Chapter Fourteen I
The Fontaine galleries occupied a conspicuous building on Fifth Avenue above the Forties. It was one of the show places in New York’s principal show street, and it received a daily stream of visitors as much for the sumptuousness of its interior appointments as for the worth of its stock and its exhibitions.
Mr. Rene Fontaine had inherited the business from his father, who had left France in his boyhood and had begun in a small way as a jeweler on lower Sixth Avenue. The founder of the house had built up a fashionable trade in pearls and precious stones and, having a strong private fancy for certain kinds of ceramic ware, had been led into adding a department of rare porcelains.
After the death of the founder, the business was incorporated. Mr. Rene, as president of the firm, continued his father’s twofold policy with such success that, when the uptown trend of high-class trade necessitated a change of quarters, Fontaine and Company transferred their establishment to one of the choicest corners of Fifth Avenue. Here the ceramic and other works of art were displayed in galleries on the second floor. And the patronage of these galleries was so profitable that Claude had persuaded his father to open a gallery for paintings on the third floor and let him conduct the new department.
Mr. Fontaine was a fastidious man and a stickler for appearances, particularly British appearances. The fashionable set in New York aped English manners, and consequently, the door attendant at Fontaine’s was an English youth and the salesmen in the art departments were Englishmen with consciously superior airs fortified by British university educations, Oxford accents and modish London clothes.
A humble art lover on a visit to the galleries might easily have been frightened off by the sumptuous appointments, or overawed by seven or eight swagger young gentlemen who would eloquently ignore him as he crossed their several posts. They might have been so many heirs to dukedoms engaged in a feeble game of passing themselves off as prosaic American commoners. Yet they could pay a very flattering attention to multimillionaires, especially of the feminine gender; and these, as their astute employer knew, they attracted in considerable numbers.
Moving in and out among his father’s young men, Claude might readily have passed for one of them. He was like them in the ingratiating, physical appearance that comes from a systematic cultivation of the body, and his accent, if not of an Oxford, was of a Harvard flavor. The only real difference was that he was several degrees less arrogant—not that humility was one of his specialties, by any means.
II
About ten days after the Mineola outing he was seated at his desk, opening the morning’s mail. Two letters caught his eye. One, from Marjorie Armstrong, supplemented Mr. Armstrong’s invitation to the two Fontaines to attend a week-end party in the Armstrong’s Long Island home. The other was a note from Cornelia, reading:
“Lothario, remember your appointment with us this evening. We shall sup al fresco in the Japanese pagoda on the Lorillard roof—Araminta, Hercules and you will be the guests of honor. Only the chosen few are invited: Lydia, Charlotte, Robert and the invisible Pryor. A special attraction has been provided after supper—if indeed you need an attraction other than the piteous spectacle of Araminta pining away for you.
Cornelia.
This operatic reminder was much more welcome to Claude than Marjorie’s frigid message. Cornelia’s latest party—parties trod on one another’s heels in the model tenements—was in celebration of Janet’s admission to the society of the Outlaws. Everybody counted on Claude to be the bright particular meteor of the occasion. Yet how was he to follow his natural inclination without offending his father, to say nothing of Colonel Armstrong and Marjorie?
He turned over a volume of Muther’s History of Painting and, while staring vacantly into its pages, raked his mind for a diplomatic escape from attendance at the Armstrongs’ party. He was still far from successful, when his father approached to transact a little business. This settled, Claude referred to a Van Gogh he had lately bought for $5,000. Mr. Fontaine’s face puckered quizzically.
“You are worse than the prodigal son,” he said. “That young man squandered his patrimony on real extravagances, while you fritter yours away on unreal mockeries.”
“Did you look at it, father?”
“Bless my soul, no. Its mere presence in the house is enough to upset me. As soon as I learned of its arrival, I looked at a copy of Ruisdael’s “Mill” for ten minutes to steady my nerves. Whenever I hear of one of your modern pictures, I steal comfort from an ancient one.”
“But you can’t judge a picture without seeing it,” remonstrated Claude.
“My boy, you once induced me to spend ten minutes at a Matisse exhibition in Stieglitz’s Little Secession Gallery. What I saw there was one horrible libel on humanity after another. That will last me a lifetime, thank you.”
Claude laughed. He and his father got along admirably by rarely pursuing an argument beyond its illogical conclusion.
“What have you done with my particular ‘libel’?”
“I had it sent upstairs, to join your other atrocities in the Chamber of Indecencies.”
This was a nickname Mr. Rene Fontaine applied to a little room on the top floor where Claude had hung various “finds” in the later Impressionist, Cubist and Futurist styles.
“Tomb, not chamber,” said Claude. “Everything there is practically buried.”
“Not at all. Your friends are forever trotting upstairs. I even send people there myself. Only yesterday I invited J. Tuyler Harmon to go up. He said he enjoyed himself hugely.”
“What brought the old rogue in here again?”
“His mistress. She’s one of the chief patronesses of the Religion and Forward movement. She had to attend a committee meeting downtown. He escorted her from her apartments in the Plaza and waited here for her until the committee adjourned. Out of that waiting I made several handsome sales—but not of your pictures.”
“Thus religion and art,” said Claude, “are reconciled by the Mammon of Unrighteousness.”
III
This reflection was lost on Mr. Fontaine, whose thoughts had switched to another line. He reminded Claude of the party they were to attend on the Armstrong estate in Huntington, Long Island.
“Can’t you lunch with me at one, Claude?” he asked in an excellent humor. “Then we’ll take the train together.”
“I’m sorry, father, but I have another engagement this afternoon.”
He elaborated the urgency of the matter with an anxiety that Mr. Fontaine was quick to detect.
“An invitation from Armstrong Hall, Claude, is like an invitation from Windsor Castle,” he said, smiling. “It cancels all previous matters except matters of life and death.”
“I never felt less like breaking my word,” countered the younger man obstinately.
Mr. Fontaine did not press the point. His easy life and lucrative business had enabled him to cultivate certain expensive reticences. It pained him to drive anyone into a corner. As regards the three stages of paternal activity—the interrogative, the declarative and the imperative—he held that a competent father need rarely go beyond the first two. Besides, he had found by experience that, if he took a determined stand, his son frequently yielded to the mere pressure of silent expectation.
Mr. Fontaine, who had been a widower for ten years, habitually gave great latitude to Claude, his only son, of whom he was genuinely fond. He frankly made “keeping up appearances” the basis of all conduct. Apart from that, he had a naive Rousselian theory of education, to the effect that, if you let a young man indulge all his whims and passions to the top of his bent, he will settle down at thirty or thereabouts to a sane and steady career.
As refined tastes and good physical habits came natural to Claude, the operation of this theory had done him no bodily harm; but it had trained him to an exaggerated concern for his own desires and an enormous ignorance of other people’s. Opposition to his stronger wishes was so rare that, when it occurred, he was tempted to regard it as wicked, and hence to crush it with a close approach to a feeling of self-righteousness. To put it shortly, he had the makings of a first-class tyrant, and he would have become a vicious one if his will had been as pronounced as his desires.
“You haven’t had a tiff with Marjorie?” asked the father, with a casual air.
“No,” said Claude. “We haven’t quarrelled in three months.”
“But you haven’t seen her more than once or twice in that time.”
“That’s why, father!”
“Well, I’m glad you’re not on bad terms with her, anyhow,” repeated Mr. Fontaine, a deep interest beneath his affected unconcern.
“Oh, no. On as good terms as she’ll allow. I don’t know whether you’ve observed it, father, but it isn’t easy to break through Marjorie’s reserve.”
“You don’t mean she’s a cold nature!”
“Only when Lord Dunbar is around.”
The trace of petulance in this reply was the scar of an old wound. Claude, always first among his rivals on the battlefield of love, had once been obliged to yield the supremacy. This had happened about a year before, when the young Earl of Dunbar came to Newport in Marjorie’s train. With two fine strings to her bow, Marjorie actually made Claude her second string. This sensation had been the talk of the smart set from Bar Harbor to Palm Beach. And Claude had never quite forgiven the very serious blow to his pride.
Mr. Rene Fontaine had no fault to find with Marjorie’s supercilious airs and snobbish predelictions. He liked and admired her unreservedly and thought it quite natural that, in choosing a husband, she should prefer a titled Englishman to a Yankee commoner. Why not? That London was the real capital of American fashionable society was, after all, a fact no socially ambitious American girl could be expected to ignore.
“I don’t think she ever cared for Dunbar,” ventured Mr. Fontaine. “At all events, he’s gone.”
“Gone!”
“He sailed for England yesterday. I’ve just heard it from Mr. Armstrong.”
“Good Lord!” exclaimed Claude, walking up and down in marked agitation.
“My dear boy!” cried Mr. Fontaine, uncertain as to the cause of his son’s emotions, “she didn’t take him after all.”
“No. Probably she couldn’t. I dare say she means to take me, now.”
“Why, Claude, everybody supposed you two were as good as engaged long before this Englishman came over.”
“So we were—before he came.”
“Well?”
“Well—he came.”
“Really, Claude—”
“I mean, she preferred him to me. I don’t blame her. He had more to offer.”
“What had that to do with it?”
“Everything. He’s a British nobleman. I’m only an ordinary American. He’s got the entree of the best London circles. I’ve only the entree of the best New York.”
“That’s a very unkind thing to say of Marjorie. I’ve known her since she was a baby. She has her faults. But heartless calculation is not one of them.”
Mr. Fontaine’s indignation did not sound convincing. Like Claude, he knew that Marjorie would not hesitate to sacrifice her feelings to her social ambitions.
“I don’t say it’s a fault,” protested Claude. “She had the right to change her mind. For women, the business side of marriage is the most important side, since marriage establishes them in life positions. I find it perfectly natural, therefore, that they should knock themselves down to the highest bidder.”
This was a sentiment he had adopted, with his own modifications, from Robert Lloyd.
“Don’t be cynical, my boy,” said Mr. Fontaine. “Business is business, but family life is quite another thing.”
“I agree with you, father,” said Claude, pacifically. “As I said before, I don’t blame Marjorie. And I’m not too proud to be her second choice.”
“That’s the way to talk. Second choice, like second thought, is often the sounder.”
“Only, it happens that when she changed her sentiments, I changed mine, too.”
“You mean there’s some other girl?”
“In a way—yes,” replied Claude, awkwardly.
Then, on the impulse of the moment, he plunged into an account of Janet Barr.
IV
Mr. Fontaine was distinctly uneasy. But he concealed his emotion as well as he could.
“You haven’t any wild plan of marrying this young woman?” he said, adopting the air of a judicious outsider.
“I like her better than any girl I ever met.”
“My boy, is that a good reason for marrying her? Take the word of an elderly man: It isn’t worth while to marry solely for love, because you are bound to fall in love with somebody else as soon as the honeymoon is over.”
“If not for love, what is one to marry for?”
“Why, for compatability, position, money—these are the considerations that wise men weigh.”
Both were silent for a while, Claude thinking sardonically of his father’s charge that his view of family life was too materialistic. Then Mr. Fontaine resumed his objections.
“How do you intend to support the young lady?”
“Surely my interest in the firm is enough.”
“You never made a bigger mistake, Claude. Perhaps the fault is mine, though. For I have never driven home to you the relative value of an income of twelve thousand a year. That is what you’ve been spending.”
“Good Heavens, father! You exaggerate, surely.”
“Not in the least. I am in the habit of keeping very careful accounts, a habit it would do you no harm to acquire. Let me remind you that your new car cost five thousand dollars. That puts your weekly outgo roughly at a hundred and fifty, of which your chauffeur alone gets fifty.”
“I’ll cut down my extravagances! Besides, two can live more economically than one.”
“Can they? Well, just try it, my boy! I fear you’ve picked up that idea in some novel. But don’t forget that all novels are written by middle-class people and reflect middle-class notions of economy. Possibly a middle-class couple can save if they double up in one sordid flat, sleep in one bed, limit their amusements to the few which please both, compromise on the one or two friends whom neither dislikes too much, and generally lead the spiritual life of the Siamese twins. But this can’t be done in our class! With us, the diverse activities and needs of husband and wife make expenses for two run four times as high as expenses for one.”
Mr. Fontaine returned significantly to the assertion that he was in no position to play the benevolent father. He would not deny that the firm was doing business on a magnificent scale. But magnificence was costly, on the debit side as well as on the credit side. There were ferocities of competition that were slicing off the safe margins of profits, besides pressing the management into transactions involving a peculiar risk.
“Risk!” exclaimed Claude, greatly surprised.
Ha begged his father to remember the huge dividends recently declared on Fontaine & Company’s stock.
“I didn’t say financial risk. There’s a tremendous legal risk.”
Mr. Fontaine felt that the time had come for Claude to learn more of the technique of a big business in jewelry and the fine arts. He pointed out that the war had caused a substantial reduction in the demand for luxuries accompanied by a substantial increase in the tax upon them. And he asked his son if he had never wondered why, in the face of this handicap, the firm’s post-war profits had exceeded the records of pre-war years.
“Yes, it did puzzle me,” admitted Claude. “But there’s so much wizardry in your management of the business—”
“No wizardry at all. One or two of the biggest firms land their prizes without the Customs House being a penny the wiser.”
Claude made a wild movement to rise, but fell back in his chair again.
“Then that blackguard was right,” he cried, his face ashen.
“What on earth do you mean? What blackguard?”
“Hutchins Burley! He called me a diamond smuggler right out before everybody at the Outlaws’ Ball.”
In the greatest agitation Mr. Fontaine pressed Claude for particulars. When the whole story had been told, he breathed a sigh of relief.
“Nothing to worry over, thank goodness!” he said, reassuring his son. “Nobody will pay the slightest attention to what a tipsy man blurts out against the Fontaines.”
“No?” Claude’s tone was decidedly skeptical.
“No, they won’t dare to.”
“Anyhow, we’re actually in this smuggling game—” Claude went on gloomily.
“Our competitors call it slight-of-hand organized.”
The ghost of a smile flitted over Claude’s face.
“And what do they call being at the mercy of a drunken cur’s venom?”
“Don’t rub it in, Claude. I blame myself severely for your embarrassment. I ought to have forewarned you earlier. But it won’t happen again. Depend upon it, I shall lock that fellow’s tongue, good and tight.”
“Is it really necessary for us Fontaines to have truck with such degraded scoundrels?”
“Well, my boy, it isn’t exactly easy to get certificated gentlemen for the work,” said Mr. Fontaine, stung into irony. “But don’t let’s go into that now, Claude. You must have confidence in me. One of these days I shall give you the history of the whole matter from A to Z.”
“But look here, father. Suppose we were caught!”
Mr. Fontaine sat down in an armchair opposite his son and lighted a cigar with leisurely grace.
“It’s a possibility,” he said, “a slim possibility. But we have excellent friends.”
“Government officials?”
“H’m—yes. More especially—there’s Colonel Armstrong.”
“Mr. Armstrong! You don’t mean to say he dickers with backstairs political grafters?”
“‘Dickers’ is hardly the word. Colonel Armstrong stands above, about and underneath the political machines—both of them.”
“Mr. Armstrong in the boodle game! I can scarcely believe it.”
“Boodle game! Don’t talk like a grocer or a reporter, Claude. Mr. Armstrong is a lover of fine art who, like all sensible people, thinks it monstrous to tax foreign works of art destined to do an educational service here. By virtue of his influence at Washington, he has been able to use his good offices to our advantage. The result is that the Customs House officials are wise enough not to go behind our list of import declarations.”
“Does he get much out of it?” inquired Claude.
“What a brutal question, Claude! Armstrong is so rich that he has nothing to live for except the luxury of being disinterested.”
Mr. Fontaine added that there had never been any outright verbal understanding between himself and his protector. Mr. Armstrong might be said to have slid into the protectorate insidiously. He was chiefly interested in the exquisite vases and textiles handled by Fontaine, and he was probably ignorant of the fact that it was not these articles but the precious stones that comprised the larger and more profitable fraction of the smuggled goods.
“For the rest,” said Mr. Fontaine, “he is, as you know, a steady purchaser here. He buys whatever suits his fancy at cost price. We needn’t begrudge him the bargain.”
“I wish our relations with the Armstrongs were not complicated in this way,” said Claude, with an ominous feeling that he, too, might be knocked down at a bargain if the influential banker should fancy him as a bridegroom for Marjorie.
Claude had always taken special pride in the irreproachable origin of the Fontaine riches. He had looked up to his father as a convincing example of the possibility of making trade both clean and aristocratic. Mr. Fontaine’s disclosures now robbed his son of this illusion, besides confronting him with the sordid hazards of reality.
One of these sordid hazards was barely a week old. A new customs inspector, in a fit of unsophisticated fervor, had stumbled upon an act of smuggling in which the complicity of the Fontaines appeared in the course of investigation. Only the lucky fact of Mr. Armstrong’s nephew being the Collector of the Port of New York had saved Fontaine & Company from scandal, public exposure and humiliation.
“By Heaven!” said Claude. “We’re indebted to Mr. Armstrong for being out of prison!”
“Quite so,” replied the father. “An American business man who desires to keep out of prison must take one of two hygienic precautions. One is to form a friendship with a leading financier or a political boss; the other is to avoid being caught. I have done both.”
Mr. Fontaine looked significantly at his son.
“Those plans of yours,” he said, “about the William Morris art center and all that—there can’t be anything in that line if you marry a poor girl, you know.”
Claude was silent for a while. His father, watching him keenly and sympathetically, supposed him to be in the throes of a fierce emotional contest between his sense of duty and his love for Janet. Claude was under the same delusion. In reality, the willful force that swayed him was not so much inclining him to marry Janet as pushing him not to marry Marjorie. For the moment, the easiest course to pursue was to yield on the minor issue and gain time on the major one. He would give up the evening with Janet and go to Huntington, but he would refrain from committing himself definitely as regards Marjorie and marriage.
“I’ll be in Huntington for dinner, father,” he said briefly.
Mr. Fontaine, greatly relieved, patted his son’s back affectionately and walked away with a satisfied smile.
V
That evening, just before the theatres opened, a tall, thin man in a taupe-colored flannel suit and a soft beaver hat came out of the Commodore Hotel walked westward along Forty-second Street, and took an uptown bus at Fifth Avenue.
Mark Pryor, in a very unprofessional mood, had the air of one who is determined to be seen rather than to see. Considering the constant use he made of his knack of fading out of his surroundings to the point of almost total invisibility, this was not as easy for him as it sounds. Easy or not, it was his mood. Mr. Pryor, whose gift for self-effacement amounted to a miracle, needed a change. And he sought it by trying to make himself manifest, as other people seek it by trying to hide.
He had not deserted Kips Bay. But the growing inquisitiveness of his neighbors, and particularly of the acquaintances he had struck up in flat Number Fifteen, had driven him to the expedient of running two domiciles and of dividing his time between them. The choice of a room in a first-class hotel had been dictated not by a craving for luxury but by a sense of domestic propriety. “There are two things I can’t live without,” he had once told Robert Lloyd. “One is an unfailing supply of hot water, the other is perfect freedom to come and go as I choose. A man can always get these treasures among the model poor or the unmodel rich, but never in a middle-class home.”
Robert had heartily endorsed this sentiment without any suspicion that Mr. Pryor—whom some of the Outlaws suspected of being a fugitive counterfeiter and others of being a shrinking novelist in search of local color—perambulated from an army cot in his Lorillard flat to a Circassian walnut bedstead in the Commodore Hotel. On the evening in question, Mr. Pryor decided to explore a section of Manhattan which he had hitherto neglected. Accordingly he boarded a cross-town bus going east and alighted at the corner of Second Avenue and Seventy-second Street.
Between this point and East End Avenue, he took a zig-zag course along several side streets and main roads. Thus he sauntered past the Vanderbilt tenements—the aristocrats of their kind—and through the German and Czechoslovak colonies, which were remote enough from Times Square to have retained some of their European flavor.
Presently he found himself in a very prettily lighted shopping section of First Avenue, a section which reminded him faintly of the chief street in some of the Teuto-Bohemian towns he had once traveled through. Reaching the Eighties, he strolled westward again, not without a sigh of regret as he noticed that the few quaint German or Slovak spots left on the East Side were fast being submerged in the uniform drabness which inevitably descends on all the quarters of an American city.
The cross street into which he turned was dimly lighted and quite deserted except for one other pedestrian on the opposite footway. This was a man whose hippopotamine dimensions instantly chained Mr. Pryor’s scrutiny.
Surely there were not two people in New York with the aggressive waddle, the labored locomotion of Hutchins Burley? Pryor was in a holiday frame of mind; but here, as usual, was opportunity knocking at his door when he was in a mood to be “not at home.”
“What must be, must be,” he murmured, resigning himself to his fate.
He kept his eyes glued on Burley, and followed him slowly until he had watched him enter a cigar and stationery shop at the corner. Walking hurriedly past the shop window twice, he observed Burley, in a rather secretive manner, handing the proprietor a small bundle of letters.
Then Pryor acted with lightning speed.
In less time than it takes to tell, he had darted down the dark basement steps of the closed shop next to the tobacconist’s and, after a brief disappearance, had emerged again.
The man who came trudging up the steps, however, was not the agile, immaculate gentleman who had descended a few seconds before. At least, to outward view, it was a middle-aged man with stooping shoulders, a painful limp, clothes that looked trampish and untidy, and a round hat rammed Klondike fashion far down over his forehead.
This ugly looking customer lurched past the tobacconist’s shop a moment later, just brushing the sleeve of Hutchins Burley on his way out. Wholly absorbed in himself, Burley paid no attention to the incident or the cause of it. He plodded on up the street; but the man who had so nearly collided with him went into the shop, made a quick purchase—during which he took a good look at the shopkeeper—and then came back to the street again with a haste that was scarcely in keeping with his limp. By this time Burley had almost turned the corner of Third Avenue, and Mark Pryor was obliged to throw his limp to the winds and strike into a lively clip in order to keep his quarry within view.
Eventually, he contrived to be a passenger on the bus that carried Hutchins Burley downtown, and got off with him at Seventeenth Street. There he watched his man waddle heavily towards Irving Place and enter a dingy old house in the middle of the block.
Mark Pryor followed slowly. As soon as the coast was clear, he crept cautiously up the front stoop to look at the name plate on one side of the doorway. With the aid of a pocket flashlight, he read the words: “Japanese Consulate General.”
“What in thunder has the Mikado got to do with Hutchins Burley’s smuggling adventures?” he asked himself, greatly perplexed.
An hour or so later, he repeated this query to a brisk, florid-faced gentleman in the prime of life who was seated in what purported to be an actor’s agency in the heart of Times Square. The florid gentleman, who looked much less like a theatrical agent than like a military man in mufti, offered no solution to the enigma.
“Major Blair, I think I’m on the trail of something big at last,” volunteered Mr. Pryor, hopefully.
“Possibly, sir, possibly,” replied the gentleman, briskly.
But he paid only a languid attention to his visitor’s spirited account of how he had gradually wormed himself into the confidence of Hutchins Burley. When Pryor finished, he said:
“Somebody else will have to take up the trail of Burley. Orders came from headquarters this evening that you are to sail for France the day after tomorrow. You will report in Paris to Colonel Scott at the address in this letter.”
“Foiled again,” exclaimed Pryor, veiling his real feelings with assumed good humor. “Whenever I’m on the point of nailing a case down, headquarters steps in and calls a halt, as if I were the villain in the piece.”
He added sardonically: “What is the use of information fairly breezing into my hands, so long as headquarters’ notion of Secret Service is that the only conduct becoming an officer or a gentleman is to keep a secret dark.”
“Mr. Pryor, orders are orders! The first duty of an officer of the Secret Service is never to ask questions.”
“Quite so, sir,” returned Pryor coolly. “And yet the first duty of a crack Secret Service officer is to ask questions all the time.”
Major Blair stared at this independent, gifted member of his staff. Nothing daunted, Mark Pryor took his sealed orders, saluted and left.