Chapter Ten I
About a week later, a tall, thin, immaculate gentleman, in a suit of neutral taupe, entered the offices of the Evening Chronicle. A stand-up collar slightly tip-tilted his chin. But his expression was a friendly, not a haughty one. His small roving gray eyes looked around with a humorous inquisitiveness, as if they wondered what their immaculate owner could possibly hope to find in such a sloppy, disorderly place.
In due time, a slovenly office boy stopped pounding on a typewriter and showed the stranger to an inner office. Here Hutchins Burley penned those inimitable effusions on “the ethereal feminine” which gave the Saturday special half a million female and male readers. It was an army that ran the Saturday Evening Post brigade a close second, and rendered Burley’s professional position unassailable.
The roving gray eyes saw the swollen bulk of Mr. Hutchins Burley, squatting like a giant toad behind a roll-top desk and pawing over a visiting card.
“Well, Mr. Pryor?” said the pillar of the Evening Chronicle, with no waste of civility. “What d’you want?”
“Frankly, I want Mr. Robert Lloyd’s job.”
“How do you know it’s vacant? Are you a friend of his?”
“Hardly that. The information just drifted my way.”
“You handed me that stuff at the Outlaws’ Ball. Who the devil are you, anyway?”
Whenever Burley spoke vehemently, he shoveled the words from the left side of his mouth, a process that contorted his face into the exact likeness of a cartoon by Briggs.
“You might be a spy,” he added, putting a cigar in his mouth and scowling horribly at his visitor.
The latter replied in a quiet and dignified but judiciously injured tone.
“Mr. Burley, you have my card. Go into my personal history all you like. But first, let me refer to the service I did you at the ball. It was a small matter—”
“Don’t get puffed up about it then,” growled Burley, with much less hostility, however.
“No fear,” continued Mark Pryor, as terse as his host and much more urbane. “I mention it only because an ounce of action is worth a ton of talk. Or a cartload of stuffy introductions. The point is this. Having learned that you had discharged Mr. Lloyd—”
“Who says I discharged him?” Burley noisily cut in. “He discharged himself.”
“Oh, did he?”
“Yes, damn him. I wasn’t good enough for him, I suppose. You know his kind, brains, fatted brains. But no guts! Sticks his nose up at everything and hangs out with a lot of super-highbrows—New Republic gas-bags.”
“The sort that cut a pie from the periphery to the center?”
“Yah! That’s their lingo. Still, Lloyd’s got a head on his shoulders. I’ll say that for him. And I don’t fire a man that’s worth his salary. Why should I?”
“You believe in keeping your grudges out of your business?”
“That’s me. I could have given him his walking papers for a hundred good reasons. But I didn’t. And what thanks did I get? He left me in the lurch. That’s what he did. Left me on his own hook at a damn critical time.”
“A case of bad conscience, perhaps.”
“You said it! He’d done me all the harm he could. He and Claude Fontaine who put him up to it.”
Burley enlarged on his two-fold grievance. First, Robert and Claude had circulated a malicious story about Harry Kelly (a professional bruiser) making a punching bag of him; this story had ruined his prestige among the Outlaws of Kips Bay. Then, they had freely slandered him in Cornelia Covert’s inner circle, with the result that Cornelia’s friend, Janet Barr, had conceived an insane and utterly baseless dislike of him.
His story was full of evasions and suppressions. Thus he forgot to tell Mark Pryor that he had twice waylaid Janet on the street and had been coldly repulsed each time. It was clear that these repulses had added fuel to his hatred of Claude and Robert, the two men who found favor in her eyes. Against them, rather than against her, he vented his spleen. When he spoke of her, his diatribe degenerated into a whine.
“I know,” said Pryor, laconically, cheering him up. “You have that ‘nobody loves me,’ feeling. Nastiest feeling in the world. We all get it once in a while. I find there’s only one remedy for it, and that’s to stop bullying people.”
“Bullying people!” shouted Burley, jumping up and glaring at his visitor. “Say that again, if you dare.”
Mr. Pryor smiled faintly and sat unmoved, save that his neck seemed to rise a very little out of his stand-up collar, as the eye-piece of a microscope rises out of the tube.
“I’m a plain man, Mr. Burley,” he said, imperturbably. “And I speak plainly. If you don’t like plain speaking, I’d better withdraw my application.”
“The hell you’d better!”
Mr. Pryor got up, everything quiet about him except his eyes.
Burley looked as if he were about to launch a thunderbolt. But the roving eyes of his visitor were now fixed upon him like points of steel.
“Sit down,” said Burley, suddenly limp.
Mr. Pryor sat down very quietly, without taking his eyes off Hutchins Burley, who sat down, too, almost as if mesmerized.
“Tell you what,” he said, after a while. “I need a sort of confidential assistant. A man who can keep his eyes and ears on the jump, and his pen and tongue under lock and key. Get me?”
He went on to tell Mr. Pryor that he was willing to try him out and that faithful service would meet with very big rewards and with increasingly confidential commissions. For the present, his newspaper duties were to be subordinated to the one task of keeping track of the Lorillard tenements.
“Trust me,” said Mark Pryor.
He did not think it necessary to explain that keeping track of the Lorillard tenements was precisely what he had been doing for purposes of his own.
“And glue an eye on that fellow Fontaine,” added Burley.
“To get a line on the diamond smuggling?” asked Pryor, with the most casual air imaginable.
Burley straightened up with a yell of suspicion.
“What in blazes are you talking about?” he said.
“Merely what you yourself talked about, my dear sir,” said Pryor soothingly. “At the ball you called Mr. Fontaine a diamond smuggler. More than one person will remember that remark.”
Burley’s suspicions were disarmed.
“Forget it, my friend, forget it,” he said. “A man says a good many things under the influence of liquor that he has no call to say. I don’t suppose the Fontaines are less on the square about their importations than the other big jewelers are. That’s no business of mine or yours, however, is it?”
He declared emphatically that his interest in Claude Fontaine’s doings had a totally different basis. On three occasions Fontaine had come between him and a woman. He did not hesitate to name the ladies. One was Lydia Dyson, another was Cornelia Covert, the third was Janet Barr. He had said nothing about the first two. He was not a greedy man. Anyhow, according to the ethics of Kips Bay, Lorillard females were nobody’s property. That was no blasted secret, was it?
“But this Janet Barr’s no Lorillard female,” he said, bringing his fist down heavily on the desk. “Any fool can see that. And I’m man enough, to refuse to stand by while Fontaine dirties her good name.”
“You don’t mean to say that he has—”
“He’ll do it, all right. Or why did he pick the girl up, when he’s just got engaged to Armstrong’s daughter?”
“Armstrong, the financier?”
“Yes. And Dupont Armstrong won’t stand for a man who isn’t on the level with his girl. Just put that in your pipe and smoke it.”
“I know a safer place,” said Mr. Pryor, gently tapping his head. “Where it won’t go up in smoke.”
He rose and, after coming to a few necessary understandings with Burley, took his leave.
As he walked rapidly along Broadway towards the subway, he felt that he had done a very good morning’s work. He was satisfied that Hutchins Burley knew more about the diamond smuggling than he cared to admit. The puzzle was that, although Burley obviously connected Claude Fontaine with the smuggling operations, he was unwilling to give the connection away. What was the motive that restrained him from exposing a man he bitterly hated? Clearly, either a lack of proof, or some consideration of a more personal kind.
Reminding himself of his maxim that two and two never make four except in vulgar mathematics, Mark Pryor left the subway at Thirty-fourth Street, the Kips Bay station nearest the Lorillard tenements. Then he went directly to his flat.
II
Incoming or outgoing denizens made barely a ripple on the surface of Kips Bay. The district was used to a shifting population. Even the colonization of Sutton and Beekman Places by Pierian millionaires “cut no ice.” Honest men and thieves, artists, criminals and Bohemians, idle paupers and rich idlers, all these floated in and floated out, but the net hodge podge was much the same. Bomb makers might come and gunmen might go, but Kips Bay went on forever.
The Lorillard tenements, the hub of the district, had experienced their fair share of changes during the week of Mark Pryor’s advent. Robert and Janet were among the newcomers. Robert, thrown on his own scant resources, had secured a nook in Kelly’s flat, Number Thirteen, his berth there being the fruit of Cornelia’s good offices. And Janet had come to live with Cornelia in flat Number Fifteen.
This last event was at once followed by a break in Cornelia’s partnership with Mazie Ross. The three small rooms and kitchenette were not large enough for more than two people. And pretty, slovenly Mazie, her early enthusiasm for Cornelia cooled, had lately spent more and more time on her own appearance and less and less on her companion’s wants.
Cornelia always got rid of a companion the moment a better one turned up. A “better one” usually meant one who could do more of Cornelia’s housework, or could look after her creature comforts more diligently, or could give her more of that flattering attention of which she never had her fill. Whenever the time came to change partners, Cornelia would send the old one flying without the smallest compunction. Nor was she ever at a loss for a good excuse.
Janet’s first day in Number Fifteen was Mazie’s last. When Mazie came home that night, “instead of poppies, willows waved o’er her couch.”
The crash came after supper, while Janet was out shopping with Harry Kelly, who had quickly become a steady visitor at his next-door neighbor’s flat. As a pretext, Cornelia chose the matter of Mazie’s easy friendship with Hutchins Burley, a friendship reported to have gone as far as was possible, since the recent ball.
There was nothing new in the charge that Mazie practiced principles of varietism about which Cornelia simply theorized. The only novelty was that Cornelia now declared the charge to be a good excuse for parting company. Mazie thought it a poor excuse. On this difference of opinion there sprang up a tempestuous scene. Words flew high, and the checks that polite society imposes on candid criticism of one’s friends went completely by the board.
The climax was reached when Cornelia offered the opinion that if Mazie wanted to become a vulgar little copy of Camille, that was her affair; but flat Number Fifteen was not the place in which to practice the part. In vain did Mazie reply with an unexpurgated review of Cornelia’s history. Cornelia was unmoved. And her languid, cadenced retorts floated serenely above Mazie’s torrent of invective like a violin obligato above the crashing brasses.
It did not take Mazie long to pack her most necessary articles into a bag and go. On her way out, she said, with a good imitation of Cornelia’s sweetest tone:
“Good bye, Cornelia. I’d like to stay long enough to tell your next dupe what a fraud you are. But what’s the use? She won’t thank me for it, as I suppose she has a crush on you, like I had once. Well, it’ll do her good to learn by experience. Finding you out, my dear, is such a complete education.”
By the time Janet and Harry Kelly returned, all was quiet along the Potomac.