The Savage Gentleman (16 page)

Voorhees rushed forward and took Henry's hand. "By George, young man, your judgment is as sound as your father's is reputed to have been, and I shan't forget the meaning of this expression of your confidence in me. . . .

"This is Broadway," Marian said.

She seemed to be talking with an effort, and its cause lay, at least partly, in the fact that her grandfather had not spoken a word since they had left the Record Tower. She glanced at him and went on conscientiously:

"Street of fame and fortune, sin and sorrow. The Great White Way. The part we're going through now is Times Square. That triangular building is the Times Building. One of your competitors. Over there is the Hotel Astor. The skyscraper with the globe on top is the Paramount Building. Maybe tonight we'll take you to the movies. It's ten to one those two bleached-blond girls walking side by side over there do a sister act in vaudeville. And that man in the light tan trousers with the pink cheeks and the bright necktie--well--never mind about him. Don't sulk so, grandfather. What Henry said is perfectly true. It's as silly for you to expect him to launch all your ideas of reform in two hours as it is for him to pilot the
Graf Zeppelin
across the Atlantic."

Whitney did not even turn his head.

Henry glanced at the girl and then at the man and seemed almost to draw into himself physically as he did so. Finally he said in a deep and carefully measured voice, lifting it above traffic, and keeping his eyes straight ahead:

"You must admit that my moral obligation toward the world is debatable. You both would sympathize with my private reactions if you had spent as long a time as I have in so circumscribed a place. It is doubtless hard for you to realize that everyone of these myriad people on the street is a new experience, a new interest, a profound surprise to me. For the rest--I'm afraid I must continue to seem ungrateful for your hospitality, and overproud."

Elihu Whitney stirred angrily and thumped on the floor of the car with his foot.

"Bosh! I can remember when I was a young fellow. I used to talk that way myself.

Your stilted logic. Your damn impertinent self-assurance. I've thought of your home-coming as a great draft of fresh air but it's only a bad memory. Look at all these people, then, since you're so eager to see people. Their mouths are turned down. They are sick, dejected, weary, wretched, cheated. Their birthright has been stolen by profiteers--by men like Voorhees. You could be their champion but since you prefer to be a little brass Gulliver, living on your newspaper's dirty money, why, go ahead, young man. The world is certainly your oyster. That I can't dispute."

Again he stamped the floor.

Henry turned hotly and directly toward him.

"I'd rather not discuss my future any further. I was impressed by Voorhees. He is a competent man, I am sure."

Whitney made a disparaging sound in his throat.

"He's too damn competent. He frightened you, didn't he? That building and its elaborate contents frightened you, didn't they?"

Henry did not answer.

After some time Marian said:

"I now wish to point out, dismally, that we are arriving in Central Park. It has miles and miles of paved roads, many fine trees and flowers. A reservoir, bridle-paths and a zoo--"

Chapter Twelve:
THE WOMAN

MARIAN came into the library where her grandfather sat moodily unoccupied in a huge chair. "L h read"

. unc. eon IS. y.

"Where is Stone?"

"He's upstairs in his room. I've sent for him."

The aged lawyer stood up and walked back and forth across the room.

"He's a misfit! A social anomaly! A popinjay!"

"He's been here less than twenty-four hours you must remember."

"He's made his attitude clear. He's afraid."

"Of what?"

Elihu Whitney snorted. "Of everything."

Marian shook her head. "I don't think he's afraid of what you think he's afraid of.

Did you notice him as we drove around this morning? He was excited by the skyscrapers.

He listened very intelligently to everything that was told him down at the Stock Exchange. He enjoyed the tour of the Record Building. But what he was really looking at all those hours, whenever he, had any sort of a chance at all, was women--all women, old and young, beautiful and ugly. That's what he's thinking about. That's what concerns him.

Everything else he said was just a sort of irritated desire to postpone the responsibility of being Henry Stone until he had in some way made up the interesting half of his biological life."

Whitney looked at his granddaughter. "By George, I wonder if you're right?"

She nodded.

He tugged at his beard and said:

"In that case we should put his problems behind him as quickly as possible because I've got to see that boy do things in this world. With all the power he has--who's going to do it? You?"

He stepped up to his granddaughter and tilted her head back so that her shining hair fell away from her eyes.

"You'd like to, wouldn't you? But you'd have to remember that he's been trained by his father for thirty years and more to hate women, and to distrust them. He didn't act as though he had any emotions today, but I have a feeling that somewhere inside him there is a considerable fire burning, and it might not be the kind of fire that can be played with successfully. Then--consider yourself and him. It will certainly be a shock to him to find out that there is here and there a grain of truth in your checkered reputation. You're like all the girls of today. You look so angelic. And yet I imagine you could frighten a great many young men in a very few minutes--young men far more sophisticated than our

impeccable islander. Still--if you're right--we may find him married to the first little doxy who is kind to him. There is that to think of."

Marian raised her eyebrows. "Has it occurred to you that this is very strange counsel for a grandfather to give his granddaughter?"

The old man shrugged. "It has occurred to me that this advice is redundant and tardy and it has occurred to me that I, myself, have changed greatly since the seventies and eighties."

Henry opened the library door. His face was so impassive that discomfort was almost unreadable there.

A few moments later they were summoned to luncheon.

Elihu Whitney sipped his coffee.

Once again they had been spellbound while Henry talked about the island, although he discussed it with less enthusiasm than he had on the previous night and with some show of polite accommodation.

They were interrupted by a servant who handed a note to Marian. She read it arid passed it to her grandfather.

"It's a young man named Tom Collins. He wants to see you."

Whitney scanned the note.

"Collins? Collins? Tom Collins? Asinine name. Who is he?"

"He's a newspaper reporter," Marian answered. "He brought me home from Webster Hall one night after Billy Laforge, who had taken me there, had passed out. He's a nice boy and if he wants to talk to you, you'd better go and see him. He works for the
Record
."

Whitney left the dining-room and walked into the library.

A young man rose as he entered. He was tall and angular, bright-eyed and cheerful-voiced. He had a wide sensitive mouth, a long sharp nose. His clothes were faintly collegiate, his bearing quick and informal, like that of many of New York's innumerable clever young men.

In answer to Whitney's, "Well?" he said:

' I'm Tom Collins. I've been a reporter on the
Record
for the last three years. I resigned today because I was up here this morning with all the thugs who interviewed Henry Stone and I didn't write the story about Stone that Voorhees wanted me to write. It occurred to me, as I walked brooding and jobless along the city pavements an hour ago, that Stone might be able to use somebody like me. He's new here. I'm not. I can take a duchess to dinner at the Ritz, or chase a child murderer through the Mott Street dives. I'm a stenographer and a good two-fisted drinker, and I have an idea that I'd be useful in all those capacities. Besides, if Stone is going to manage his publications at all he'll find me a complete index of who's who and what's what, of office politics and political chicanery.

I liked his looks this morning and I didn't like the run-around his own papers were giving him. They're afraid of him. I also came up here, Mr. Whitney, to tell you privately that I know for a fact that if Stone interferes too much with Voorhees and Voorhees' gang there's nothing surer in the world than that he'll be taken for a ride. I mean just that. Put on the spot. Bumped off."

A smile came and went on the face of the old lawyer. He sat down and lighted a cigar.

"You seem to know a great deal, Mr.--"

"Collins. Tom Collins."

"Damned funny name. "

"It was my father’s worst habit."

Whitney nodded. "It might not be a bad idea. You'll have to see Stone himself, of course. He has taken his life pretty much into his own hands. He's difficult. By the way, just how am I to know that Voorhees didn't send you here?"

"Marian will give me a passport. We were like that about two hours once."

Collins grinned. "I shall remember them as the happiest two hours of my life. Seriously, though, Mr. Whitney, this bird Stone looks like the goods to me. He could be a big shot--

"

Whitney rose.

"Perhaps so. You tell him about it. I told him, and he seemed to prefer the idea of roller-skating, or throwing cards into a hilt. I'll send him in."

"Anyway put in a word for me. Understand I don't need this kind of job so much as I want it."

Henry Stone shook hands with the young New Yorker very formally and said:

"Mr. Whitney has just suggested that I hire you as a sort of personal assistant and general attaché. He has given you the very highest recommendation."

Tom Collins smiled cheerfully. "I told him what to say."

He sat down on the corner of a table and swung one leg while he talked.

"Listen, Stone, no matter what you do or where you go for the next weeks, and maybe months, you're going to be a target for the curiosity boys and girls. You could stampede any theater in town by appearing there tonight. If you will look at the afternoon papers, which will be floating through the streets in an hour or so, you'll see that some of them still hold to the idea that you're a sort of hairy ape, and others maintain that doomsday has been sounded for the wicked old Stone Publications by the return of the founder's son. Every paper has you in wrong anyway. It's my opinion that you're in a tough spot in every department of the game, and because I've knocked around this town long enough to know it too well, I thought I'd barge up here and offer my services."

Henry felt a considerable liking for this young man but, as in the case of Marian and her grandfather, he had no means of articulating his sentiment. He was unhappily compelled to adhere to the rigid social disciplines of his father.

"I shall be very glad to make a trial of your services, Mr. Collins, and I appreciate their proffer."

Collins hopped from the table and said:

"You better call me Tom and the first thing we better do is to go out to a speakeasy this afternoon and have a few hookers together so that we can get each other straight."

Marian, her father and her grandfather were once again waiting in the library. It was dark outside and in the vertical valleys winked the red and green jewels that guided traffic.

For the third time Marian spoke to the butler: "We'll wait just a little longer."

"That Collins probably got him drunk," Whitney said.

"I hope he did," Marian answered.

Sidney Whitney looked at his father and his daughter and chuckled:

"From what you say, we've caught a Tartar. Here he is. Nobody else in New York City would ring a doorbell so politely."

Henry walked into the room and spoke to them gravely. His eyes rested on each one as if he were seeing them in a new perspective. He made his apology for being late.

"I am extremely sorry. I had no idea it was nine o'clock until Tom--that is to say, Mr. Collins--reminded me of the hour."

"Perfectly all right, Henry," Whitney said. "We hoped you were getting drunk, but apparently not."

"No. My father was very insistent on that point."

Marian rose.

"Let's have dinner now, anyway. What have you and Mr. Collins been doing?

You seem more frigid than ever."

Henry waited until they were seated at the dining table, then he said:

"I have simply spent the whole afternoon listening to Mr. Collins. If a tenth of what he said is true--and he was able to demonstrate the truth of it--then these United States have fallen on such times as are intolerable--at least to me."

Elihu Whitney's sudden tide of delight was checked by Henry's next words.

"I have listened to accounts of scandals reaching even to the White House. I have listened to the whole story of that infamous man, Capone. And I was disgusted by every syllable of it. I have heard a great deal about the management and politics of our great cities and I have concluded that the less I traffic with this compound of greed and villainy the happier I shall most certainly be. Tomorrow I shall relieve you of my presence and take chambers somewhere in town until I find the most ideal way of avoiding and forgetting this scrofulous civilization."

He looked first at the older Whitney and then at Marian's father. His eyes were furious, haughty and disgusted.

"Gentlemen--I can scarcelyy see how that word can have meaning any more--if resistance to all this corruption and degradation is impossible, then I am not sure that I, myself, would choose to live in the midst of it all."

For a moment Henry was possessed by a frantic excitement. Then, suddenly, bitterly he flung down his napkin and stalked from the room.

"A damn quitter. God, how mawkish and self-righteous we must have been forty years ago, Sid."

Elihu Whitney almost shuddered.

Two hours later Henry stood looking over the light-studded silhouettes of Manhattan. He had left Tom Collins in almost the identical manner he had left the dinner table.