The Savage Gentleman (15 page)

"Honestly, Henry, by begging people's pardon every thirty seconds, by bowing to them, and rushing around eagerly to keep doors open and traffic cleared ahead of them, you're going to make a nervous wreck out of yourself."

He stood aside to let her pass by but she merely came another step closer and stood with her eyes level to his.

"In this rude travesty of civilization good manners have vanished entirely. You probably began to gather that from the reporters."

Henry flushed. "They were despicable."

Marian's eyebrows went up. "You could find a shorter and more accurate word.

Lousy, for example."

His flush deepened, but although he was embarrassed he stood unmoved and repeated her expression:

"
Lousy
."

Into his mind flashed a quick portrait of the green island, the long-lasting sunshine and his father's in terminable dissertations on English usage."

"Anyway, you're game. Now you be a good boy and say 'lousy' a hundred times a day. Then after that, I'll teach you how to say a lot of other words. I'll begin with the easy ones--'snooty,' 'swell,' 'punk,' 'racket,' 'high-hat' and on into the upper register of current argot. What shall I teach you, after that, Henry?"

He had gained a little confidence in himself and banished from his mind the notion that it was absurd and not quite polite to stand face to face on a staircase while conversing with a young lady.

"I'm sure I don't know." His smile was quite genuine, his eyes steadily upon hers.

"There are so many things, Henry. You smoke and drink, which is doing pretty well for an old desert-island boy. I wonder if you gamble? Do you know how to gamble, Henry?"

His discomfort under this gentle teasing had temporarily subsided.

"I know how to play poker. I know the principles of roulette--father explained it to me very carefully. And five hundred."

"My! Henry, you're a rake-hell. Also you're a prevaricator. The picture of quiet life on the island which you gave last night is fading fast. I had imagined your days were like one long Sunday afternoon. But what do I find? Poker! Five hundred! Mercy!"

Henry chuckled and made a gesture with his arm which he hoped was not awkward.

"Wouldn't you like to sit down?"

"Sure."

Marian promptly seated herself on the steps and made room for Henry beside her.

"Since there is nothing I can add to your list of worldly dissipations we might consider another angle of human enterprise and endeavor."

She looked at him with apparent flippancy and yet, far away and showing faintly, there was a fresh light in her gray-blue eyes.

"I was referring to the matter of love-making. Did your father teach you how to make love? Or did he have some books on it in his library?"

All Henry's composure vanished again. He drew in his breath as if he were about to do hard work and said:

"No."

"Then I'll be useful after all," she said gallantly. "I'll teach you how to make love, Henry. Possibly you may not find me ideally suited to your own needs. Doubtless after I've wasted many valuable evenings coaching you, it will turn out that you prefer brunettes. But I'm a girl of spirit. A stranger in a strange city deserves consideration.

When would you like your lessons? Say, Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays from nine to twelve-thirty with options on the next three hours? We'll begin with hand-holding, dinner-table flirtations, winking, nudging, foot-foot and progress from there to embraces, kissing, vehement phrases--"

She stopped because she had just looked at Henry. On his face was an expression of amazement and shock.

For a moment she was silent. Then, quickly, she took his hand.

' I'm sorry, Henry. I didn't mean to do anything like this to you. I was just kidding.

Teasing."

He looked at her then, turning his head slowly and he spoke in a deep, dull voice.

"It is I who must apologize. I have no idea under these circumstances of what I should do. I didn't know that ladies talked about things like that as you have just been talking about them. And if--I mean, since--they do, I don't know how to respond."

Marian nodded and relinquished his hand which dropped inertly on the stair carpet.

"I probably just wanted to find out what you'd do. You're pretty nice, Henry. I've never in this city, or any other, met two hundred and twenty pounds of absolute purity and punctiliousness before. The playboys up and down the avenues of this little home town of mine are decadent at fourteen. Look. I'll try to teach you what you ought to know without being mean to you. But first we've got to see the sights. I made grandfather promise to take me along. Do you mind?"

He stood up. "Not if you can further tolerate the society of a fool."

"It's called the Empire State Building." Elihu Whitney leaned forward and spoke to his chauffeur. "Just pull over to the curb a moment, Gedney."

Henry looked.

His eyes traveled to the cylindrical, shimmering apex of the colossal obelisk, and then back to the street. He watched the ant-swarm on the pavement as if he were wondering from what incredible source they drew sufficient courage to walk beneath these awful structures. He stared again at the surrounding buildings, dwarfed by the Empire State Tower.

Blue sky and sunlight seemed phenomena subsidiary to this man-made thing.

Perception of such magnitude made him ache. It was a shock to bring back his eyes to the old man and the girl who sat beside him in the tonneau of the car. They were still novelties--but in the confinement of an apartment they had seemed more like what Henry had expected people would be, than they did here on Fifth Avenue.

They were looking at him, waiting for him to speak. He tried to push the right words into his consciousness but they would not come. Instead, he looked again at the skyscraper beyond the place where its altitude was credible, beyond that to the place where his insular sense of proportion was shattered, and his eyes suddenly filled with tears.

He felt Elihu Whitney's arm around his shoulder. He heard the old man's voice telling the chauffeur to drive on. He realized in the midst of his poignant: muteness that the girl and her grandfather were exchanging a long meaningful glance.

"Your New York offices."

Once again Henry found his eyes straining upward at the window-made geometry of unleashed, up-leaping surfaces.

This time he smiled. "Mine? I really have rather nice offices haven't I? What floor are they on?"

Whitney chuckled. "Any floor you like. The whole building is yours."

"Very convenient."

"And another building just as big in Chicago," Marian said, looking at him, "and another in Seattle, and another in San Francisco, and one in Pittsburgh. Oh, you have lots of buildings, Henry. You can play house in almost any city in the country without having to pay rent. Of course I hope you'll make your headquarters in New York. But then I'm just a little frivolous girl who'd be jealous of the equally frivolous girls in the other cities if you moved."

Whitney half interrupted his granddaughter.

"Would you like to go in and meet Voorhees?"

"He's the man at the head of all father's papers, isn't he?"

"Your papers, my boy."

Henry considered. "He's the man who you say mismanages the estate? Goes in for cheap politics? Graft?"

"He's the man."

' I'm surprised, if what you say is true, that he was allowed to remain in such a powerful position."

The car had stopped at the curb near the doors of the Record Building.

Elihu Whitney glanced at the young man beside him. There was fire in his eyes when he spoke, yet he kept turning his gaze toward the tremendous bronze doors as if he expected an eavesdropper to come out of them.

"You're the only man in the world who can interfere with Voorhees, son. Let me repeat, I've been waiting for the day of reckoning that would be represented by your return--or your father's--for a whole generation and more. I was powerless, legally, to change anything so long as the Stone newspapers made money. But I've watched in silent fury, and with an aching heart, the perversion of the finest newspaper reputation in the world to a reputation for scandalous, brazen, unprincipled, thieving, lying, blackmailing, rabble-raising villainy. I've watched Voorhees become one of the most powerful men in the country, an elector of innumerable foul politicians, a salesman of bad securities, a giant public grafter, a scourge and a menace.

"You mustn't get so excited, grandfather."

Marian addressed the old man, but her eyes were on Henry.

Whitney shrugged. "I can't help it. What do you say, Stone? Shall we go up?"

Henry had no criterion for measuring sinister men. He had expected someone ugly in appearance and uncouth in behavior. But he saw, seated behind a magnificent desk in a vast, cool, tasteful, and altogether peaceful-seeming office, a man of perhaps fifty with curly iron-gray hair, bright, straightforward eyes--eyes that a more experienced person might have found too candid--with an urbane smile and an outstretched hand. He found a man, elegantly dressed, whose diction was impeccable, whose voice was cultured--a man with none of the seeming of the rascal.

Whitney took Voorhees' hand and smiled at his words of greeting:

"Elihu! Delighted to see you. It's been a long time. And you, too, Marian."

He looked then inquiringly at Henry.

The old lawyer allowed his inspection to continue for a fraction of a second, during which Voorhees’ face was subtly altered.

Then Whitney laughed, apparently in completely good humor.

"I see you're beginning to guess my little surprise. And you're correct. This is Henry Stone."

Once again the newspaper publisher's face betokened a slight, but definite, variation. He strode around his desk and seized Henry's hand in both of his.

"Stone! Good God, young man, what a surprise! And what a story!" He smiled ruefully, then. "And how we've mishandled it. We've made the young scion of our founder into a Tarzan, without any real information about him at all."

Henry, in the suit which Elihu Whitney had secured, with his absurd mustache shaved away, was certainly spectacular, but he made a picture far removed from the stone age, he was different from other men only because of his superb physique, his indelible tan and his immaculate eyes.

He answered Voorhees embarrassedly.

' I'm very glad to make your acquaintance. I don't think the reports of me which I have seen in the
Record
did my pride any permanent injury. But they did serve to add to my confusion."

The confidence of Henry's speech discomfited Voorhees.

He glanced at Whitney, who said archly:

"You see he will be quite able to look out for himself in this new-found world.

Even, I dare say, to look after his possessions."

Voorhees surveyed Henry surreptitiously while he opened a desk drawer, took out a box of cigars and passed them. He glanced thoughtfully at Whitney as the old man lighted his cigar and observed a smile behind the gnarled hands.

Finally Voorhees spoke, his voice casual and his words identifying themselves in the air as exhaled smoke.

"You intend to follow your father's footsteps, Mr. Stone.

Henry shook his head diffidently. "My father trained me in as much of the theory and practice of newspaper work as he knew."

Elihu Whitney interrupted him.

"Going to be a rude awakening, eh, Voorhees? Back into our midst unsullied and unchanged, come all the ideals, all the eagerness, all the public principles and ambitions of an older and a better day. They come with millions behind them and a score of great newspapers for a voice. For years and years I've wished I was young again. And a thousand times I've wondered what this boy's father would do about the cesspool modern life has become. Egad, we'll find out!"

Voorhees' brow had faintly darkened, but he wore an industriously mustered expression of amused agreement. It was Henry who spoke, partly from common sense and partly because of the confusion into which he had been thrust:

"If you gentlemen are counting on me for any such exhibition, you seriously overrate me."

Whitney glanced hastily at him and so did Marian.

"Of course we don't expect you to set the world to rights in a day--"

Henry nodded. "Or perhaps never. You see I don't know anything about the world.

I'm just beginning to realize that what my father taught me about newspapers will be useless to me. It isn't my world or my responsibility. The sort of verbal fencing to which you have just resorted is not in accordance with my nature. If subtleties of this sort must exist, they will do so without me."

He paused.

"I see I have offended both of you, but I might as well make my position clear now as later."

Elihu Whitney broke through Henry's words with an anxious phrase:

"Don't you think you better reserve all your opinions until later?"

Henry shook his head. "I hate to be disappointing, but I've seen enough of newspapers to know that I'm an ignoramus where they are concerned. My father taught me to make decisions for myself and to make them quickly. I shall certainly spend a year, and possibly two or three, in the mere business of acclimating myself with this new and fantastic world."

He smiled a little.

"You, Mr. Whitney, in your eagerness to see certain ideas of your own materialize, and you, Mr. Voorhees, in your natural agitation about your future status in my concern, have both overlooked the fact that I have been in the most solitary sort of confinement and isolation all the long years of my life. To put any sort of responsibility on my shoulders, to expect me to assume any such responsibilities, is unthinkable. It is obvious that I shall be compelled, whether I like it or not, to leave everything in statu quo for a very long time. Have I made myself clear?"

To that long and careful speech there were three reactions. Elihu Whitney threw away his fresh cigar and grunted.

Marian stared through the high windows at the sky-line of New York, her lips pursed, her eyes amused and speculative.