Dangerous Business

Front matter

Copyright, 1927 By Edwin BalmerPublished October, 1927 Second printing October, 1927Printed in the U. S. A. by Vail-Ballou Press, Binghamton, N. Y.

Chapter 1

The stop awakened Jay and he lay, pleasantly drowsy, not remembering yesterday nor trying to recall it. Indeed, he vaguely was warned against any effort to deal further with that day. It had dealt with him. Here he was in a Pullman berth aboard the Century, westbound. Well enough—but behind the train was New York.

In New York was Lida; so there he was again, alone with her in her mother's apartment on Park Avenue where she had told him, calmly at first and then crying, what had happened to her.

He stood staring at her, with fury flaming in him against Nucast and because of his accountability for Nucast. Then he had Lida in his arms, clinging to him and crying. She was soft and little and warm, and so young and so frightened, not like herself at all. Nineteen only, she was. So, never minding the cost to himself, he had offered to take Nucast's place.

"I won't let you. I won't think of it!"

"You have to let me," he pleaded with her.

"I haven't."

Finally he asked her, direct: "Then what are you going to do?"

That halted her heart. The straight question scared her and also brought to him, bluntly, the alternative. Yet she stuck to her refusal; he stuck by his proffer. So the matter remained between them when, at last, he left her.

How was it this morning with her?

Jay turned upon his side and closed his eyes in endeavor to put it out of his mind. No use. The train started and he lifted the window blind, which disclosed to him a station roof dimly etched before a gray dawn and a platform aswirl with snow which made big, gleaming balls of the street lamps.

The city must be Elkhart, two hours east of Chicago. He drew down the blind, packed his pillow to his best position for sleeping and closed his eyes only to hear his name repeated in the aisle:

"Mr. Rountree . . . Mr. J. A. Rountree . . ."

The man, speaking the name, went past. He was the stenographer who yesterday afternoon had asked Jay, when making the same request of other passengers, to give his name and berth number in case telegrams were expected. Jay had replied that no messages would come for him; but it must be that one had been handed aboard at Elkhart.

He looked between the curtains and saw the man with telegrams halt at the end of the car. Jay did not call because the idea had seized him that it was from Lida; and if it was, he wanted a minute or so to think before taking it. The morning on the train was not like yesterday forenoon with her in his arms. He required a bit of preparation.

The man disappeared; but he would return after a while or could be hunted up. Likely, Jay thought, the telegram was not from Lida at all. Probably it was from his father. Most telegrams were. The words of a recent one ran in Jay's mind, as he let the curtains close. He re- packed his pillow and shut his eyes. No hurry about that telegram and no use thinking what it meant to him, if it was from Lida. He lay very still, not sleeping and he tried not to think.

"Jay!" Ben spoke to him from the aisle. "Jay; are y'wake?"

Ben was his nearest substitute for a brother. All his life he had known Ben; and through boarding school and college, they had been separated for but one year due to the fact that, when Ben went to Harvard, Jay had failed the entrance examinations and so had dropped back a class. But the next fall, Jay had got in and they had been room-mates at Cambridge for the last year and a half.

Until day before yesterday, there never had been an affair of any importance to Jay which Ben had not known.

Jay, pretending sleep, expected Ben to arouse him. Ben always was up early but he seldom was irritating because of this good habit. Qualities of regularity were inborn in him and Jay appreciated them and depended upon them.

"Y'wake?" whispered Ben again; and went away.

He had the telegram and Jay did not think of that. Ben supposed that it was a dispatch from Jay's father and he had seen many of the sort. In fact, he had seen a few which Jay never had read because Ben had thrown them away. There simply had been no use in letting Jay have some of them; and this, likely, was another.

Accordingly Ben took it to his own place in the next car, and after thinking it over, he pulled out the message, folded so that it displayed, first, a date line at New York at three o'clock that morning and the address to Jay on the fourth section of the 20th Century train, Elkhart, Indiana.

Ben jerked up and reddened before the message. He knew the girl who signed it. That was, if Lida was Lida Haige of Miss Willett's School. Probably she was, for Lida was not a usual name, and it was unlikely to be repeated even among Jay's surprising acquaintance.

Ben did not hold against Jay either the number or the intimacy of this acquaintance. Ben, plain enough himself, yet had sufficient personal experience with girls in this age of unblushing pursuit of man by woman to appreciate Jay's extraordinary position.

Ben replaced the message in the envelope and returned to Jay's berth, where again he looked in.

Jay had fallen asleep with the serenity in which he always dreamed. What went on in his dream world, he never knew when he awoke. Ben often had asked him; for so evidently it was pleasant. Nearly always Jay smiled when touched; and he did so now.

"Hello," he said, smiling up at Ben.

"Hello," said Ben. "You lazy hat, we're past Elkhart. Telegram came on for you."

"Oh, yes," said Jay. "Heard it. Was awake then."

"Why didn't you ask for it?" asked Ben, blaming him.

"Plenty of time. I guess it's just a welcome to our city from father."

"That's what I figured," said Ben, grateful for this help. "So I took it; told the man I was you. Then I read it for you," he added, defending himself with another offensive. "The devil of a thing to have sent you aboard a train. I've read it."

"Why shouldn't you read it?" asked Jay.

Ben tossed it down and dropped the curtains, leaving Jay with his message. As with Ben, the date line and address first appeared; next, Jay read:

"I had to tell them I guess I've got to ask you to go through with it sorry sorry Lida."

He held it steadily, without surprise, his eyes traveling from end to end of the double line. "Lyda," he repeated to himself, "Leeda," he tried the name with inflection used by others. He looked up at the date line: 3 a. m.

She had sent it fifteen hours after yesterday noon, when he had left her. What else had happened? When had she had to tell "them"? Just before 3 a. m., or had that been merely the hour when she decided to telegraph him upon the train?

He considered the address to him on the fourth section of the Century and recollected how she had asked him not only the train but the section on which he would travel. Yet he had not expected a telegram from her; not on the train. She had said she only wanted to know where he was.

She had wanted, also, to know where he would go from the train; and he had promised to tell her where he would be every day.

Every day for how long? Throughout his life? Did this mean that now he must tell her every day throughout his whole life? Perspiration dampened his hands in spite of the cold draft blowing in the screen of the opened window. "Lyda; Leeda," he tried her name again. Which way would he like it best—throughout his whole life?

"I guess I've got to ask you to go through with it."

He had not expected this on the train; nevertheless he had expected it, he told himself. What else could she do? He had made his offer, meaning it; he had begged her to take it. Well, she had.

He shut the window and threw up the blind so that he could watch the storm while he dressed. He liked the swirl and violence of the wind; it met his mood this morning. Quarter to eight. So the Century, in spite of the snow, was on time. People talked about it as they passed in the aisle. On time!

Jay cared nothing at all about arriving on time except, since his father was expecting him, he might borrow a bit of the virtue of promptness from the train which, in spite of the storm, was on time.

How little avail would be his bit of promptness this morning when he was to tell to his father what was to be believed of him hereafter. That was the meaning of going "through with it": to take Nucast's offense upon himself and tell no one, not even his father, the truth—nor Ben.

Jay went to the next car and, not finding Ben, passed to the diner where Ben was at a table with a Yale man and a couple of girls from Vassar who had been in New York before starting for home. At other tables were college people homeward bound for the Christmas vacation. In contrast to them, business men breakfasted by twos and fours. Some had their wives along.

Jay looked for a seat at a college table but none was vacant. He dropped into a chair back of Ben, wondering what Ben must be thinking of him—Ben, who knew him so well and knew a little about Lida and how well he had liked Lida, and who had read Lida's telegram.

Jay forced his attention to the talk at his own table. The man beside him, pouring syrup over corncakes, talked business to a husband and wife, opposite. Mrs. Diblon was the wife and the husband was "Diblon" to the man beside Jay who was, importantly, "Mr. Polk" to them both.

He was no more than thirty, rather younger than Diblon; but Diblon was playing up to him, constantly, and so was Mrs. Diblon, who was hardly older than the college girls. There was not enough difference in the ages of these three, compared to the college people, to account for the difference in the feeling of this table. It was because it was business here.

To say that, thought Jay as he ordered, was merely to make a name. What was it about business which made the air of this table so uneasy and unnatural and patronizing and patronized?

Diblon was a seller of something; and Mr. Polk purchased huge quantities of that same thing. This became plain; this was the trouble with the table. Mr. Polk held the fate—at least, the present prosperity—of the Diblons in his important hands; so they, husband and wife, yessed him, smiled, laughed, listened and agreed and praised to flatter him.

Last week, or even two days ago, Jay Rountree would never have bothered about this; or noticed it. It would have been nothing in his life; he would have ignored it to listen to the talk at the college tables and to cut in where no one bore with any one else or laughed or agreed with or praised any one, unless he liked to; and where no one, man or girl, was afraid of any one else. But Jay noticed it this morning; for to-day he was taking upon himself a consequence of business—a consequence of Nucast's having held the business fate of others in his important hands.

"Cornell?" said Diblon to Mr. Polk. "Yes; I went there. My wife went to Wells."

"I'm from Dartmouth," announced Mr. Polk; and Jay almost shivered. These had been college people and not so long ago had sat as these others at the next tables, laughing at what they liked, joshing and calling down each other and being called down, fairly and freely. By God, something got them quick in business; and Jay Rountree was to leave college, where no one controlled his fate, and enter . . . business. That was sure; that was another meaning of going "through with it."

"Lyda; Leeda," he whispered to himself. Which way would he say it throughout his life? He must tell her, throughout his life, where he would be every day? Why no; most days they would be together—throughout his life. No use thinking of that now. A mile nearer each minute, was his father; and he would be wise to prepare exactly what he was to say to him.

Not that there would be difficulty in making his father believe that he had acted badly. It was the sort of thing his father was ready to believe of him. No; convincing his father would not be the difficulty. It lay within himself; it was his own rebellion, his own recoil from that which he had promised, for Lida's sake, to take upon himself; and which his father would believe.

And Ellen Powell would learn. Suddenly he thought of her hearing it; and the shock to himself, as he imagined her, surprised him. And yet it was the first moment, since he had awakened, that he had thought of her at all.

Chapter 2

Ellen Powell, from the moment of her awakening, had thought almost constantly of him. Already she had learned enough, from a message which had reached the office late yesterday afternoon, to know that he was in trouble; of what sort, she had little idea; but the fact of it, together with his departure for home, had filled her heart.

No one can maintain even an overwhelming matter in mind, or in the heart, without any interludes. Passions have their pulses. So Ellen found intervals when, consciously, she considered nothing more personal to her than the storm.

When she looked through her window, it surprised her, as a storm in Chicago is likely to do. As late as eleven on the night before, when she had opened the window before going to bed, she had glanced over a street of fog and had heard from the lake the blasts of fog-horns rumbling deep and steady like an abysmal Chaliapin bass bearing the baritones and tenors of honking motor-cars. She awakened to the resound of ships' whistles but they eddied and diminished and then were drawn louder and shriller again. Wind; a gale, Ellen realized at once; and she felt the cold of it and the sift of the blowing snow.

Some one had covered her in bed with a comforter and tucked her snugly in—Diana. Ellen turned to see Di's auburn head in Di's soft, white pillow. Di liked silk against her skin and she hugged her silken comforter close to her cheek. Di slept, as always, curled up and clutching something and she slept very soundly. She looked even lovelier asleep than awake, for she never lost her clear rosiness. Her cheeks were like pink petals and her lips, relaxed, so red and soft; and her long, dark lashes lay in even ovals against her cheek.

The handful of silk, which clothed Di at evening, draped the back of a chair; Di's dress, green and very décolleté, a step-in, a pair of sheer stockings; underneath, a pair of satin slippers. These were familiar items to Ellen but not so the new leopard coat, with red fox collar, which depended from a hanger below the light-bracket beyond the bed. Whose coat was it? Ellen wondered. And had it been lent to Di or bestowed? Ellen gazed at Di, so innocently sleeping, and reconstructed a probable scene of the coat's acquirement:

Di, shivering her soft, white shoulders: "Weeping willows, who'd any time think it could turn this cold?" Next the procurement of the coat, made the more a deed of devotion because of the hour of the night. Its bestowal and Di's protest: "Why, you got this for me? Why, I couldn't dream of wearing it! Why, it's the most mysterious fur I ever saw. So soft and warm and wonderful! But you know I can't dream of keeping it on. You know perfectly well I can perfectly well wind a lap robe around me and be perfectly comfortable. . . ."

Well, here was the coat; here was Di. At what hour had she returned? At what hour had it turned cold? Ellen arose and closed the window, purposely testing with her pink toes the tiny drift of snow on the rug below the sill.

A ship's signal blast beat upon the wind, summoning her mind, momentarily, to the vessels on the lake; whence it flew to a train westbound through the snow—to Jay Rountree.

She looked about and seeing that Di slept, she slipped a hand into a drawer and to the back of it, where Di would never explore for handkerchiefs or compacts and where Ellen hid her treasure. She drew forth a little leather case protecting a picture clipped from a newspaper long ago. He had been arrested in a raid upon a dance club where several college boys and girls had been "picked up" along with couples of another sort. The boys had given false names but Jay had been recognized and, when this picture had been taken, he had known he was in for it and was trying to smile it away. Ellen knew how little wrong he had done and how much blame he got for it; and she loved this picture best of all.

In the opposite side of the case, she had another, also cut from a newspaper. This showed him in an eight-oar shell on the Charles. She loved that, too; for it revealed his strong, slender arms and straight, strong shoulders and his neck slightly astrain from the stroke.

Ellen bathed, while the bedroom was becoming warm, and returned without disturbing Di. Before the pictures on her dresser, she let down her hair, which fell in a bronze-chestnut shower. She had lovely hair, thick and lustrous. When it was down, it made her look younger; she looked like a girl of sixteen with her slim, white legs, her small breasts and smooth arms and large gray eyes. When she wore a dark skirt and a blouse with long sleeves and high in the neck, and when her hair was coiled about her head, she could look older than she was. She appeared at least twenty-five, she thought. She wanted to look older than twenty-three; not because it was actually her own age but because it was his. Only by seeming to be much older, and therefore not to be suspected of loving him, was her situation bearable.

She was secretary to his father, who was one of those men who dictate correspondence upon even the most highly personal and intimate matter. Ellen had been precipitated into his private affairs by the sudden illness of Miss Danforth, a much older woman. When Ellen was called into the president's office and seated herself, in Miss Danforth's place, she had known of Jay Rountree only that he existed, was at Harvard, and that he and his father were very different.

Immediately she was writing taunts and sarcasm at the boy which set her heart to thumping and her fingers to quivering, in his defense, as she hurried her scribbles to keep pace with the biting words. Could a man mean to say such things to his son?

Mr. Rountree entirely ignored her. She was not to him a girl of twenty-one to feel for this boy of her own age, whatever he was and whatever he had done. She was not to Mr. Rountree a new individual at all. He called her "Miss Danforth" when he gave her a direction.

She typed the letter with her mind on the boy who would read it, if it was to be sent. She could not yet believe that. But when she brought it to Mr. Rountree, he merely underscored the most sarcastic sentences and signed it. So she folded, sealed it and put it in the mail. That night, she lay awake for a long time wondering about it; about Jay Rountree.

Miss Danforth never returned to the office. Ellen continued to take Mr. Rountree's letters. She found thirty-five, instead of twenty-five, dollars in her Saturday envelope; but Mr. Rountree never made any comment upon the nature of her services. He continued to confide to her, with complete detachment, his personal matters.

He was a tall, angularly handsome man of fifty with a strong, spare body and black hair without a trace of gray; but his face was deeply lined with unhappiness. He was a widower, having lost his wife the year after Jay was born. A tradition of her loveliness and likeableness lingered in the office, kept alive by Clancy, the white-haired usher.

"Faith, she was the beauty! Little—like that! And with the look in the eyes and the laugh on the lips. Like the boy has! And she had the high heart of him! And him" (this him was Mr. Rountree) "he loved her like he hates him" (this him was Jay).

"Why does he?" demanded Ellen.

"Sure, he niver got over the death of her. He holds it agin the boy."

"How can he?" asked Ellen. "The boy was a baby."

"But by her bearing him, he lost her."

This explanation never satisfied Ellen; it was too purely sentimental and substanceless. Something far more adequate was required to account for what she witnessed in the deep lines of John Rountree's unhappiness and his stubborn antagonism to his son.

She was employed in January and it was not until after the boat races in June that she saw Jay. When first she heard his pleasant lively voice in the outer office, before he pushed open his father's door, she knew it was his.

He was tall and brown, tanned from long afternoons on the Charles River. She knew so much about him that at the moment she saw him she recognized how he had become so brown that his skin was darker than his hair. How white were his teeth as his lips parted in his pleasant half-apologetic let-bygones-be-bygones smile at his father. How blue and clear and lively were his eyes.

"Come in, Justin," said his father, with the same tone of challenge with which he dictated. Justin was Jay's given name, which only his father used. "You received my letter of the seventh?"

"I think so," replied Jay.

"You think so!"

"You don't expect me to remember letters by dates, do you, father? You don't suppose the date is the most impressive part of a letter from you? Now if you'd just mention a part of your opinion of me at the time . . ." He gazed at Ellen and asked, "You're E P, aren't you?"

"What," his father inquired.

Of course Ellen understood: he meant, was she the EP of the symbol JR/EP on the letters she typed?

"This is Miss Powell, Justin," said Mr. Rountree.

"Do you remember," Jay asked her, "was his favor to me of the seventh a sort of superspecial rip-snorter?"

"Rip-snorter!" ejaculated his father.

"If it was," said Jay, "I got it and sort of started to read it—but didn't finish it, father. You know," he continued agreeably and equally to Ellen and his father, "a letter like that is great to get before a sprint race. You can pull mighty well for a mile, mad; but you can't stay mad—or I can't—for twenty minutes. You get sort of let down in your feelings after the first spurt and you're no good. You see, I was rowing four miles that afternoon."

Ellen left the office, looking back as she closed the door upon the boy she loved; for she knew that, from that moment, she loved Jay Rountree.

It was time, she realized, for Di to be up; so she drew away Di's silken comforter and shook, gently, Di's soft, smooth shoulder. Di was healthily warm and slightly moist.

"Hmhm," sighed Di, contentedly.

"Nearly eight, Di."

"What's eight in my life?" inquired Di, grandly, and Ellen hesitated about completing the wakening of her. A few weeks past, when Di was still employed in the Rountree offices, Ellen would have had no doubt, but Di's duties, since she had been on the payroll of the Slengels, had developed variety as to hours, to say the very least.

"There's a blizzard this morning," announced Ellen. "If you're going to the office, you've got to start early."

"B-r-r-r," shivered Di, and sat up, blinking for her bearings. "Don't I know Mr. Blizzard? He sure whizzled me last night. B-r-r-r. I'd simply congealed on the street if Jello hadn't loaned me Leo. Isn't he sweet?"

Leo, obviously, was the leopard coat; Jello, by the magic of Di's nomenclature, emerged from the ranks of unknown persons likely to donate a Leo, as a male person of poundage to quiver, like a gelatin dessert, when agitated.

"Jello who?" inquired Ellen.

"Metten."

"Sam Metten?" asked Ellen and laughed, the two syllables set him off so perfectly. Sam Metten was the junior partner of Metten Brothers, who were customers of the Rountrees.

"Uhuh," said Di easily. "You ought've been there, representing Rountree."

"Where?"

"On Jello's lap; there was lots of room. He liked me."

"Who?"

"Jello; hasn't he shown it? Art Slengel threw the party. It was perfectly proper, Ellen. I was hardly alone with Jello even when I was on his lap. Mrs. Jello's south; so he had us up to his apartment toward the finish. That's where he located Leo for me. I certainly went big with Jello last night," observed Di with unaffected pride, and she curled more contentedly in bed.

"Not getting up?" persisted Ellen.

"Me?" asked Di, satisfied. "Why should I? Look in Leo's pocket—left."

Ellen explored and abstracted a thin, beautifully made cigarette case of gold banded with platinum in which tiny diamonds and sapphires were set.

"How do you like it?" demanded Di.

"Like?" asked Ellen.

"I mean, would you keep it? Of course, the 'nitials ain't—aren't—mine; but Jello gave it to me before he was sozzled much. He distinctly told me it was my personal present. He said that about Leo, too; but not so distinctly. I know, Ellen, I ought to give back Leo. I'll give back that too," Di made disposition of her difficulty, "but if he gives it to me again, I'll keep it—if Art says it's all right."

"Art?" repeated Ellen.

"Art Slengel."

"Oh."

Di procured her prospective property, opened it, obtained a cigarette, touched a hidden spring in the back which shot up a short blue flame from which she took a light. "Cute, I'd say," she commented and lay upon her pillow, reflectively smoking.

"Of course Art has really got to say," she considered, "what's best for business."

"For business!" objected Ellen.

"I'll say it's for business," observed Di, coolly. "Art slung that party, and had me at it, to get the Metten business for Slengels. Why d'you suppose I parked on Jello's knee? Art says we sure made a start with Sam Metten last night. How much business does he swing, Ellen? You know. Rountree has been getting most of it in our line. What do Mettens order from you a year? Four hundred thousand about?"

Ellen's mind flew to the files with which she dealt day by day and in which the order sheets of the Mettens composed the second most important account. It totaled, she knew, nearly half a million yearly. She nodded, unthinking, to Di's question.

"Slengels will clear ten per cent gross, anyway, if they get it," reckoned Di. "That's tearing off forty thousand in one night's entertainment, ain't it? Not one night, of course," she considered fairly. "There was preparation for last eve; and we aren't through. But if we rip away that Metten business from Rountree and if Jello keeps my case, when I give it back, Art Slengel sure can buy me another—if I don't want an automobile instead."

"What?" gasped Ellen.

Di inhaled and let the smoke out gently through her pretty, provocative nose. "Selling," she formulated sagely, "is sure woman's work, these days. Nights, I mean. Selling the big stuff, I mean; not the little stuff; and selling the big men. The bigger they are the more they do like a little personal attention.

"To think of the weeks and months I tossed away kidding the keys of a typewriter from 8.30 a. m. to 5.30 p. m.! What difference did I make at a typewriter? All the letters looked alike, except mine; they were worse. But I certainly made a lot of difference last night in Jello's lap."

Chapter 3

Ellen could not consider the bearing of this upon the business; she could not dwell upon the effect of it upon Di. Jay Rountree was coming home; and to think of Sam Metten's fat, flabby arms about Di was to be cast, by contrast, into Jay's arms. She was cast, by her mind, into his arms, where she had never been. Startlingly this morning she longed for physical touch with him; startlingly, she felt the restraints within her broken down. She would catch them up again; she must, of course. He was coming to the office within two hours; he was in trouble again. What sort of trouble? Because of a girl?