"Yes."
"Fan, we"re a couple of weaklings, both of us, to have sprung from a mother like ours. I don"t know which is worse; my selfishness, or yours." Then, at the hurt that showed in her face, he was all contrition. "Forgive me, Sis. You"ve been so wonderful to me, and to Mizzi, and to all of us. I"m a good-for-nothing fiddler, that"s all.
You"re the strong one."
Fenger had telephoned her on Sat.u.r.day. He and his wife were at their place in the country. f.a.n.n.y was to take the train out there Sunday morning. She looked forward to it with a certain relief. The weather had turned unseasonably warm, as Chicago Octobers sometimes do. Up to the last moment she had tried to shake Theodore"s determination to take Mizzi and Otti with him. But he was stubborn.
"I"ve got to have her," he said.
Michael Fenger"s voice over the telephone had been as vibrant with suppressed excitement as Michael Fenger"s dry, hard tones could be.
"f.a.n.n.y, it"s done--finished," he said. "We had a meeting to-day. This is my last month with Haynes-Cooper."
"But you can"t mean it. Why, you ARE Haynes-Cooper. How can they let you go?"
"I can"t tell you now. We"ll go over it all to-morrow. I"ve new plans.
They"ve bought me out. D"you see? At a price that--well, I thought I"d got used to juggling millions at Haynes-Cooper. But this surprised even me. Will you come? Early? Take the eight-ten."
"That"s too early. I"ll get the ten."
The mid-October country was a lovely thing. f.a.n.n.y, with the strain of Theodore"s debut and leave-taking behind her, and the prospect of a high-tension business talk with Fenger ahead, drank in the beauty of the wayside woods gratefully.
Fenger met her at the station. She had never seen him so boyish, so exuberant. He almost pranced.
"Hop in," he said. He had driven down in a runabout. "Brother get off all right? Gad! He CAN play. And you"ve made the whole thing possible."
He turned to look at her. "You"re a wonder."
"In your present frame of mind and state of being," laughed f.a.n.n.y, "you"d consider any one a wonder. You"re so pleased with yourself you"re fairly gummy."
Fenger laughed softly and sped the car on. They turned in at the gate.
There was scarlet salvia, now, to take the place of the red geraniums.
The gay awnings, too, were gone.
"This is our last week," Fenger explained. "It"s too cold out here for Katherine. We"re moving into town to-morrow. We"re more or less camping out here, with only the j.a.p to take care of us."
"Don"t apologize, please. I"m grateful just to be here, after the week I"ve had. Let"s have the news now."
"We"ll have lunch first. I"m afraid you"ll have to excuse Katherine. She probably won"t be down for lunch." The j.a.p had spread the luncheon table on the veranda, but a brisk lake breeze had sprung up, and he was busy now transferring his table from the porch to the dining room. "Would you have believed it," said Fenger, "when you left town? Good old lake. Mrs.
Fenger coming down?" to the man.
The j.a.p shook his head. "Nossa."
Their talk at luncheon was all about Theodore and his future. Fenger said that what Theodore needed was a firm and guiding hand. "A sort of combination manager and slave-driver. An ambitious and intelligent wife would do it. That"s what we all need. A woman to work for, and to make us work."
f.a.n.n.y smiled. "Mizzi will have to be woman enough, I"m afraid. Poor Ted."
They rose. "Now for the talk," said Fenger. But the telephone had sounded shrilly a moment before, and the omnipresent little j.a.p summoned Fenger. He was back in a minute, frowning. "It"s Haynes. I"m sorry. I"m afraid it"ll take a half hour of telephoning. Don"t you want to take a cat-nap? Or a stroll down to the lake?"
"Don"t bother about me. I"ll probably take a run outdoors."
"Be back in half an hour."
But when she returned he was still at the telephone. She got a book and stretched luxuriously among the cushions of one of the great lounging chairs, and fell asleep. When she awoke Fenger was seated opposite her.
He was not reading. He was not smoking. He evidently had been sitting there, looking at her.
"Oh, gracious! Mouth open?"
"No."
f.a.n.n.y fought down an impulse to look as cross as she felt. "What time?
Why didn"t you wake me?" The house was very quiet. She patted her hair deftly, straightened her collar. "Where"s everybody? Isn"t Mrs. Fenger down yet?"
"No. Don"t you want to hear about my plans now?"
"Of course I do. That"s what I came for. I don"t see why you didn"t tell me hours ago. You"re as slow in action as a Chinese play. Out with it."
Fenger got up and began to pace the floor, not excitedly, but with an air of repression. He looked very powerful and compelling, there in the low-ceilinged, luxurious room. "I"ll make it brief. We met yesterday in Haynes"s office. Of course we had discussed the thing before. You know that. Haynes knew that I"d never run the plant under the new conditions.
Why, it would kill every efficiency rule I"ve ever made. Here I had trimmed that enormous plant down to fighting weight. There wasn"t a useless inch or ounce about the whole enormous billionaire bulk of it.
And then to have Haynes come along, with his burdensome notions, and his socialistic slop. They"d cripple any business, no matter how great a start it had. I told him all that. We didn"t waste much time on argument, though. We knew we"d never get together. In half an hour we were talking terms. You know my contract and the amount of stock I hold.
Well, we threshed that out, and Haynes is settling for two million and a half."
He came to a stop before f.a.n.n.y"s chair.
"Two million and a half what?" asked f.a.n.n.y, feebly.
"Dollars." He smiled rather grimly. "In a check."
"One--check?" "One check."
f.a.n.n.y digested that in her orderly mind. "I thought I was used to thinking in millions. But this--I"d like to touch the check, just once."
"You shall." He drew up a chair near her. "Now get this, f.a.n.n.y. There"s nothing that you and I can"t do with two millions and a half. Nothing.
We know this mail order game as no two people in the world know it. And it"s in its infancy. I know the technical side of it. You know the human side of it. I tell you that in five years" time you and I can be a national power. Not merely the heads of a prosperous mail order business, but figures in finance. See what"s happened to Haynes-Cooper in the last five years! Why, it"s incredible. It"s grotesque. And it"s nothing to what you and I can do, working together. You know people, somehow. You"ve a genius for sensing their wants, or feelings, or emotions--I don"t know just what it is. And I know facts. And we have two million and a half--I can make it nearly three millions--to start with. Haynes, fifteen years ago, had a couple of hundred thousand. In five years we can make the Haynes-Cooper organization look as modern and competent as a cross-roads store. This isn"t a dream. These are facts.
You know how my mind works. Like a cold chisel. I can see this whole country--and Europe, too, after the war--G.o.d, yes!--stretched out before us like a patient before expert surgeons. You to attend to its heart, and I to its bones and ligaments. I can put you where no other woman has ever been. I"ve a hundred new plans this minute, and a hundred more waiting to be born. So have you. I tell you it"s just a matter of buildings. Of bricks and stone, and machinery and people to make the machinery go. Once we get those--and it"s only a matter of months--we can accomplish things I daren"t even dream of. What was Haynes-Cooper fifteen years ago? What was the North American Cloak and Suit Company?
The Peter Johnston Stores, of New York? Wells-Kayser? Nothing. They didn"t exist. And this year Haynes-Cooper is declaring a twenty-five per cent dividend. Do you get what that means? But of course you do. That"s the wonder of it. I never need explain things to you. You"ve a genius for understanding."
f.a.n.n.y had been sitting back in her chair, crouching almost, her eyes fixed upon the man"s face, so terrible in its earnestness and indomitable strength. When he stopped talking now, and stood looking down at her, she rose, too, her eyes still on his face. She was twisting the fingers of one hand in the fingers of the other, in a frightened sort of way.
"I"m not really a business woman. I--wait a minute, please--I have a knack of knowing what people are thinking and wanting. But that isn"t business." "It isn"t, eh? It"s the finest kind of business sense. It"s the thing the bugs call psychology, and it"s as necessary to-day as capital was yesterday. You can get along without the last. You can"t without the first. One can be acquired. The other you"ve got to be born with."
"But I--you know, of late, it"s only the human side of it that has appealed to me. I don"t know why. I seem to have lost interest in the actual mechanics of it."
Fenger stood looking at her, his head lowered. A scarlet stripe, that she had never noticed before, seemed to stand out suddenly, like a welt, on his forehead. Then he came toward her. She raised her hand in a little futile gesture. She took an involuntary step backward, encountered the chair she had just left, and sank into it coweringly.
She sat there, looking up at him, fascinated. His hand, on the wing of the great chair, was shaking. So, too, was his voice.
"f.a.n.n.y, Katherine"s not here."
f.a.n.n.y still looked up at him, wordlessly.