Dangerous Business/Chapter 8
At Tryston, where it was cool and misty on this Christmas eve, Lida Rountree, who never remembered her new surname, was entering her room. She had one of her own and Jay had another beside it; for the best rooms at Tryston were in suite.
They had the best, which were very expensive; but Jay, who was lying across his bed in the dusk, bothered little about the cost. He could not afford the rooms but neither could he afford marriage; and here he was married to a girl to whom dollars were merest details.
He did not know how many of his thousand dollars lingered in his pockets; he scarcely cared. Not only his finances—but all his affairs had fled so far beyond his reckonings.
Lida entered her room from the hall, flicked on her light and stood whistling, as she looked about. She did not notice him through the doorway and he watched her strip one glove and then the other to her finger-tips when, one after the other, she suddenly snapped them away. She removed her hat, stared at it and twirled it and skipped it, spinning, over the foot of her bed toward her pillows.
She whistled not lightly or cheerfully but with a sort of plaintive sharpness. Not with plaintiveness, exactly; for in plaintiveness is something of repining; and Lida did not repine. She teased and taunted; she whistled a plaintive air, La Paloma, over and over, with a sort of defiant, cynical challenge.
"Make me happy, happy, happy," she seemed to taunt. "Is this being happy?" her thin, whistling lips inquired.
Jay was not happy; but her whistling snatched him from his own to her discontent. In the midst of a measure, she stopped short and called, "Y'there?"
He leaped up and went to her. "You were 'sleep?" she asked him.
"Just about."
"You weren't."
"No; I wasn't," he admitted.
Her eyes were doing their dancing, daring, dancing above, below, about and about his.
"So y'heard me come in."
"Yes. And I saw you; I wanted to watch you."
"What d'you feel, watching me?"
"Love."
"Love for who?"
"Love for you."
"Liar," she cast at him coolly and kissed him. "You don't love me. I hope to God I don't love you."
He jerked a little from her. "I hope to high heaven, there's more than this coming to me," she explained, seizing him. "And it may be from you, Jay. Nobody else gives me more kick."
"All right," he said.
"D'you know we're happy, marvelously happy? Y'ought to read the New York papers."
"About us? Are they here?"
"Not yet; but on the way. Announcements are out in New York; and I bear, darling, congratulations."
Telegrams, he now noticed, lay tossed on her dresser. Lida laughed.
"Mamma evidently employed a poet. We have refreshed the jaded world, sweetheart, with a breath of youth's romance, running off in old-fashioned manner because we couldn't be kept apart a second longer.
"The subway, darling, sighs and languishes over your picture. I hope they're printing the one they took when you were pinched, because they certainly pass out the most poisonous poses of me. . . . Are we sitting down?"
He dropped upon a chair, she flicked out the light and was upon his knees, her warm, soft, restless fingers upon his cheek, smoothing his hair, touching his temples, at his cheek again.
"How do we get it, husband," she whispered.
"Get what?"
"More. Oh God, I want it—more, more."
"We'll get it, Lida," he said, and her lips were upon his, leaving to ask:
"You and I, Jay?"
"Why not?"
"You don't want it."
She was up; she was out of his arms, or trying to free herself, but he held her. "Let me go," she fought with his hands. "You don't love me as I love you."
"You don't love me, Lida."
"But I want to. You don't even want to."
She was away from him and at the window. She flung up the blind and lifted, next, the sash. She drew deep breaths of the cool evening air and returned to his arms, from which she watched the gray spread of the last twilight over the soft summits of the mountains. Here and there on the slopes below the Tavern twinkled tiny lights, motionless, mostly; but one crept slowly into the wide expanse of misty darkness which was the golf course. A little negro boy, Jay thought, a caddie with a lantern; and whistling came from the darkness; haunting, happy notes.
"Have the niggers got it on us?" Lida asked.
"Change with 'em, would you?" asked Jay.
"Nothing in that," Lida denied. "But what's in this?"
"We're young," said Jay. "You're very young."
"That's the trouble; what'll be better, older? They'd sell their souls, older, to be back where we are. It's all here at our age; we got to have it now or there's nothing at all."
"We'll have it, Lida."
"Will we? . . . Why are we staying here?"
"I like it. I thought you would."
"I don't. It isn't exactly cheap, is it?" she demanded.
"Not exactly."
"Then why are we staying?"
"Where do you want to go?"
"Kamchatka, unless you know some place further."
"I see," said Jay, quietly.
"Where were you thinking of going from here?"
"Chicago."
"My God, why Chicago?"
"I was born there," said Jay, stirring with a slight defensiveness and feeling far more; so much, indeed, that it surprised him. "The family business is there."
"I greeted the grim and growling world from Santa Barbara," observed Lida, "but that doesn't impel me in the least toward the consecration of the rest of my young years to the spot. I don't even know where my business is. Its name is Anaconda. I can find it on the ticker; that's enough for me."
"J. A. Rountree and Son," said Jay, "used to mean grandfather and father; now it means father and me."
"Then you own some of it?"
"No; but I will if I work."
"In Chicago?"
"That's where they keep the bottom of the ladder."
"Why do you worry about the bottom?"
"I've got to begin getting in money."
"For whom?"
"You."
"My grieving God, d'you see me needing money?"
"I need it," corrected Jay. "I know you don't."
"Then neither do you. We have it; we've all we can want, don't you see? Spend it; spend it with me, Jay. God knows I need help with it. We'll spend it. What'll we do with work? What'll we do with more money? We have what we want; we can go where we want, live as we want, do as we want right now—now . . ."
For the moment, in the dark, he held her tight in his arms; for the moment, he had the sensation of being lured to leap with her. It increased, when he shut his eyes; it was like a sensation of height, like standing at the edge of the roof of a very tall building and feeling drawn to step over. How simple a step of escape from all complication, to step with her over the edge and drop down, down with her.
He opened his eyes and shook it off. She lost her moment; she knew it and arose.
From the window, she inquired, "How in heaven did you happen to wish us into this place?"
Not yet did Jay recollect. He had no mind for memory of a trifle, at the time so inconsequential and unconnected with his fate, as the chance which had caused him to recommend Tryston, in his father's office, to Philip Metten.
Mr. Phil Metten also might have forgotten, or at least have neglected, the recommendation, had he not been reminded of it by the newspaper which he opened at his breakfast table on Christmas morning. Upor the picture page (to which Mr. Metten turned after a glance atethe headlines had reassured him that no disaster immediately menacing to money rates had happened overnight) was the portrait of an unusually smart-looking society girl.
New York society girl, the paper designated her; and as such, Mr. Metten admired and, in the cause of his own womenfolk, coveted her smartness. Without having noticed the newspaper's guarantee of her, Mr. Metten himself would have seen that she was in real "society." He flattered himself that he could set apart at a glance on the Avenue, and almost as infallibly upon a picture page, the authentic from the spurious; the blue-blood society girl from the Follies girl or even the bankermarried ex-Follies girl, though she obtained from the same modiste an identical gown, chapeau and furs, and was driven, identically lounging, in a replica of the society girl's Rolls-Royce.
Now the subscript trailed into Mr. Meteen's eyes:
"whose runaway marriage to Justin A. ("Jay") Rountree of Chicago, yesterday was announced by her mother, Mrs. Imbrie Lytle. The young couple are honeymooning at Tryston, N. C."
Mr. Phil Metten stared and straightened, with a flush of pleased importance; he wiped his moustache and preened it with his fingers as he gazed across the little round breakfast table at his wife, Emma, and to his right and left where sat his daughters; Ruby, twenty, and Rosita, nineteen.
Before each member of the family, a fine, yellow half grapefruit, embellished by a rich, round cherry neatly set in the center, nested extravagantly in cracked ice; delicious coffee, in a silver pot with a long, narrow neck, steamed with aromatic aristocraticalness above a spirit flame; red carnations and little sprigs of holly (Christmas compliments of the hotel) bestrewed the white damask. Mr. Metten reviewed all this with appreciation which was increased by his consciousness that he had deliberately special-ordered eggs Mornay and also buckwheat cakes, spurning the set combinations of "club breakfasts" with their various choices for one dollar.
This breakfast would come, with tip, to eight dollars, although it was served in his own suite on which his room-rates really took care of overhead, independently. Sixteen dollars and sixty-six cents daily, he paid for this suite. (Thirty days into five hundred dollars the month.) Christmas dinner, already ordered, would cost twenty-five dollars. Forty-nine sixty-six, not counting supper, he would spend on living to-day; and he would not feel it. Phil Metten could spend it every day, and not feel it. The fact was still fresh enough to seem, at moments, incredible.
Phil was dressed for the day in a new, gray suit; Emma amply was clothed in a new, gold-brocaded kimono; their daughters, slim and dark, drew close to them breakfast robes, one of blue and the other of salmon satin.
"A friend of mine, mamma," Phil announced, catching his wife's eye, "is married."
"Uh?" said mamma. "Do you give him a gift?"
"He is a very nice boy, mamma. I give his papa business; four hundred and forty-five thousand, gross, he has from me this year. That is some business. Look who he married."
Proprietorily, he passed over the paper which Emma received in bediamonded hands and held close to her soft, near-sighted eyes. Her daughters arose and read, over her shoulders.
"She is certainly swell looking," approved mamma.
"She is in society, mamma."
"Do you know him, personal, papa?" asked Ruby, looking across at her father with her lovely, liquid eyes.
Personal association with such a young lady as Lida represented to Emma, and her daughters, a goal manifestly impossible of complete attainment yet perhaps to be approximated in the wonderful, unfolding world of papa's prosperity.
Phil himself scarcely knew what would open, and what remain sealed to him, when touched by the wand of his increasing influence in the world of business; daily he plummeted new potentialities of personal favor from his control of purchases of four hundred and forty-five thousand dollars to be bestowed at his desire.
"Certainly I know him, personal," boasted Phil. "I was taking him out to lunch with me. He is a golfer, too. But he had to go off and get married. I give his papa a business of four hundred and forty-five thousand in one year. We are very good friends."
"She looks very swell," repeated Emma, enviously.
"Papa," reproved Rosita, "mamma should not say swell."
Papa was persuading himself into a fancy too pleasant to permit expeditions into cavil. Fled from Phil's sensitiveness was all offense against Jay for having ignored the luncheon invitation. The boy had been running off to get married; Phil excused any one, under such conditions. He imagined that at the time of his talk with Jay, the boy had had Tryston definitely in mind as his destination for his honeymoon.
This endowed his recommendation of the place, to Phil, with an exceedingly flattering significance. Jay Rountree had, practically, invited Phil Metten and family to visit Tryston after Christmas when he, himself, would be there. The matter magnified itself most agreeably.
"Do you remember, mamma, the other day," asked Phil, "I say to you, 'Maybe after Christmas we go South?' I tell you why I said it. That day I was talking to this boy; and he says to me, 'Mr. Metten, I tell you where to go; you come to Tryston. It is the best golf course I know; and very nice people. Your wife she will like them . . . I know them. I see that you meet them. . . .'"
Phil inflated the incident recklessly, as he became aware after he was embarked in the relating. Three pair of soft, liquid eyes were admiringly upon him and he wanted to prove how intimate, with his swelling consequence in the business world, was his acquaintance with such a boy as Jay Rountree. Moreover, it was true that the boy had told him about Tryston. Never had Phil Metten thought of going to the place until Jay suggested it.
Before the waiter served the eggs Mornay, Phil Metten inextricably had involved himself in a family expedition to Tryston; and starting to-night. An advantage of residence in a hotel was that, after deciding to travel, you could be out and away at once.
"Any day," warned mamma, after a scrutiny of the news columns failed tq reveal assurance of the duration of the Rountree honeymoon, "they may be going."
Phil arose soberly, with the splendid ornament of the invitation suddenly stripped to recollection of the boy's bare, absentminded mention of Tryston. The fact of the four hundred and forty-five thousand dollar business remained, however, real. Phil Metten had done such a business with Rountree this year; next year, he had still more to give or withhold at his wish—if his brother had not already signed up with the Slengels.
Since Phil was the senior partner and the president of the company, his approval technically was required to bind so large a contract; but, in practice, Sam did the buying and his signature sufficed upon ordinary orders.
Recently, as Phil very well knew, Sam had been swinging toward the Slengels. He liked their goods and service, he said; their prices and terms met the Rountrees'. Sam "liked" the Slengels, and Phil had appreciated, without especial feelings of offense, some of the reasons for Sam's liking. He knew that Sam had been out with the Slengels at a party last night.
Hastily Phil retreated into his bedroom and nervously called the phone number of his brother's apartment, without response. When later attempts were devoid of results, Phil descended to the snowy boulevard and, by taxi, journeyed to Sam's apartment and found it deserted.
Sam's wife, as Diana had reported to Ellen upon the occasion of the procurement of the leopard coat, was in the South. A wife should not be at Palm Beach, Phil believed, nor anywhere away from her husband. Himself, he had a good and ever-present wife and two wonderful daughters; he was a good husband and father. Sam should be at Palm Beach, too, or Sophie should be here so Sam should not be out at parties with the Slengels. Suppose Sam last night had signed an order giving the business next year to Slengels; a fine figure Phil and his family would cut, coming to Tryston as personal friends of Jay Rountree.