STERN LOGIC
Between Dr. Surtaine and his son had risen a barrier built up of reticences. At the outset of their reunion, they had chattered like a pair of schoolboy friends, who, after long separation, must rehea.r.s.e to each other the whole roster of experiences. The Doctor was an enthusiast of speech, glowingly loquacious above knife and fork, and the dinner hours were enlivened for his son by his fund of far-gathered business incidents and adventures, pointed with his crude but apt philosophy, and irradiated with his centripetal optimism. He possessed and was conscious of this prime virtue of talk, that he was never tiresome. Yet recently he had noted a restlessness verging to actual distaste on Hal"s part, whenever he turned the conversation upon his favorite topic, the greatness of Certina and the commercial romance of the proprietary medicine business.
In his one close fellowship, the old quack cultivated even the minor and finer virtues. With Hal he was scrupulously tactful. If the boy found _his_ business an irksome subject, he would talk about the boy"s business. And he did, sounding the Paean of Policy across the Surtaine mahogany in a hundred variations supported by a thousand instances. But here, also, Hal grew restive. He responded no more willingly to leads on journalism than to encomiums of Certina. Again the affectionate diplomat changed his ground. He dropped into the lighter personalities; chatted to Hal of his new friends, and was met halfway. But in secret he puzzled and grieved over the waning of frankness and freedom in their intercourse. Dinner, once eagerly looked forward to by both as the best hour of the day, was now something of an ordeal, a contact in which each must move warily, lest, all unknowing, he bruise the other.
Of the underlying truth of the situation Dr. Surtaine had no inkling.
Had any one told him that his son dared neither speak nor hear unreservedly, lest the gathering suspicions about his father, against which he was fighting while denying to himself their very existence, should take form and substance of unescapable facts, the Doctor would have failed utterly of comprehension. He ascribed Hal"s unease and preoccupation to a more definite cause. Sedulous in everything which concerned his "Boyee," he had learned something of the affair with Esme Elliot, and had surmised distressfully how hard the blow had been: but what worried him much more were rumors connecting Hal"s name with Milly Neal. Several people had seen the two on the day of the road-house adventure. Milly, with her vivid femininity was a natural mark for gossip. The mere fact that she had been in Hal"s runabout was enough to set tongues wagging. Then, sometime thereafter, she had resigned her position in the "Clarion" office without giving any reason, so Dr.
Surtaine understood. The whole matter looked ugly. Not that the charlatan would have been particularly shocked had Hal exhibited a certain laxity of morals in the matter of women. For this sort of offense Dr. Surtaine had an easy toleration, so long as it was kept decently under cover. But that his son should become entangled with one of his--Dr. Surtaine"s--employees, a woman under the protection of his roof, even though it were but the factory roof--that, indeed, would be a shock to his feudal conception of business honor.
Such dismal considerations the Doctor had suppressed during an unusually uncomfortable dinner, on a hot and thunder-breeding evening when both of the Surtaines had painfully talked against time. Immediately after the meal, Hal, on pretext of beating the storm to the office, left. His father took his forebodings to the club and attempted to lose them along with several rubbers of absent-minded bridge. Meantime the woman for whom his loyalty was concerned as well as for his son, was stimulating a resolution with the slow poison of liquor around the corner from the "Clarion" office.
Nine P.M. is slack tide in a morning newspaper office. The afternoon news is cleared up; the night wires have not yet begun to buzz with outer-world tidings of importance; the reporters are still afield on the evening"s a.s.signments. As the champion short-distance sleeper of his craft, which distinction he claimed for himself without fear of successful contradiction, McGuire Ellis was wont to devote half an hour or more, beginning on the ninth stroke of the clock, to the cultivation of Morpheus. Intruders were not popular at that hour.
To respect for this habitude, Reginald Currier, known to mortals as Bim, Guardian of the Sacred Gates, had been rigorously educated. But Bim had a creed of his own which mollified the rigidity of specific standards, and one tenet thereof was the apothegm, "Once a "Clarion" man, always a "Clarion" man," the same applying to women. Therefore, when Milly Neal appeared at the gate at 9.05 in the evening, the Cerberus greeted her professionally with a "How goes it, Miss Cutie?" and pa.s.sed her in without question. She went straight to the inner office.
"Hoong!" grunted McGuire Ellis, rubbing his eyes in a desperate endeavor to disentangle dreams from actualities. "What are _you_ doing here?"
"I want to see Mr. Surtaine."
Something in the girl"s aspect put Ellis on his guard. "What do you want to see him about?" he asked.
"I don"t see any Examination Bureau license pinned to you, Ellis," she retorted hardily.
"The Boss is out."
"I don"t believe it."
"All right," said McGuire Ellis equably. "I"m a liar."
"Then you"re the proper man for a "Clarion" job," came the savage retort.
"Come off, Kitty. Don"t be young!"
"I want to see Hal Surtaine," she said with sullen insistence.
Shaking himself out of his chair, the a.s.sociate editor started across the room to the telephone at Hal"s desk, but halted sharply in front of the girl.
"You"ve been drinking," he said.
"What"s it to you if I have?"
The man"s hand fell on her shoulder. There was no familiarity in the act; only comradeship. Comradeship in the voice, also, and concern, as he said, "Cut it, Neal, cut it. There"s nothing in it. You"re too good stuff to throw yourself away on that."
"Don"t you worry about me." She shook off his hand, and seated herself.
"Still working at the Certina joint?"
"No. I"m not working."
"See here, Neal: what made you quit us?"
The girl withheld speech back of tight-pressed lips.
"Oh, well, never mind that. The point is, we miss you. We miss the "Cutie" column. It was good stuff. We want you back."
Still silence.
"And I guess you miss us. You liked the job, didn"t you?"
The girl gazed past him with ashen eyes. "Oh, my G.o.d!" she said under her breath.
"Your job back and no questions asked," pursued Ellis, with an outer cheerfulness which cost him no small effort in the face of his growing conviction of some tragic issue pending.
Now she looked directly at him, and there was a flicker of flame in her regard.
"Do you know what a Hardscrabbler is, Ellis?" she asked.
The other rubbed his head in puzzlement. "I don"t believe I do," he confessed.
"Then you won"t understand when I tell you that I"m one and that I"d see your "Clarion" blazing in h.e.l.l before I"d take another cent of your money." The fire died from her face, and in her former tone of dulled stolidity she repeated, "I want to see Mr. Surtaine."
With every word uttered, McGuire Ellis"s forebodings had grown darker.
That Hal Surtaine, carried away by the girl"s vividness and allure, might have involved himself in a _liaison_ with her was credible enough.
He recalled the episode of the road-house, on that stormy spring day.
That Hal would have deserted her afterward, Ellis could not believe. And yet--and yet--why otherwise should she come with the marks of fierce misery in her face, demanding an interview at this time? On one point Ellis"s mind was swiftly made up: she should not see Hal.
"Miss Neal," he said quietly, "you can sit there all night, but you can"t see the Boss unless you tell me your errand."
The girl rose, slowly. "Oh, I guess you all stand together here," she said. "Well, remember: I gave him his chance to square himself."
When Hal came up from a visit to the new press half an hour later, Ellis had decided to say nothing of the call. Later, he must have it out with his employer, for the sake of both of them and of the "Clarion." But it was an ordeal which he was glad to postpone. Nothing more, he judged, was to be feared that night, from Milly Neal; he could safely sleep over the problem. Having a certain sufficient religion of his own, McGuire Ellis still believes that a merciful Heaven forgives us our sins; but, looking back on that evening"s decision, he sometimes wonders whether it ever fully pardons our mistakes.
While he sat reading proof on the status of a flickering foreign war, the Hardscrabbler"s daughter, in a quiet back room farther down the block, slowly sipped more gin; and gin is fire and fury to the Hardscrabbler blood.
At eleven o"clock that evening, Dr. Surtaine, returning to that ma.s.sive hybrid of architecture which he called home, found Milly Neal waiting in his study.
"Well, Milly: what"s up?" he asked, cheerfully enough in tone, but with a sinking heart.
"I want to know what you"re going to do for me?"
"Something wrong?"
"You"ve got a right to know. I"m in trouble."
"What kind of trouble?"
"The kind you make money out of with your Relief Pills."