopping?" The paper had not supplied that item.
"When he comes to the office, I will tell him you have returned," said Ellen.
"Also with me Mrs. Metten and the Misses Metten," amplified Phil, employing proudly the phrase of the Tryston journal, describing his family; and he repeated several times the name of his hotel and its phone number.
Ellen talked, by long distance, with Mr. Rountree at Stanley; and a little later looked up to see Jay. She started with some corfusion, for he had happened to come in, silently, the door being open; previously she had had a little preparation for him.
"Good morning. My wife called me?" he asked, noticing but trying to ignore Ellen's agitation.
"No . . . but you've had a call."
"Father?" he asked. Ellen shook her head and her confusion fled as she warmed with excitement familiar to the moments when he and she, before he had married, banded together against his father.
"Mr. Philip Metten phoned for you," she related and delivered the message, adding, "Your father didn't ask for you, but he said something about you. He's returning to-morrow and told me to invite you and your wife to dine at home with him."
"Exactly what did he say?" demanded Jay, smiling but also reddening. "I want his own words."
"Well, he told me to see that you and your wife dined with him."
"That all?" insisted Jay.
"He asked, were you still at the hotel? He said you were to move home."
"At once, I suppose."
Ellen nodded, gazing up at him, and he considered her, half absently, half realizing her in the manner of their odd intimacy which surprised him only when, suddenly, he remembered Lida.
"Is father bringing back the Alban business?" he asked.
"I don't know; and I don't think he does. It makes Metten so mighty important, doesn't it?"
Did he think, she wondered, that she urged him to use his wife to help hold Metten? She wanted him to hold the Metten account.
"It's a rotten row," he said, "business."
She opposed him, quickly. "No, it's not!"
"Do you like it?" he challenged her.
"Of course I like it or I wouldn't be here."
"You're not here merely for money?"
"No."
"No; I know you're not," he agreed, puzzling over her in a new, surprising way. Here she was; here she had been, working beside his father for pay. Previously that had sufficiently explained her. Now he asked: "What else do you work for?"
"What?" repeated Ellen and confessed: "I don't know."
"You like the city better than the country?"
"That's not it," she denied, "for I don't like to live in the city so much of the time. I like business and the people in business."
"Do you? Do you like them better than the people at home?" he demanded, and glanced out the window over the lake—Lida's sea, choked with ice and floe. "Your father works at a clean, clear job; he sails his ship; he sets his course and keeps it; loads his ore, goes back in ballast, and loads again. No Nu—" Jay caught himself quickly. "No Lew Alban and no Metten brothers can make any difference to him. Nothing but wind and weather can touch him. Would you like your father in business . . . holding Metten?"
"Not father," said Ellen quickly, and gasping a little so that Jay laughed at her.
"Why not, if you like business so?"
"I don't know."
"What do you feel about him; that he's above business?"
"Not above it," Ellen denied.
"Certainly not below it."
"No; not below," agreed Ellen; and she gazed at him for long seconds with her gray, steady eyes. No one knew so well as she the hounding this boy had received to drive him to seriousness, to work, to duty; no one knew so well how it set up, inevitably, antagonism. Then there was some experience, something to do with that Nucast order and his marriage, which she did not know. She asked, very gently; "What is it little boys want to be?"
"Why," said Jay, wondering but seeing she was completely earnest, "why, firemen and Indian fighters and"
"And ship-captains, don't they?"
"Yes."
"Then what do they do?"
"What?"
"They grow up."
"Wow!" said Jay softly. "Wow!" and he was fiery red and perspiring and felt it.
She bent forward from his father's big chair, in which she was sitting, and caught his sleeve. "I'm not criticizing my father!" she cried. "He's the finest, finest man I ever knew! I wouldn't have any one else for a father! I wouldn't have him off his ship! I'm proud to be his daughter. You know him!"
"I know him," said Jay. "I know your remark was meant solely for me. Thanks."
"I meant"
"I said 'thanks,'" Jay repeated and, gazing into her gray eyes, he thought of Lida's black ones and her white body on her crimson scarf when she would have lured him to Levuka. "What's Phil Metten's number? D'you mind getting him on the phone for me?"
Ellen dialed the call with trembling fingers and gave over the instrument. Shortly after he hung up, the bell rang and Ellen, answering, heard a cool, alert, confident voice say: "This is Lida Rountree. Is Mr. Jay Rountree there?"
"Your wife," said Ellen to Jay, and slipped into her own little room where she waited to see if he wanted her again. He did not, but departed; and after he was gone, Ellen stayed alone, upset by her excitement at what she had said and its effect upon him. She was glad that she had said it, glad that she had stirred him so. Could his wife, the possessor of that cool, confident voice, put him upon another path?
In spite of knowing that Lida Rountree at Tryston had charmed the Mettens and had served the business cause, Ellen was unable to visualize Jay's wife as an ally of endeavor. Nothing that she had said and nothing that Jay had put into words betrayed her different allegiance, but every instinct screamed it. Ellen Powell and that girl, who had married this boy about to grow up, were completely opposed.
Upon her return to her room, Ellen underwent twinges of doubt of her own declaration. Di was there and was preparing for another foray on business. Di had not received the irrevocable donations pledged to her by Art Slengel when the Metten order should be signed to Slengels, but Di was not despairing about it.
"Sam signed all right," she reported. "Jello did his little duty, but Phil had to put off writing his name. He's sprained his wrist, you see, at the golf game—and then turning over all the pages of the social register."
Di had benefited from an exceedingly frank interlude with Sam.
"The bride took them on quite a ride," commented Di, indolently draping and revealing, with minute care, her pink, soft body under the rose tints of her shaded light. "She certainly has them hoping high. I bet they're listening at the phone this minute for a call from the Potter Palmers or the Armours, at the very least." And Di inspected the satisfying reflections of her mirror.
"Seen Mrs. Jay Rountree?" she demanded suddenly.
"No."
"Me," said Di, somewhat indignantly, "I had thatorder. Sam shot it across. Then that bride had to kick in and spill everything. My God, what'd she want from me? Why can't a rich dame like her leave a working girl alone?"
"Who're you out with to-night?" Ellen ventured.
"Jello."
"Why?" questioned Ellen, dropping other argument and adopting, for this occasion, only Di's practical point of view. "What's the use, when he can't give you a good order?"
"He'll have to make it a good one—with brother Phil's moniker all over it," retorted Di, confidently and cryptically; and refused to elucidate. But she nursed her personal grievance against Lida Rountree; and this, Ellen slowly understood, was to whip herself up to something she was yet reluctant to do.
Shortly before eleven a cab came, not summoned by Di, but sent. The cab, as Ellen saw from the window, was empty; no escort offered himself to accompany her to the affair planned, to-night, to counteract and overwhelm Lida Rountree's sudden and successful incursion into the contest for the Metten account; and Ellen, desperately in need of a new point of protest, seized on this.
Di laughed at her. "I know the driver," she said, and kissed Ellen good-night. "Look here," she added, "you've been wrong every time before. You're wrong now. I can take care of myself." So she escaped.
She did know the driver; and she sank into a corner of the cab without a word to him. He had his orders, in obedience to which he sped along the snowbound boulevard, soon reaching a region where brilliant display lights flooded show windows of gowns, negligées, hats, slippers, jewels.
Di stared and desired; Di drew back, shivering a little. A new, splendid limousine, with liveried chauffeur, passed and Di imagined Jay Rountree and his bride in it—that rich girl who had to kick in and kill a big fat order which Diana Dewitt had got without having to give too much for it.
The cab halted at a corner and a rotund townsman, jowled and smiling, rat-tatted playfully upon the window before, jerking open the door, he bundled in.
"How's my dandy Di-light?" Jello greeted Diana, smothering her slim hand in the grasp of his large, soft fingers as he bulged in the seat beside her.
"How's my snappy little Sammarino?" flattered Di, in return, smiling at him but trying not to see his fat face. Soon he would kiss her with his thick, soft lips. All right; she could go it again for the sake of a half million dollar order; but she must make sure of it this time, with that smart society girl kicking into the game.
"Love me a little?" demanded Jello.
"Lots," lied Di. She despised him.
The cab, she knew, had been sent for and paid for by Art Slengel; the appointment at the corner and all other arrangements as to destination and entertainment there had been made by Art. Jello played merely a passive part in the proceedings. He had not the nerve and courage of his own to go after a girl, but he would drop into a date made for him, with his way paid and everything prepared.
He enfolded her with a soft, round arm and kissed her several times. Sometimes she responded. It was not far, thank God, to the studio where they were bound. There would be dancing for a while; Jello loved to dance. It was awful to dance with him—sweating, puffing, pushing his heavy, fat feet after hers—but it was better than being in a cab with him.
They drew up before an entrance distinguished by a striped canvas canopy and sentineled by a tall, obsequious mulatto. Reluctantly Jello released Di and she jumped out and ran into the vestibule and up iron stairs, with him lumbering behind her.
At a door, behind which dance music beat, she waited for him and together they debouched into a large, studiolike room, cleared in the center for dancing, and remarkable, as to its perimeter, for its convenient nooks. Some of these were architectural, following actual recesses and bays in the wall of the building; others had been contrived with potted palms and oriental hangings.
Two couples trotted to the cacophony of piano, saxophone and drum ambushed at the end of the room.
Di fluttered gay and care-free fingers, "'Lo, people!" But Jello regarded the dancers more cautiously, especially the gray heads. The blond heads he did not doubt; they were party girls, paid for this entertainment and dependable. Art Slengel had assured him that the men would be strangers from out of town, but he put on his glasses to make sure. Over their partners' shoulders, they studied him; then they nodded, somewhat relieved. They were strangers to each other.
Di, having waited to witness this formality, fled into the refuge of a little room where five girls, four of whom she knew, prinked and powdered before the mirrors.
"'Lo, Di," three of them hailed.
"'Lo, everyone."
The number of girls here was no proof, Diana well knew, of the presence, now or prospectively, of an equivalent male population in the gentlemen's room; for the requirements of a business party were exactly contrary to the code of a merely social affair where extra men, or at least an even number, were essential. At a party for business, there must be no stag line; every man at every moment must be entertained; there must be extra girls to compete for them.
The girl whom Di knew, but who had not spoken to her, was peering at Di in her hand mirror. She was white-skinned, blue-eyed, blondined and with overstained finger nails.
"'Lo, Rene," hailed Di, pleasantly; and was glad she was here, for Irene Pierce was her understudy although, in another sense, her rival for Jello. She was employed this evening to make it particularly joyful for Sam Metten. A couple of the others occasionally would assist in the cheer, but Irene was paid to specialize on Sam.
She peered at Di but did not speak, being peeved at Jello's pronounced preference for Diana. Not that Rene liked Sam—she shared, indeed, Di's aversion—but he was a man with a choice of two playmates and, invariably, he preferred the other.
Di, fresh from the cab, was perfectly willing that Irene take on Jello first. Di could hear just outside the door an elephantine thumping on the floor which she identified as Jello's toes tapping his boyish eagerness for the dance.
"Shove him from shore," urged Di, generously.
"Oh, Di-anna, Di-anna; don't you hear the pi-anna," chanted Jello in the tenor falsetto of his lighter moods; and Irene relapsed into her chair.
"I'll jump in," agreed Di, "but for God's sake row out with the water-wings and tow me to the beach." So she sought her partner.
Jello perspired in black broadcloth with wide, plaited shirt bosom already wilted. He was very bald and very nearsighted; when he discarded his glasses, he had to hold his eyes half closed to obtain any clear vision at all.
He squinted at Diana to make sure of her before tucking her under his arm and parading her to a tray of cocktails, which he already had sampled. Di drank one; and danced.
"Oh, Baby!" puffed Jello appreciatively; and Di, dancing, patted gently his fat hand.
Sam soon was steaming up. He had ceased to regret the solo opportunities of the taxi; he greatly preferred a party, after he got there; provided it was a guaranteed, discreet party with no comebacks of reports of him in embarrassing quarters. Sam considered himself a performer; he liked to bring into a group, previously lacking it, a little spontaneous gayness and life.
"I see Meth and Mo have come to our city," he panted, sotto voce, as the music stopped.
"I'll bite," offered Di.
"Methuselah and Moses," explained Sam and pointed them out.
Di identified them, by matching them up with her mental memoranda of Art Slengel's descriptions of the guests' physical peculiarities and their business importance, made for her guidance during the evening. Methuselah must be the manufacturer from a small city in Wisconsin; eight thousand a year, he might throw to the Slengels. Moses owned a plant in Iowa capable of consuming perhaps ten thousand dollars worth, yearly, of the Slengel—or the Rountree—product. Neither was to be compared, in present or prospective importance, to the Mettens.
Loudly Di laughed at Jello's quip, eliciting from Mo's partner the demand: "Hey, if it's that good, broadcast it!"
"Impossible!" shrieked Di. "Oh you censors!" And she slapped Sam's fat wrist.
Jello, delighted at the imputation of devilishness, exuberantly swung her off her feet as the encore commenced, and whirled her about him.
The drummer, expert at such parties, was watching the floor with especially vigilant eye to the fat, bald Lothario who, controlling a business of half a million, was worth all the others in the room. Instantly he beat a roll on the snare drum, timed to the swing of Di in Jello's grasp. It aided in the excitation of Methuselah, who not unnaturally was slightly sensitive as to his obvious years and who determined to deny them by a feat of perilous emulation.
Age, however, had diminished him to a meager, bony frame, undoubtedly to be envied, on the score of longevity, in comparison with Jello's but deplorably deficient in avoirdupois to qualify him as a competent pivot about which to swing a hundred-and-ten-pound girl. He started bravely and beautifully enough, with a snare drum accompaniment tempting him on to increased efforts by its cheering crescendo, br-r-r-at-atat-tat.
Meth tried to meet the challenge of speed and acceleration. He swung his partner from the floor, turned with her, spun with her. Faster rattled the snare drum, and Methuselah tried to keep up. His spirit was willing, but his shanks were weak. He twisted his legs, turning, and tripped. Up went his shoes, down went his seat, and he plumped upon the hardwood, his partner sprawling.
Boom! beat the bass drum, celebrating the thump at the finish. "Attaboy; attaboy!" shrilled Jello, in high humor, while Mo, of Iowa, started to him, out of the sympathy of common years. Art Slengel also hurried toward him, but Methuselah waved them away. He refused first aid, to scramble up and limp after his partner, beckoning to her to try it again.
"Game girl!" Jello audibly approved her compliance; and Methuselah caught her and braced himself again. Br-r-r-at-atat-tat! applauded the snare drum and stayed with him about one turn—two. Then thump! Boom! Boom!
Old Meth, game but groggy, sat up rubbing his bumped head and bowing to the plaudits and laughter. Art Slengel supported him from the floor, patting his back and praising him.
"Now we show 'em," whispered Jello to Di, and he seized her and started spinning.
Sam was become a triumphant whirling dervish in the center of the floor, with Di a flywheel around him. She shut her eyes. Sam was bent on showing how it should be done, since the clown act was cleared away, and Di, opening her eyes, got skipping glimpses of palms, wallpaper, piano and staring faces. She felt herself slipping in Jello's sweaty hands; she tried to tighten the grasp and he tried to hold her but their fingers failed and she flew from him, tripping, sliding and skimming at last on side and shoulder and cheek over the waxy boards.
Jello, stumbling back, kept his balance and staggered to a divan in a nook before he fell from dizziness. Di turned over and sat up, soiled and shaky in the face of loud applause. She saw Irene cross the spinning room and go to the nook after Jello. Di arose and retired for a wash, re-rouging and repairs.
More determination than distinguished either of her parents, in the little unkempt cottage near the Straits of Mackinac, sustained Diana Dewitt when she returned to the floor.
Jello was not dancing. He had one-stepped and done his dervish whirl, again, with Irene, but the act had not gone so big at its repetition and he had not thrown Irene. Jello was tired and he rested for refreshment with Irene in his palm-screened nook.
Di, scouting, caught a view and tactfully postponed her intrusion, accepting an invitation to foxtrot from Methuselah who, favoring his left ankle, rejoined the fray.
Under the conditions, Meth was not a bad dancer; but he talked about his children in Wisconsin and explained, twice, that he was a widower—thereby proving, if further testimony were needed, that he was new to a party. It took very little indeed to make him feel hopelessly compromised.
He kissed Di, clumsily and with an air of rising to expectations, when they went to their nook, and he was so fussed that she sat further from him and held his hand, merely to tell his fortune. He was going to make a business change, she assured him, which would bring him prosperity and peace of mind.
Meth agreed that he was making a change; he said plainly that he was giving his business to the Slengels. He liked Art for helping him from the floor; besides Art had told him not to worry about the sprained wrist of his partner. Slengels would take care of it.
Di saw in his old eyes fear of his reputation in his little town. Suppose the girl followed him to sue him for the sprain or other injuries. His account was in the bin, and the lid nailed down, and nothing more need to be done about him. Di was rather sorry for him.
She was not at all sorry for Jello. Her cheek felt rough and itchy under its rouge and she suspected that a shoulder would be black and blue in the morning. Besides, hadn't Sam, after promising her that half million dollar order at another party, failed to deliver it? No matter that maybe he couldn't; he hadn't.
He whistled at her as she passed his sheltering palms, so she looked in and he patted the divan beside him. Under his other arm, he held Irene.
"Come on!" he invited, having been refreshed by highballs: until a company of three, provided the other two were girls, no longer composed, for him, a crowd. "Havin' supper soon. Lot's supper. Plenty f'rus all. Come in."
Irene refrained from seconding the invitation but Di did not require such a formality.
"What you been doin' with old Meth—Methuselah?" Sam managed with jealous dignity.
"Talking to him," replied Di, carelessly.
"What tubjects," demanded Jello, with pompous preciseness, "did you such on? What tubjects, I say, did you such on?"
Irene reached for a drink for him, which Di forbade by a shake of the head. In spite of her Rene pushed the glass at him. Di thrust it back, spilling half the highball over Irene's skirt.
" you," swore Rene, and dashed the rest over Di.
"Girls!" rebuked Jello, much pleased. "Ladies!"
The whisky and soda trickled in tiny, teasing rivulets down Di's white shoulders, which Sam found the more fascinating.
"Dewdrops!" he poetized, admiringly.
Di failed to appreciate the embellishment and reached across Jello to slap at Irene, who struck back and clutched Di's hair.
"Ladies!" protested Jello, preserving strictest neutrality as he felt himself the prize' for the scratch and scramble. He wanted, however, Di to win him; and she did. At any rate, she was on the divan beside him; Irene was gone. Jello did not question why or where.
"Now you'n me have highball," he suggested comfortably.
"No," refused Di.
"How 'bout supper?"
"Supper," agreed Di.
With it, they had a drink or two, but Di did not let him become insensible. She had brought him home drunk, before; and she knew that there was nothing in a repetition of such an incident to force from brother Phil an O.K. to Sam's signed order. Jello was no aged widower and manufacturer from Wisconsin, to scare himself pink over a mere drink party; nor was Phil one to go into a panic for him.
When she left the party with him alone, he had a flask which, since it would have been surplusage in the studio, he had kept corked. Its contents were sufficient, in quantity and potency, to finish him for the night; and after Di refused it, he started at it.
From within the bend of his fat arm, she watched the flask and his lips. Let him gurgle a little more and his excitement and recklessness would become mere stupidity; his head would drop heavy; he would be "out" for the rest of the night; the taxi-driver would need help merely to deposit him within his door. Then Diana Dewitt would be driven to her own room and to Ellen, much the same girl she had been.
It was calm and quiet in the night with snow smooth and shining in the moonlight as the cab traversed a park. It was like, for a moment, the moon on the snow of the field outside Diana Dewitt's window at home in Hoster.
She saw herself a little girl, kneeling beside her bed to say old, childish prayers—silly things about being always a good girl and her soul being kept while she slept.
Di shut her eyes but they only gave her a glimpse of her mother, pettish and complaining about her own troubles but always with a fond, lingering touch for Di. "Good," her mother wanted her to be. "Good." Her mother made a sort of fetish about being good. When she was younger, many a man with money had liked her. "But," her mother used to say, when she boasted of this, "whatever else I got or ain't, I got that. I've always been a good woman."
Well, what had it brought her?
The gin gurgled from the flask. Here was the Metten order; half a million, maybe, going, going. . . . Di snatched quickly and knocked the flask from him, and the gin drained upon the floor.
Jello bent for it but she blocked him; and he swore at her. "That's all I got."
"I know it."
"What y'do that for?"
Di looked up at him, and he forgot the flask to stare down at her.
"You're goin' to give me somethin' for that!" he threatened her.
Di's eyes merely widened.
With both his fat arms, he enveloped her.
Two minutes later, he tapped upon the pane behind the driver. It was to announce a different destination.