Children of the Whirlwind
the bar and remarked: “Give me some of the real stuff, Tim, and forget
that eye-dropper the boss bought you last week.” Barney had a drink of
the real stuff, and then another drink, in the measuring of neither of
which had an eye-dropper been involved.
After that, much heartened, he put two dollars upon the bar and went
his way. His course took the dapper Barney into three of the gayest
restaurants in the Times Square section; and in these Barney paused long
enough to speak to a few after-theater supper-parties. For this was the
hour when Barney paid his social calls; he was very strict with himself
upon this point. Barney was really by way of being a rising figure in
this particular circle of New York society composed of people who had
or believed they had an interest in the theater, of expensively gowned
women the foreground of whose lives was most attractive, but whose
background was perhaps wisely kept out of the picture, and of moneyed
young men who gloried in the idea that they were living the life. These
social calls from gay table to gay table, at all of which Barney was
welcome--for here Barney showed only his most attractive surfaces, his
most brilliant facets--were in truth a very important part of Barney's
business.
A little later, alone at a corner table in a quieter restaurant, Barney
was eating his supper and making an inventory of his prospects. He was
in a very exultant mood. The whiskey he had drunk had given broad
wings to his self-satisfaction; and what he was now sipping from his
tea-cup--it was not tea, for Barney was on the proper terms with his
waiter here--this draught from his tea-cup tipped these broad wings at a
yet more soaring angle.
Yes, he had certainly put it over so far. And Maggie would certainly
prove a winner. Those fair women he had chatted with as he had moved
from table to table, why, they'd be less than dirt compared to Maggie
when Maggie was rigged out and readied up and the stage was set. And it
had been he, Barney Palmer, who had been the first to discover Maggie's
latent possibilities!
He had an eye beyond mere surfaces, had Barney. He had used women in the
past in putting over many of his more private transactions (and had done
so partly for the reason that using women so was eminently “safe”--this
despite his violent outburst of sneering disdain at Larry when the
latter had spoken of safety): some of them professional sharpers, some
unscrupulous actresses of the lower flight--such women as he had just
chatted with in the restaurants where he had made his brief visits. But
such, he now recognized, were rather BLASEES, rather too obvious. They
were the blown rose. But Maggie was fresh, and once she was properly
broken in, she would be his perfect instrument. Yes, perfect!
Barney's plans soared on. Some day, when it fitted in just right with
his plans, he was going to marry Maggie, It was only recently that he
had seen her full charms, and still more recently that he had determined
upon marriage. That decision had materially altered certain details of
the career Barney had blue-printed for himself. Barney had long regarded
marriage as an asset for himself; a valuable resource which he must hold
in reserve and not liquidate, or capitalize, until his own market was at
its peak. He knew that he was good-looking, an excellent dancer, that he
had the metropolitan finish. He had calculated that sometime some rich
girl, perhaps from the West, who did not know the world too well, would
fall under the spell of his charms; and he would marry her promptly
while she was still infatuated, before she could learn too much about
him. Such had been Barney's idea of marriage for himself; which is very
similar to ideas held by thousands of gentlemen, young and otherwise,
in this broad land of ours, who consider themselves neither law-breakers
nor adventurers.
But that was all changed now. Now it was Maggie, though Maggie in
pursuit of their joint advantage might possibly first have to go through
the marriage ceremony with some other man. Of course, a very, very rich
man! Barney already had this man marked. He hoped, though, they would
not have to go so far as marriage. However, he was willing to wait his
proper turn. As he had told Maggie, you could not put over a big thing
in a hurry.
As for Larry, he'd certainly handled that business in swell fashion!
He'd certainly put a crimp in what had been developing between Larry and
Maggie. And he'd get Larry in time, too. The drag-net was too large and
close of mesh for Larry to hope to escape it. The word he'd slipped that
boob Gavegan had sure done the business! And the indirect way he had
tipped off the police about Red Hannigan and Jack Rosenfeldt and had
then made his pals think Larry had squealed--that was sure playing the
game, too! Jack and Red would get off easy--there was nothing on them;
but little old Barney Palmer had certainly used his bean in the way
he had set the machinery of the police and the under-world in motion
against Larry!
While other occupants of the cafe, particularly the women, stole looks
at the handsome, flawlessly dressed, interesting-looking Barney, Barney
had yet another of those concoctions which the discreet waiter served in
a tea-cup. He'd done a great little job, you bet! Not another man in New
York could have done better. He was sure going to put Maggie across! And
in doing so, he was going to do what was right by yours truly.
All seemed perfect in Barney's world....
And while Barney sat exulting over triumphs already achieved and those
inevitably to be achieved, Maggie lay in her new bed dreaming exultant
dreams of her own: heedless of the regular snoring which resounded in
the adjoining room--for the excellent Miss Grierson, while able to
keep her every act in perfect form while in the conscious state,
unfortunately when unconscious had no more control of the goings-on of
her mortal functions than the lowliest washwoman. Maggie's flights
of fancy circled round and round Larry. She stifled any excuses or
insurgent yearnings for him. He'd deserved what he had got. Already,
contrary to his predictions, she had made a tremendous advance into her
brilliant future. She would show him! Yes, she would show him! Oh, but
she was going to do things!
But while she dreamed thus, shaping a magnificent destiny--an
independent, self-engineered young woman, so very, very confident of the
great future she was going to achieve through the supremacy of her own
will and her own abilities--no slightest surmise came into her mind that
Barney Palmer was making plans by which her will was to count as naught
and by which he was to be the master of her fate, and that the furtive,
yielding Old Jimmie was also dreaming a patient dream in which she was
to be a mere chess-piece which was to capture a long-cherished game.
And yet, after all, Maggie's dreams, aside from the peculiar twist life
had given them, were fundamentally just the ordinary dreams of youth: of
willful confident youth, to whom but a small part of the world has yet
been opened, who in fact does not yet half know its own nature.
CHAPTER XV
No prison could have been more agreeable--that is, no prison from which
Maggie was omitted--than this in which Larry was now confined. He had
the run of the apartment; Dick Sherwood outfitted him liberally with
clothing from his superabundance of the best; Judkins and the other
servants treated him as the member of the family which they had been
informed he was; the lively Dick, with his puppy-like friendliness,
asked never an uncomfortable question, and placed Larry almost on the
footing of a chum; and the whimsically smiling Miss Sherwood treated
Larry exactly as she might have treated any well-bred gentleman and in
every detail made good on her promise to give him a chance. In fact, in
all his life Larry had never lived so well.
As for Miss Sherwood's aunt, a sister of Miss Sherwood's mother and a
figure of pale, absent-minded dignity, she kept very much to her own
sitting-room. She was a recent convert to the younger English novelists,
and was forced to her seclusion by the amazing fecundity with which they
kept repopulating her reading-table. Larry she accepted with a hazy,
preoccupied politeness, eager always to get back to the more substantial
characters of her latest fiction.
Of course Miss Sherwood did not make of Larry a complete confidant. For
all her smiling, easy frankness, he knew that there were many doors
of her being which she never unlocked for him. What he saw was so
interesting that he could not help being interested about the rest. Of
course many details were open to him. She was an excellent sportswoman;
a rare dancer; there were many men interested in her; she dined out
almost every other evening at some social affair blooming belatedly in
May (most of her friends were already settled in their country homes,
and she was still in town only because her place on Long Island was in
disorder due to a two months' delay in the completion of alterations
caused by labor difficulties); she had made a study of beetles; she had
a tiny vivarium in the apartment and here she would sit studying her
pets with an interest and patience not unlike that of old Fabre upon his
stony farm. Also, as Larry learned from her accounts, there was a day
nursery on the East Side whose lack of a deficit was due to her.
All in all she was a healthy, normal, intelligent, unself-sacrificing
woman who belonged distinctly to her own day; who gave a great deal to
life, and who took a great deal from life.
Often Larry wished she would speak of Hunt. He was curious about Hunt,
of whom he thought daily; and such talk might yield him information
about the blustering, big-hearted painter who was gypsying it down at
the Duchess's. But as the days passed she never mentioned Hunt again;
not even to ask where he was or what he was doing. She was adhering very
strictly to the remark she had made the night Larry came here: “I don't
want to know until he wants me to know.” And so Hunt remained the same
incomplete picture to Larry; the painter was indubitably at home in such
surroundings as these, and he was at home as a roistering, hard-working
vagabond at the Duchess's--but all the vast spaces between were utterly
blank, except for the sketchy remarks Hunt had made concerning himself.
Larry had guessed that hurt pride was the reason for Hunt's vanishment
from the world which had known him. But he knew hurt pride was not Miss
Sherwood's motive for making no inquiries. Anger? No. Jealousy? No.
Some insult offered her? No. Larry went through the category of ordinary
motives, of possible happenings; but he could find none which would
reconcile her very keen and kindly feeling for Hunt with her abstinence
from all inquiries.
From his first day in his sanctuary Larry spent long hours every day
over the accounts and documents Miss Sherwood had put in his hands. They
were indeed a tangle. Originally the Sherwood estate had consisted
of solid real-estate holdings. But now that Larry had before him
the records of holdings and of various dealings he learned that the
character of the Sherwood fortune had altered greatly. Miss Sherwood's
father had neglected the care of this sober business in favor of
speculative investment and even outright gambling in stocks; and
Dick, possessing this strain of his father, and lacking his father's
experience, had and was speculating even more wildly.
Larry had followed the market since he had been in a broker's office
almost ten years earlier, so he knew what stock values had been and
had some idea of what they were now. The records, and some of the stock
Larry found in the safe, recalled the reputation of the elder Sherwood.