“What did you come for, if it’s rotten sport?” asked Plank so simply that it took O’Hara a moment to realise he had been snubbed.
“I didn’t mean to be offensive,” he drawled.
“I suppose you can’t help it,” said Plank very gently; “some people can’t, you know.” And there was another silence, broken by Mortimer, whose entire hulk was tingling with a mixture of surprise and amusement over his protégé’s developing ability to take care of himself. “Did you say that Stephen Siward is in Westbury, Billy?”
“No; he’s in town,” replied Fleetwood. “I took his horses up to hunt with. He isn’t hunting, you know.”
“I didn’t know. Nobody ever sees him anywhere,” said Mortimer. “I guess his mother’s death cut him up.”
Fleetwood lifted his empty glass and gently shook the ice in it. “That, and — the other business — is enough to cut any man up, isn’t it?”
“You mean the action of the Lenox Club?” asked Plank seriously.
“Yes. He’s resigned from this club, too, I hear. Somebody told me that he has made a clean sweep of all his clubs. That’s foolish. A man may be an ass to join too many clubs but he’s always a fool to resign from any of ‘em. You ask the weatherwise what resigning from a club forecasts. It’s the first ominous sign in a young man’s career.”
“What’s the second sign?” asked O’Hara, with a yawn.
“Squadron talk; and you’re full of it,” retorted Fleetwood—”’I said to the major,’ and ‘The captain told the chief trumpeter’ — all that sort of thing — and those Porto Rico spurs of yours, and the ewe-necked glyptosaurus you block the bridle-path with every morning. You’re an awful nuisance, Tom, if anybody should ask me.”
Under cover of a rapid-fire exchange of pleasantries between Fleetwood and O’Hara, Plank turned to Mortimer, hesitating:
“I rather liked Siward when I met him at Shotover,” he ventured. “I’m very sorry he’s down and out.”
“He drinks,” shrugged Mortimer, diluting his mineral water with Irish whisky. “He can’t let it alone; he’s like all the Siwards. I could have told you that the first time I ever saw him. We all told him to cut it out, because he was sure to do some damfool thing if he didn’t. He’s done it, and his clubs have cut him out. It’s his own funeral.... Well, here’s to you!”
“Cut who out?” asked Fleetwood, ignoring O’Hara’s parting shot concerning the decadence of the Fleetwood stables and their owner.
“Stephen Siward. I always said that he was sure, sooner or later, to land in the family ditch. He has a right to, of course; the gutter is public property.”
“It’s a damned sad thing,” said Fleetwood slowly.
After a pause Plank said: “I think so, too.... I don’t know him very well.”
“You may know him better now,” said O’Hara insolently.
Plank reddened, and, after a moment: “I should be glad to, if he cares to know me.”
“Mortimer doesn’t care for him, but he’s an awfully good fellow, all the same,” said Fleetwood, turning to Plank; “he’s been an ass, but who hasn’t? I like him tremendously, and I feel very bad over the mess he made of it after that crazy dinner I gave in my rooms. What? You hadn’t heard of it? Why man, it’s the talk of the clubs.”
“I suppose that is why I haven’t heard,” said Plank simply; “my club-life is still in the future.”
“Oh!” said Fleetwood with an involuntary stare, surprised, a trifle uncomfortable, yet somehow liking Plank, and not understanding why.
“I’m not in anything, you see; I’m only up for the Patroons and the Lenox,” added Plank gravely.
“I see. Certainly. Er — hope you’ll make ‘em; hope to see you there soon. Er — I see by the papers you’ve been jollying the clergy, Mr. Plank. Awfully handsome of you, all that chapel business. I say: I’ve a cousin — er — young architect; Beaux Arts, and all that — just over. I’d awfully like to have him given a chance at that competition; invited to try, you see. I don’t suppose it could be managed, now—”
“Would you like to have me ask the bishops?” inquired Plank, naively shrewd. And the conversation became very cordial between the two, which Mortimer observed, keeping one ironical eye on Plank, while he continued a desultory discussion with O’Hara concerning a very private dinner which somebody told somebody that somebody had given to Quarrier and the Inter-County Electric people; which, if true, plainly indicated who was financing the Inter-County scheme, and why Amalgamated stock had tumbled again yesterday, and what might be looked for from the Algonquin Trust Company’s president.
“Amalgamated Electric doesn’t seem to like it a little bit,” said O’Hara. “Ferrall, Belwether, and Siward are in it up to their necks; and if Quarrier is really the god in the machine, and if he really is doing stunts with Amalgamated Electric, and is also mixing feet with the Inter-County crowd, why, he is virtually paralleling his own road; and why, in the name of common sense, is he doing that? He’ll kill it; that’s what he’ll do.”
“He can afford to kill it,” observed Mortimer, punching the electric button and making a significant gesture toward his empty glass as the servant entered; “a man like Quarrier can afford to kill anything.”
“Yes; but why kill Amalgamated Electric? Why not merge? Why, it’s a crazy thing to do, it’s a devil of a thing to do, to parallel your own line!” insisted O’Hara. “That is dirty work. People don’t do such things these days. Nobody tears up dollar bills for the pleasure of tearing.”
“Nobody knows what Quarrier will do,” muttered Mortimer, who had tried hard enough to find out when the first ominous rumours arose concerning Amalgamated, and the first fractional declines left the street speechless and stupefied.
O’Hara sat frowning, and fingering his glass. “As a matter of fact,” he said, “a little cold logic shows us that Quarrier isn’t in it at all. No sane man would ruin his own enterprise, when there is no need to. His people are openly supporting Amalgamated and hammering Inter-County; and, besides, there’s Ferrall in it, and Mrs. Ferrall is Quarrier’s cousin; and there’s Belwether in it, and Quarrier is engaged to marry Sylvia Landis, who is Belwether’s niece. It’s a scrap with Harrington’s crowd, and the wheels inside of wheels are like Chinese boxes. Who knows what it means? Only it’s plain that Amalgamated is safe, if Quarrier wants it to be. And unless he does he’s crazy.”
Mortimer puffed stolidly at his cigar until the smoke got into his eyes and inflamed them. He sat for a while, wiping his puffy eyelids with his handkerchief; then, squinting sideways at Plank, and seeing him still occupied with Fleetwood, turned bluntly on O’Hara:
“See here: what do you mean by being nasty to Plank?” he growled. “I’m backing him. Do you understand?”
“It is curious,” mused O’Hara coolly, “how much of a cad a fairly decent man can be when he’s out of temper!”
“You mean Plank, or me?” demanded Mortimer, darkening angrily.
“No; I mean myself. I’m not that way usually. I took him for a bounder, and he’s caught me with the goods on. I’ve been thinking that the men who bother with such questions are usually open to suspicion themselves. Watch me do the civil, now. I’m ashamed of myself.”
“Wait a moment. Will you be civil enough to do something for him at the Patroons? That will mean something.”
“Is he up? Yes, I will;” and, turning in his chair, he said to Plank: “Awfully sorry I acted like a bounder just now, after having accepted your hospitality at the Fells. I did mean to be offensive, and I’m sorry for that, too. Hope you’ll overlook it, and be friendly.”
Plank’s face took on the dark-red hue of embarrassment; he looked questioningly at Mortimer, whose visage remained non-committal, then directly at O’Hara.
“I should be very glad to be friends with you,” he said with an ingenuous dignity that surprised Mortimer. It was only the native simplicity of the man, veneered and polished by constant contact with Mrs. Mortimer, a
nd now showing to advantage in the grain. And it gratified Mortimer, because he saw that it was going to make many matters much easier for himself and his protégé.
The tall glasses were filled and drained again before they departed to the cold plunge and dressing-rooms above, whence presently they emerged in street garb to drive down town and lunch together at the Lenox Club, Plank as Fleetwood’s guest.
Mortimer, very heavy and inert after luncheon, wedged himself into a great stuffed arm-chair by the window, where he alternately nodded over his coffee and wheezed in his breathing, and leered out at Fifth Avenue from half-closed, puffy eyes. And there he was due to sit, sodden and replete, until the fashionable equipages began to flash past. He’d probably see his wife driving with Mrs. Ferrall or with Miss Caithness, or perhaps with some doddering caryatid of the social structure; and he’d sit there, leering with gummy eyes out of the club windows, while servants in silent processional replenished his glass from time to time, until in the early night the trim little shopgirls flocked out into the highways in gossiping, fluttering coveys, trotting away across the illuminated asphalt, north and south to their thousand dingy destinations. And after they had gone he would probably arouse himself to read the evening paper, or perhaps gossip with Major Belwether and other white-haired familiars, or perhaps doze until it was time to summon a cab and go home to dress.
That afternoon, however, having O’Hara and Fleetwood to give him countenance, he managed to arouse himself long enough to make Plank known personally to several of the governors of the club and to a dozen members, then left him to his fate. Whence, presently, Fleetwood and O’Hara extracted him — fate at that moment being personified by a garrulous old gentleman, one Peter Caithness, who divided with Major Belwether the distinction of being the club bore — and together they piloted him to the billiard room, where he beat them handily for a dollar a point at everything they suggested.
“You play almost as pretty a game as Stephen Siward used to play,” said O’Hara cordially. “You’ve something of his cue movement — something of his infernal facility and touch. Hasn’t he, Fleetwood?”
“I wish Siward were back here,” said Fleetwood thoughtfully, returning his cue to his own rack. “I wonder what he does with himself — where he keeps himself all the while? What the devil is there for a man to do, if he doesn’t do anything? He’s not going out anywhere since his mother’s death; he has no clubs to go to, I understand. What does he do — go to his office and come back, and sit in that shabby old brick house all day and blink at the bum portraits of his bum and distinguished ancestors? Do you know what he does with himself?” to O’Hara.
“I don’t even know where he lives,” observed O’Hara, resuming his coat. “He’s given up his rooms, I understand.”
“What? Don’t know the old Siward house?”
“Oh! does he live there now? Of course; I forgot about his mother. He had apartments last year, you remember. He gave dinners — corkers they were. I went to one — like that last one you gave.”
“I wish I’d never given it,” said Fleetwood gloomily. “If I hadn’t, he’d be a member here still.... What do you suppose induced him to take that little gin-drinking cat to the Patroons? Why, man, it wasn’t even an undergraduate’s trick! it was the act of a lunatic.”
For a while they talked of Siward, and of his unfortunate story and the pity of it; and when the two men ceased,
“Do you know,” said Plank mildly, “I don’t believe he ever did it.”
O’Hara looked up surprised, then shrugged. “Unfortunately he doesn’t deny it, you see.”
“I heard,” said Fleetwood, lighting a cigarette, “that he did deny it; that he said, no matter what his condition was, he couldn’t have done it. If he had been sober, the governors would have been bound to take his word of honour. But he couldn’t give that, you see. And after they pointed out to him that he had been in no condition to know exactly what he did do, he shut up.... And they dropped him; and he’s falling yet.”
“I don’t believe that sort of a man ever would do that sort of thing,” repeated Plank obstinately, his Delft-blue eyes partly closing, so that all the Dutch shrewdness and stubbornness in his face disturbed its highly coloured placidity. And he walked away toward the wash-room to cleanse his ponderous pink hands of chalk-dust.
“That’s what’s the matter with Plank,” observed O’Hara to Fleetwood as Plank disappeared. “It isn’t that he’s a bounder; but he doesn’t know things; he doesn’t know enough, for instance, to wait until he’s a member of a club before he criticises the judgment of its governors. Yet you can’t help tolerating the fellow. I think I’ll write a letter for him, or put down my name. What do you think?”
“It would be all right,” said Fleetwood. “He’ll need all the support he can get, with Leroy Mortimer as his sponsor.... Wasn’t Mortimer rather nasty about Siward though, in his rôle of the alcoholic prophet? Whew!”
“Siward never had any use for Mortimer,” observed O’Hara.
“I’ll bet you never heard him say so,” returned Fleetwood. “You know Stephen Siward’s way; he never said anything unpleasant about any man. I wish I didn’t either, but I do. So do you. So do most men.... Lord! I wish Siward were back here. He was a good deal of a man, after all, Tom.”
They were unconsciously using the past tense in discussing Siward, as though he were dead, either physically or socially.
“In one way he was always a singularly decent man,” mused O’Hara, walking toward the great marble vestibule and buttoning his overcoat.
“How exactly do you mean?”
“Oh, about women.”
“I believe it, too. If he did take that Vyse girl into the Patroons, it was his limit with her — and, I believe his limit with any woman. He was absurdly decent that way; he was indeed. And now look at the reputation he has! Isn’t it funny? isn’t it, now?”
“What sort of an effect do you suppose all this business is going to have on Siward?”
“It’s had one effect already,” replied Fleetwood, as Plank came up, ready for the street. “Ferrall says he looks sick, and Belwether says he’s going to the devil; but that’s the sort of thing the major is likely to say. By the way, wasn’t there something between that pretty Landis girl and Siward? Somebody — some damned gossiping somebody — talked about it somewhere, recently.”
“I don’t believe that, either,” said Plank, in his heavy, measured, passionless voice, as they descended the steps of the white portico and looked around for a cab.
“As for me, I’ve got to hustle,” observed O’Hara, glancing at his watch. “I’m due to shine at a function about five. Are you coming up-town either of you fellows? I’ll give you a lift as far as Seventy-second Street, Plank.”
“Tell you what we’ll do,” said Fleetwood, impulsively, turning to Plank: “We’ll drive down town, you and I, and we’ll look up poor old Siward! Shall we? He’s probably all alone in that God-forsaken red brick family tomb! Shall we? How about it, Plank?”
O’Hara turned impatiently on his heel with a gesture of adieu, climbed into his electric hansom, and went buzzing away up the avenue.
“I’d like to, but I don’t think I know Mr. Siward well enough to do that,” said Plank diffidently. He hesitated, colouring up. “He might misunderstand my going with you — as a liberty — which perhaps I might not have ventured on had he been less — less unfortunate.”
Again Fleetwood warmed toward the ruddy, ponderous young man beside him. “See here,” he said, “you are going as a friend of mine — if you care to look at it that way.”
“Thank you,” said Plank; “I should be very glad to go in that way.”
The Siward house was old only in the comparative Manhattan meaning of the word; for in New York nothing is really very old, except the faces of the young men.
Decades ago it had been considered a big house, and it was still so spoken of — a solid, dingy, red brick structure, cubical in proportions, su
rmounted by heavy chimneys, the depth of its sunken windows hinting of the thickness of wall and foundation. Window-curtains of obsolete pattern, all alike, and all drawn, masked the blank panes. Three massive wistaria-vines, the gnarled stems as thick as tree-trunks, crawled upward to the roof, dividing the façade equally, and furnishing some relief to its flatness, otherwise unbroken except by the deep reveals of window and door. Two huge and unsymmetrical catalpa trees stood sentinels before it, dividing curb from asphalt; and from the centres of the shrivelled, brown grass-plots flanking the stoop under the basement windows two aged Rose-of-Sharon trees bristled naked to the height of the white marble capitals of the flaking pillars supporting the stained portico.
An old New York house, in the New York sense. Old in another sense, too, where in a rapid land Time outstrips itself, painting, with the antiquity of centuries, the stone and mortar which were new scarce ten years since.
“Nice old family mausoleum,” commented Fleetwood, descending from the hansom, followed by Plank. The latter instinctively mounted the stoop on tiptoe, treading gingerly as one who ventures into precincts unknown but long respected; and as Fleetwood pulled the old-fashioned bell, Plank stole a glance over the façade, where wisps of straw trailed from sparrows’ nests, undisturbed, wedged between plinth and pillar; where, behind the lace pane-screens, shadowy edges of heavy curtains framed the obscurity; where the paint had blistered and peeled from the iron railings, and the marble pillars of the portico glimmered, scarred by frosts of winters long forgotten.
“Cheerful monument,” repeated Fleetwood with a sarcastic nod. Then the door was opened by a very old man wearing the black “swallow-tail” clothes and choker of an old-time butler, spotless, quite immaculate, but cut after a fashion no young man remembers.
“Good evening,” said Fleetwood, entering, followed on tiptoe by Plank.
“Good evening, sir.”... A pause; and in the unsteady voice of age: “Mr. Fleetwood, sir.... Mr. — .” A bow, and the dim eyes peering up at Plank, who stood fumbling for his card-case.
Works of Robert W Chambers Page 299