Dangerous Business/Chapter 18
Jay called from Grand Central and learned that the mail-boat from the Caribbean would dock during the afternoon. Ringing the Park Avenue apartment, he learned that Mr. and Mrs. Lytle were in but, naturally, had not yet arisen, so he merely left word that he was in town and put them from his mind for the morning.
He walked down Fifth Avenue, in the clear spring sunshine, toward his father's New York office, with his mind on the boat, near Sandy Hook, bearing Lida from the languor and overplayed palms of the Caribbean.
At the office door, lettered like the doors in Chicago, he halted momentarily with a sudden pulse surprising him. What was it? Open a door like this, and she looks up at you, his pulse said. But she's not beyond this door; she's not here. Ellen Powell, that was. What had she become to him? He never had felt this in Chicago, where alway he had opened the door and found her.
A very different sort of girl, in Ralph's office, informed him that Mr. Armiston was not yet down but might be, shortly. Ralph kept New York office hours, not those of Chicago.
Jay waited by a window which gave a glimpse of the Hudson, a ferry and a long, four-funnelled liner outward bound. How she'd thrill at the sight of it! How she'd thrill to New York, which she had never seen! He imagined, standing here beside him, Ellen Powell gazing at the great ship with her wide, gray eyes and then looking up at him.
Ralph had come in and hailed him, twice, "Hello!" before Jay spun about suddenly.
"Looking for the wife's ship?" inquired his brother-in-law pleasantly.
"No," said Jay. "Yes, of course," he corrected. "Who told you about her?"
"She'd left the Wilmerdons a couple weeks ago," replied Ralph. "Everybody knows that. Here you are; is she in to-day?"
"This afternoon," answered Jay and shook hands, turning the talk from Lida by inquiring for his sister.
Ralph did not pursue the matter of Lida. He was a tactful, pleasing man, eight years older than Jay. He was from Maryland, originally, and was dark, moustached, slender and handsome. He carried himself in an easy, confident way and spoke with a slight, distinguished southern accent which he maintained purposely; it was part of his air, part of his charm, part of his stock in trade.
He usually seemed a bit sleepy in the morning and did nothing to deny it. He wanted you to feel that he was the sort that was at his best late in the day and that he looked forward to the evening. Jay knew that he was a very good salesman to deal with certain buyers, but was helpless with others.
"I see you're at work," he complimented Jay. "Been wondering about you. I didn't know, really."
"That's not surprising," said Jay, smiling, "if you've been trying to trace me by my results."
"Not such rotten results!" rejoined Ralph with sincere enthusiasm. "I'm very glad to see you. Something to tell you."
The girl took this as a hint for her departure and left them alone, whereupon Ralph, instead of supplying information, requested: "Tell me the truth, when does Alban drop us?"
"Just as quick," replied Jay, "as Lew is left an orphan. That's all there is to it."
"Just so," said Ralph feelingly, and asked: "How is father using you? Between the hours of nine and five with an hour off for lunch?"
Jay smiled. "That's about it."
"And I bet you call on people at their offices. Now I'll lay you a little wager. You've done one thing that interests me mightily. You cracked Howarth-Lyman Company for a little order. I don't know anything about it but I'll lay you any odds you like that you didn't get it between nine and five, unless it was at the hour off for lunch, and you didn't hook it in any office."
"No contest," said Jay. "I got it from Ken Howarth at a club about one-thirty."
"A.M.," finished Ralph positively. "And I bet if you hadn't rung the clock at nine the next morning, father Rountree would have called you for not keeping office hours. Office hours! That's Chicago for you. Chicago still thinks business is done in offices. There's only one good reason for any busy man to have an office; it collects for him, all in one place, everybody he doesn't want to see. It's a great help, that way. A man has all his time to give to business, if he just keeps away from his office.
"Jay, I've been trying for two years to get to the real man who does the big buying for Howarth down here. He's your friend Ken's cousin. What d'you do to-day, after you meet the boat?"
"To-day," said Jay, "I'm only meeting the boat."
Ralph delayed, squinting slightly. "Make an engagement for to-morrow?"
"I'll tell you to-morrow."
Ralph refrained from comment and, after a moment, reached for a call button, but waited.
"What d'you think of Miss Powell?" he questioned, astonishingly.
"What?" said Jay, startled.
"For me, down here," explained Ralph. "She's the best business girl I've ever seen, and she's simply wasted with your father. He's always in his office to answer anything about the business, so he doesn't need her. I'm never in my office and I need like the devil a girl who knows the business, the Chicago office, the plant and our people, and who's got a head.
"Your father can train another girl out there; I can't here. The proper place for that Powell girl, in our organization, is New York. She'd be a God-send for me. I'm going to take it up with your father, Jay. Help me on it, will you?"
"Of course," said Jay.
He went early to the dock and watched the Caribbean boat approach. Almost as soon as the line of passengers at the promenade rail emerged as separate figures, he located Lida. A silhouette of her head and shoulders was enough; he could not see that she moved but he knew that she was not still. There she was, tense, eager, impatient to end the stale venture of this voyage, whatever it had been, and launch upon fresh experience. With him? If not, what did her cable and radio mean?
He waved and she lifted a hand. She responded to other greetings and Jay looked along the dock and discovered the slight, smart figure of her mother and the broad form of Mr. Lytle, who made him out and waved a stick at him.
"Heard you gave us a ring," said Mr. Lytle, proffering a cordial, soft hand. "Wished you'd come up. We'd a room for you."
Lida's mother inspected him with bright, black eyes. Under her small, black hat her hair was clipped like a boy's. She and her husband both were aware of Jay's situation with her daughter; for Lida, upon her return from Chicago, had disabused their minds of erroneous impressions. So Mrs. Lytle wanted to be cordial to Jay but she found it difficult; she felt a debt to him and she did not like that. She would have felt more at ease with him as a recognized wrongdoer.
"We are expecting both of you to stay with us," she said stiffly.
Lida disembarked with ideas of her own regarding her residence. She kissed her stepfather on the lips, her mother on the cheek, and she did not kiss Jay at all, but of him she inquired:
"Where are you taking me?"
"Plaza," he said; and while she talked with her mother, he phoned for a suite. The four left the dock in the Lytle car but the two elders stopped on Park Avenue. Lida and Jay were driven on together.
"Same straight street," murmured Lida. "Same tearing town."
She shut her eyes in distaste and leaned into her corner, swaying slightly with the swing of the car. Her return had disappointed her, Jay knew; he had been below expectations.
The white little ovals of her eyelids accentuated the clear brown of her skin. She had tanned in the Caribbean sun of the yacht deck or the sandy beaches. Lida was not physically tired; she looked very well indeed, but she sought a stimulus which neither New York, as yet, nor he had supplied her.
He had rather supposed that, when he saw her and was close to her, she might stir him again; but, somewhat surprisingly to himself, she had not. He sat beside her with her hand in his, holding her with a quiet and tenderness new to him. He wanted to please her and protect her but she did not excite him.
"Same silly old city," said Lida, with eyes shut, and he thought, with Lida's hand in his, of Ellen Powell arriving here in New York and for the first time seeing the city. Unconsciously, he pressed Lida's hand. She withdrew her fingers, as though she had felt something vicarious in his clasp, and she sat up and stared at him.
In her room at the hotel, she had her talk with him. She was seated upon his knees, his arms holding her, her arms now and then about his neck, her hands more often at his face.
"There's nothing at Santa Lucia, Jay," she told him. "Nothing for me. I guess there's nothing in Levuka. Santa Lucia must be enough like Levuka to let you know. The Fiji couldn't be lazier than the niggers or the sand hotter. There're palms in the sand and the sun, and you see the Southern Cross. . . . It's frightfully over-rated, dim and not even straight. Seen it?"
"Never," said Jay, gently patting her.
"It's crooked, like that!" She stabbed with a finger to mark the position of the four disappointing stars. "Nothing to cheer for. There's nothing at Levuka, I guess. Where is it, Jay; where is it for me?"
He held her gently, with the new tenderness which had come to him with her and which she would not have from him. She stirred in protest to it.
"I thought for a while down there, if you'd been there, Jay, we might have found . . . it; but we wouldn't."
Still he made no reply and she turned, confronting him, holding his face between her hands.
"What you been finding, Jay?" she asked.
"I?" he said. "I've just been at work. Not much done," he confessed, "but I've been at it." And his mind was with her who had been at it with him.
Lida's fingers drew, familiarly, upon his cheeks, too tensely, too troubledly, too demandingly. He thought of Ellen's touch in the brief contact of their hands and he thought how would be her touch upon his face, how different from Lida's. He withdrew, slightly, from Lida's.
"Who is she, Jay?"
"Who?"
"There was no one when I went away, Jay," she said. "That wasn't up at all. But you've—" her finger-tips quivered on his cheek—"you've found somebody."
"Nobody," he denied.
She cast off his arms and arose. "I didn't think you'd stay in this suite, Jay," she said. "I only wanted you to take it for me. I'll keep it on, you see.'m not going home. I'll have my own place; nobody'll be over me. I'm married, you see—Mrs. Jay Rountree."
She walked to the window which overlooked the park, patterned with shadows from the sun lying far and low in the west. She spun about, head up, fired with a flash of jealousy.
"What sort is she, Jay? Not mine, I know; but what—what gets you?"
She made him see, so clearly, Ellen: Ellen beside him, Ellen speaking to him, her eyes in his. She made him see Ellen, suddenly, as at that first time she cried because of him, in his father's big chair with her toes not quite touching the floor; and, amazingly, this memory affected him beyond any measure with the moment itself. But it was nothing he could relate to Lida.
He remained in New York until the end of the week, putting in appearances with Lida wherever she wished, and he looked up Ken Howarth's cousin, not by making a call at the Howarth office, but under midnight circumstances which permitted the casual introduction of Ralph, with no need to mention even that Ralph was in business.
"Precisely perfect!" Ralph exulted with Jay on the next day. "Now we have a chance to get them, if we simply don't rush them! If we try to hurry this, no chance; but if we play it properly and patiently, the sweetest business in Manhattan may fall into our laps—if we don't fall first," recollected Ralph, grimly. "This drink, Jay, had better be to the health—or at least to the longer life, however he survives—of good old, staunch old Stanley Alban!"