Saratoga Trunk (32 page)

“Hold on there! Hold on! Just because Clio there has got me saddle broke don’t get the idea that you can gentle me. If Clio is hankering for social success and a brilliant marriage, and you’re the one to rope and tie the bridegroom, why here’s wishing you luck. But you got me wrong, sister. When it comes to riding my own range, why, I’m the one that wears the pants. That matter, Clio, I’d say— only I don’t want to get mixed up in any woman business—I’d say you’ve gone this far alone, I’d go the rest of the way and play the game out.”

Slowly, as though emerging from a spell, Clio turned from the window. “You would?” she said, uncertainly. “You would?”

“Sure would. You’re smarter than any woman in this town. Go it alone. . . . Sa-a-ay, that coffee sure smells good. Kaka! How about rustling me a cup!”

Clio Dulaine walked over to Mrs. Bellop. She held out her hand. “Thank you so much, Mrs. Bellop. You have been so kind. Don’t think me ungrateful. I like you. But he is right.”

Mrs. Bellop looked from one to the other, she laughed a little discomfited laugh. “Well, you can’t say I didn’t warn you.”

“You are wonderful. So honest. And really good. Here. Please take this.” To her own surprise Clio took a ring from her finger, pressed it into Mrs. Bellop’s hand. “You are the only woman who has shown me kindness.”

“Women,” murmured Mrs. Bellop as she turned the ring this way and that to catch the light, “are a hundred years behind the rimes. They don’t know their own strength. Some day they’ll catch up with themselves and then this will be a different world. Look here, Clio, I’m going to stay behind you anyway, not being bossy but just in case. And just to prove to you I like you I’m going to keep your ring. Giving it to me is the first foolish thing you’ve done. Hang onto your jewelry, I always say. It’s a woman’s best friend.”

XV

Suddenly Clio Dulaine felt herself curiously alone in Saratoga; not alone
merely, but neglected. She had arrived in an impasse. She knew she must break through this or devise another way. Her flouncings, her paradings, her dramatic entrances, her outrageous flouting of the conventions had begun to pall on her audience. Her sure dramatic sense warned her of this. At this crucial moment her two swains had grown distrait and even neglectful.

“Business,” Clint would say, when she reproached him. “I’d like to go along with you, honey, but I’ve got a little matter of business to tend to. Now, Bart, he’d come a-running if he knew you wanted to drive out. Why’n’t you send Cupide over with a note?”

“How dare you!” she would say, melodramatically.

Innocendy, almost absently, he would stare at her. “What’s up? Have I said something? I didn’t go to.”

“How dare you say to me that you’re busy! And suggest that I go about begging other men to take me here and there! Perhaps the kind of women you have—”

“Hold on! I didn’t say anything about other men. I said Bart. He’s the man you’re fixing to marry.”

“Oh, so that’s it. You’re jealous.”

“Oh. Yes. Uh-huh. Leastways, I would be if I had time. But I am busier than a sheep dog. Look, I’m seeing Van Steed right soon. Shall I tell him?”

“Get out! Get out of my sight!”

There was about him nothing of the chagrined suitor. On the contrary, he seemed elated and thoroughly the male pleased with himself. This in itself was sufficiently annoying to the high-handed Clio. But now, to her bewilderment, the dmorous Van Steed was sometimes guilty of similar conduct. Even in her company he actually seemed unconscious of her presence. It wasn’t a lessening of his devotion, she felt, nor of Clint’s. It was an intangible barrier that had come up between her and them. Her small personal plans seemed insignificant. From first place she sensed herself relegated to second position. Awaiting a reply to a question, she could find Van Steed’s face blank. A silence. Then, “Oh, I beg your pardon! What was that you said? I was thinking—” he would stammer.

Baffled, Clio turned waspishly on Kakaracou and Cupidon. But in Cupide she encountered the same maddening preoccupation with something beyond her ken. Do this, do that, she would snap at him. But his goggle gaze would be fixed dreamily on some inner vision. “Do you hear me, you
suppôt!”

“Did you say something, Ma’m’selle?”

Kaka, brushing the girl’s hair and seeing the wrathful face in the mirror, attempted to offer her soothing solution.

“They cooking up something. Don’t you fuss your head. They doing business.”

“I don’t care what they’re doing. I’m bored with it here, anyway. Silly place, third-rate, provincial. Mama would have loathed it. I think I shall leave next week.”

At this Cupide set up a howl of protest. “No! I won’t go! I won’t go!”

Clio surveyed the dwarf through narrowed lids. “Oh, you won’t go, is that what I hear!” Then, in a surprising shout that topped his own, “Why not? Why not,
petit drôle?
Quick! Answer me!”

“Business,” said Cupide. “I have business.”

With practiced ease he dodged as she reached swiftly for the hairbrush and let fly at him.

The truth of it was that he had. Van Steed had business. Maroon had business. Cupidon, blessed by nature with keyhole height, had made their business his.

Even when they had no engagement, Clint had always rushed to her side at sight of her, whether in the garden, at the springs, in the lobby, or the piazza. Van Steed’s method had been less forthright, yet he too had seemed always somehow to be standing near, even if his mother’s hand clutched his arm as she leaned on him not only for support but to stay him. Yet now she could pass the two men as they stood in the lobby talking together earnestly, seriously, and her bewilderment mounted to fury as they bowed and held their hats aloft with the kind of exaggeration which comes of absentminded courtesy. They were thinking of something other than herself; they were so deeply interested in what they were saying that she, Clio Dulaine, was actually only another woman passing. She listened sharply as she undulated by. The Texan’s drawling voice:

“The government ought to get back of the railroads. Now, take Texas. It’s a young state run by young men. Neither I nor my father before me cared a hoot for public office but railroads—”

“In arriving at the cost of production less depreciation, why, the local conditions such as service required and maintenance—”

Then for three days he was gone. He had announced his going, casually, the night before his departure. A shade too casually.

“Almost forgot to tell you, honey, I’m taking a little trip on business.” This was the new Clint Maroon, in the saddle, and, as he phrased it, rarin’ to go.

“Where? Where are you going?”

“Oh, Albany. Albany and New York.”

“What for? You used to tell me everything. What are you keeping from me?”

“I’m showing your little friend Van Steed that he can’t go on trying to make agreements with these pirates. Next thing he knows they’re going to get more than that little trunk-line railroad away from him. Maybe his pa left him millions, but hanging on to ‘em is something different.”

“Oh, really! If you know so much about making millions why don’t you tell him this?”

“I did. I said, look, Van Steed, the way you’re going I reckon you’ll lose your piece of railroad and what goes with it. What’s it mean to you, losing that hundred miles of coal haul? In figures, I mean. You know how he is, him and his kind. Afraid to give you a straight answer to a straight question. Well, what do I know about railroads and so on? Nothing! I said, will you give me a share in the road if I save it for you? Save it how? he said. Fighting it out, I told him, the way we used to fight the sheep men to save the cattle range.”

Clio stared, aghast. “But Clint, you can’t do that! This isn’t the Wild West.”

“Worse. It’s the wild East. They’ve got the shareholdings deadlocked down there now. The board of directors are divided, half the Erie crowd, half the Morgan-Van Steed crowd. They actually wrestle for the stock books. I mean wrestle. Van Steed, he’s about ready to give up; he’s not much of a scrapper. But this J. P. Morgan, he’s the boy for my money. I never thought I’d be in a railroad fight, but say, honey, this last week I’ve had more fun than any time since I came up North from Texas. And they’re paying me for it. A fistful of shares if

She grasped his arm, she shook him as though to bring him to his senses. “This is a dangerous business. What do they care for you! What are you doing down there! What is it you have been doing this week away from me? Tell me!”

“Well, I got a gang together from here and around. Went away to New York for some of ‘em—there’s quite a bunch of Texas boys around, you’d be surprised. Hard times. Hard times. Look at the wealth in the country, and hundreds and thousands begging in the streets. Look at Frick, a millionaire at thirty! Look at Carnegie down at the Thompson Steel Works, getting a hundred and thirty percent for his money. Pirates. You can’t deal with ‘em. You have to fight ‘em, barehanded. That’s how I put it to Morgan, and I’ll say this for him, he was with me. There’s been scraps in every railroad station along the line, but last week—time I was away there—we got wind of the plan they had to take over the office headquarters at Albany by force. Sent up a bunch of brass-knuckle boys and mavericks, said they were deputies, with fake badges pinned on ‘em. Well, say, honey, force is what they got. I had the boys rounded up, so when Jim Briscoe and his gang of thugs stepped through the door expecting to find nobody but old Gid Fish with his eyeshade on and sleeve-protectors, why, Briscoe he yelled, ‘Rush in, boys, and take possession! Throw him out! Grab the books!’ That’s where we came in, yelling like Comanches and threw the whole crowd, Briscoe first of all, right down the stairs of the Tuscarora office. You never saw such a boiling or arms and legs there at the foot of the stairs. Nobody hurt serious—couple arms and legs and so on—but we were laughing so, seeing their faces, we like to fell down the stairs ourselves, on top of’em.”

Clio clasped her hands to her head, as nearly distraught as he had ever seen her. “I won’t listen. I won’t listen!”

“Why, Clio, honey, you asked me what I’d been up to, didn’t you?”

“But it’s savage! It’s disgusting!”

“Y-e-e-es,” he drawled. “Perfectly disgusting.” His tone, so quiet, so even, was venomous. “Almost as disgusting as what they did to my folks. A real delicate litde flower like you, brought up in Paris and so on, you wouldn’t understand. No! Van Steed, he’s more your kind. Ladylike, he wouldn’t hurt a fly. Pay somebody, though, to swat the fly for him.”

“Chéri,
we didn’t come here to this Saratoga to fight railroads.”

“Oh, yes we did.”

“To fight them with tricks, yes, and to get some of their millions if we could. But not to fight with fists and boots, like savages. I am frightened. I am frightened—for you.”

But the surly mood was still on him. There had been a time when he would have melted at this evidence of her solicitude, but now he said sneeringly, “Say, that’s fine! I’ve got you to look after me, and little Bart, he’s got his mama, why, no boogy man can get us that-away.”

Clio had battles of her own in plenty by now, but these brutal tales of Clint Maroon’s adventures in railroading filled her with apprehension. Bewildered, she brought up the subject as casually as possible when next she saw Van Steed. It was interesting to see his struggles, buffeted as he now was between the filial habit of years and the powerful new emotion which this beautiful and unconventional woman had aroused in him. Inexperienced in love and wary of its unexplored dangers, he tried rather clumsily to be in her company when the maternal eye was not upon him.

“Uh—Mrs. De Chanfret—I—I hear you have a charming apartment in the cottages with your own beautiful—uh—bric-a-brac and ornaments and—uh—so forth. I never have had the privilege of seeing you surrounded by your—uh—own personal—that is—”

“Who told you this?”

“Why, Mrs. Bellop, I believe. That is, Mrs. Bellop.”

“What an amazing woman! What energy! She has been most friendly to me.”

“Would you—could I come to call some—some afternoon, perhaps, and have—that is—tea? You never have invited me, you know.” He felt very audacious.

“Tea! I never could understand tea—except as medicine, of course. At night, when I am weary, Kaka brews me a tisane to soothe me. But tea as tea!”

“Oh, well, I just meant—you know—tea as a—a—symbol—I mean—”

“Dear Mr. Van Steed, that is almost as if you meant to sound improper!”

“Oh, no, Mrs. De Chanfret. I assure you!” It was too easy to bring the deeper pink into the already roseate cheeks.

“I was only teasing. Do come—tomorrow afternoon? And perhaps your mama would like to come, too.” With innocent cordiality.

“I’m afraid not. She rarely goes anywhere; she isn’t well, you know. Rheumatism—her age—difficult.”

“So I have heard. It is difficult to believe. She is so very—alert.” Then the direct attack. “Your mama does not like me.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t say that, Mrs. De Chanfret.”

“Oh, it’s quite natural. There are reasons, natural and unnatural. She wants to keep you by her—wait! I don’t mean to offend you. She herself probably would be the first to deny it. She fears—and hates— any young and attractive woman who may snatch you from her. Particularly one like myself who is not of her little world-—who is not
chacalata.”

“Not what? What’s that mean?”

“Oh, that’s a word, a foreign sort of word, it means conventional—
comme il faut.
It’s a word out of my childhood. Well, she has nothing to fear from me, dear Mr. Van Steed. My heart lies buried in my beloved France.” She saw the stubborn look come into his face. I’ve almost got him, she thought, exultandy. And even as his conviction came to her she perversely put it away from her. How silly he looks simpering at me like that! “Tomorrow afternoon, then. And do bring your dear mama if she cares to come.”

He came alone, as she had known he would. She had set her stage. The heritage of Great-Grand’mère Bonnevie, the actress, always welled strong in her at times such as this. She wore simple white with the litde girlish strand of pearls as ornament; she looked young, cool, virginal. Bart Van Steed, staring at her in the dim seclusion of the sitting room, blurted his thoughts as always.