by Leroy Scott
CHAPTER XV
No prison could have been more agreeable--that is, no prison from whichMaggie was omitted--than this in which Larry was now confined. He hadthe run of the apartment; Dick Sherwood outfitted him liberally withclothing from his superabundance of the best; Judkins and the otherservants treated him as the member of the family which they had beeninformed he was; the lively Dick, with his puppy-like friendliness,asked never an uncomfortable question, and placed Larry almost on thefooting of a chum; and the whimsically smiling Miss Sherwood treatedLarry exactly as she might have treated any well-bred gentleman and inevery detail made good on her promise to give him a chance. In fact, inall his life Larry had never lived so well.
As for Miss Sherwood's aunt, a sister of Miss Sherwood's mother and afigure of pale, absent-minded dignity, she kept very much to her ownsitting-room. She was a recent convert to the younger English novelists,and was forced to her seclusion by the amazing fecundity with which theykept repopulating her reading-table. Larry she accepted with a hazy,preoccupied politeness, eager always to get back to the more substantialcharacters of her latest fiction.
Of course Miss Sherwood did not make of Larry a complete confidant. Forall her smiling, easy frankness, he knew that there were many doorsof her being which she never unlocked for him. What he saw was sointeresting that he could not help being interested about the rest. Ofcourse many details were open to him. She was an excellent sportswoman;a rare dancer; there were many men interested in her; she dined outalmost every other evening at some social affair blooming belatedly inMay (most of her friends were already settled in their country homes,and she was still in town only because her place on Long Island was indisorder due to a two months' delay in the completion of alterationscaused by labor difficulties); she had made a study of beetles; she hada tiny vivarium in the apartment and here she would sit studying herpets with an interest and patience not unlike that of old Fabre upon hisstony farm. Also, as Larry learned from her accounts, there was a daynursery on the East Side whose lack of a deficit was due to her.
All in all she was a healthy, normal, intelligent, unself-sacrificingwoman who belonged distinctly to her own day; who gave a great deal tolife, and who took a great deal from life.
Often Larry wished she would speak of Hunt. He was curious about Hunt,of whom he thought daily; and such talk might yield him informationabout the blustering, big-hearted painter who was gypsying it down atthe Duchess's. But as the days passed she never mentioned Hunt again;not even to ask where he was or what he was doing. She was adhering verystrictly to the remark she had made the night Larry came here: "I don'twant to know until he wants me to know." And so Hunt remained the sameincomplete picture to Larry; the painter was indubitably at home in suchsurroundings as these, and he was at home as a roistering, hard-workingvagabond at the Duchess's--but all the vast spaces between were utterlyblank, except for the sketchy remarks Hunt had made concerning himself.
Larry had guessed that hurt pride was the reason for Hunt's vanishmentfrom the world which had known him. But he knew hurt pride was not MissSherwood's motive for making no inquiries. Anger? No. Jealousy? No.Some insult offered her? No. Larry went through the category of ordinarymotives, of possible happenings; but he could find none which wouldreconcile her very keen and kindly feeling for Hunt with her abstinencefrom all inquiries.
From his first day in his sanctuary Larry spent long hours every dayover the accounts and documents Miss Sherwood had put in his hands. Theywere indeed a tangle. Originally the Sherwood estate had consistedof solid real-estate holdings. But now that Larry had before himthe records of holdings and of various dealings he learned that thecharacter of the Sherwood fortune had altered greatly. Miss Sherwood'sfather had neglected the care of this sober business in favor ofspeculative investment and even outright gambling in stocks; andDick, possessing this strain of his father, and lacking his father'sexperience, had and was speculating even more wildly.
Larry had followed the market since he had been in a broker's officealmost ten years earlier, so he knew what stock values had been andhad some idea of what they were now. The records, and some of the stockLarry found in the safe, recalled the reputation of the elder Sherwood.He had been known as a spirited, daring man who would buy anything orsell anything; he had been several times victimized by sharp traders,some of these out-and-out confidence men. Studying these old recordsLarry remembered that the elder Sherwood a dozen years before had losta hundred thousand in a mining deal which Old Jimmie Carlisle had helpedmanipulate.
Larry found hundreds and hundreds of thousands of stock in the safe thatwere just so much waste paper, and he found records of other hundreds ofthousands in safety deposit vaults that had no greater value. The realestate, the more solid and to the male Sherwoods the less interestingpart of the fortune, had long been in the care of agents; and sinceLarry was prohibited from going out and studying the condition and truevalue of these holdings, he had to depend upon the book valuations andthe agents' reports and letters. Upon the basis of these valuations heestimated that some holdings were returning a loss, some a bare one anda half per cent, and some running as high as fifteen per cent. Larryfound many complaints from tenants; some threatening letters from theBuilding Department for failure to make ordered alterations to complywith new building laws; and some rather perfunctory letters of adviceand recommendation from the agents themselves.
From Miss Sherwood Larry learned that the agents were old men, friendsof her father since youth; that they had both made comfortable fortuneswhich they had no incentive to increase. Larry judged that there was nodishonesty on the part of the agents, only laxity, and an easy adherenceto the methods of their earlier years when there had not been so muchcompetition nor so many building laws. All the same Larry judged thatthe real-estate holdings were in a bad way.
Larry liked the days and days of this work, although the farther he wentthe worse did the tangle seem. It was the kind of work for which hisfaculties fitted him, and this was his first chance to use hisfaculties upon large affairs in an honest way. Thus far his work was alldiagnostic; cure, construction, would not come until later--and perhapsMiss Sherwood would not trust him with such affairs. This investigation,this checking up, involved no risk on her part as she had franklytold him. The other would: it would mean at least partial control ofproperty, the handling of funds.
Miss Sherwood had many sessions with him; she was interested, but sheconfessed herself helpless in this compilation and diagnosis of somany facts and figures. Dick was prompt enough to report his stocktransactions, and he was eager enough to discuss the probablefluctuation of this or that stock; but when asked to go over what Larryhad done, he refused flatly and good-humoredly to "sit in any such slow,dead game."
"If my Solomon-headed sister is satisfied with what you're doing,Captain Nemo, that's good enough for me," he would say. "So forget thatstuff till I'm out of sight. Open up, Captain--what do you think copperis going to do?"
"I wish you could be put on an operating-table and have your speculativestreak knifed out of you, Dick. That oil stock you bought the otherday--why, a blind man could have seen it was wild-cat. And you werewiped out."
"Oh, the best of 'em get aboard a bad deal now and then."
"I know. But I've been tabulating all your deals to date, and on thetotal you're away behind. Better leave the market absolutely alone,Dick, and quit taking those big chances."
"You've got to take some big chances, Captain Nemo"--Dick had clung tothe title he had lightly conferred on Larry the morning he had come into apologize--"or else you'll never make any big winnings. Besides,I want a run for my money. Just getting money isn't enough. I want alittle pep in mine."
Larry saw that these talks on the unwisdom of speculation he was givingDick were not in themselves enough to affect a change in Dick. Merewords were colorless and negative; something positive would be required.
Larry hesitated before he ventured upon another matter he had longconsidered. "Excuse my saying
it, Dick. But a man who's trying to doas much in a business way as you are, particularly since it's plainspeculation, can't afford to go to after-theater shows three times aweek and to late suppers the other four nights. Two and three o'clock isno bedtime hour for a business man. And that boot-legged booze you drinkwhen you're out doesn't help you any. I know you think I'm talking likea fossilized grand-aunt--but all the same, it's the straight stuff I'mhanding you."
"Of course it's straight stuff--and you're perfectly all right, CaptainNemo." With a good-natured smile Dick clapped him on the shoulder. "ButI'm all right, too, and nothing and nobody is going to hurt me. Got tohave a little fun, haven't I? As for the booze, I'm merely making haywhile the sun shines. Soon there'll be no sun--I mean no booze."
Larry dropped the subject. In his old unprincipled, days his practicehad been much what he had suggested to Dick; as little drink aspossible, and as few late nights as possible. He had needed all his witsall the time. In this matter of hilarious late hours, as in the matterof speculation, Larry recognized words alone, however good, would havelittle effect upon the pleasure-loving, friendly, likable Dick. Anevent, some big experience, would be required to check him short andbring him to his senses.
While Larry was keeping at this grind something was happening to Larryof which he was not then conscious: something which was part of the bigdevelopment in him that was in time to lead him far. A confidence man isessentially a "sure-thing" gambler. It had been Larry's practice, beforethe law had tripped him up, to study every detail of an enterprise hewas planning to undertake, to know the psychology of the individualswith whom he was dealing, to eliminate every perceivable uncertainty:that was what had made almost all of his deals "sure things." Strip aclever knave of all intent or inclination for knavery, and leave all hisother qualities and practices intact and eager, and you have the makingsof a "sure-thing" business man:--a man who does not cheat others,and who takes precious care that his every move is sound andforward-looking. Aside from the moral element involved, the differencebetween the two is largely a difference in percentage: say thedifference between a thousand per cent profit and six per cent profit.The element of trying to play a "safe thing" still remains.
This transformation of character, under the stimulus of hard, steadywork upon a tangled thing which contained the germ of great constructivepossibilities for some one, was what was happening unconsciously toLarry.