Читать книгу Damned - E. S. Dorrance - Страница 8

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The scene within the back room of the bath-set impressed John like a still on a film which had been full of action. First glance might have convinced a superficial person that intrusion was a mistake, but the financier was not limited to first glances.

Leaning against the farther wall, her apparel reduced to the flimsiest of the samples on recent display, stood the manikin. Both her arms were upraised. Both hands clasped the shoulders of Seff.

John glanced away; looked again; saw other things.

The girl was straining to push away the shopman, not to draw him to her. In her eyes, uplifted at the crashing of the door, was pictured the terror which had sounded in her cry. Her face was white as frost—looked the whiter for a mark, shaped after the imprint of teeth, which was reddening in the flesh of her cheek.

Self’s one arm wrapped her body tightly. His other hand was entangled in her flimsy garment at the breast. His face, also turned toward the door, shuddered with an absorbed, strange look between hope and hopelessness.

John Cabot stood on the threshold, held by astonishment. He had heard that high prices oft times were exacted of shopgirls, as of aspirants for the stage. But this situation would have seemed incredible except that there it was before his eyes. He felt a demand for initiative.

In that scant moment of hesitation, the pros and cons of the issue, as concerned himself, flashed through his mind. The principles in this behind-the-scenes passion play were not of his class, or so Catherine would have said. Both were total strangers to him, therefore their relationship not his affair. More or less undesirable notoriety must result from interference—the inevitable complement? to the Cabot millions.

However, just as he knew himself not to be a number of things which Catherine would have wished him to be, he was one thing in particular which she did not wish him to be. There had been many times when, frankly, he had congratulated himself on having been a human being long before a multi-millionaire.

Through the space which he had vacated in the doorway flocked a covey of fashion’s vultures. His audience formed as he crossed the room and laid a golf-hardened grip upon Seff’s shoulder. There was an instant of resistance. Then he tore the man away from the cowering girl.

Almost was he tripped to a fall. Glancing down, he noted a silken swirl upon the floor. His first act, after throwing aside the drink-maddened roué, was to gather up the negligee last shown outside and lay it about the model’s shoulders.

He faced around to meet Seff’s thick-lipped threats.

“Wha—what do you mean? You’ll answer to me for your interference and before you’re a minute older.”

The shopman chopped out at him recklessly, landing several blows.

Taller than Seff by half a head, superbly fit in comparison, John stood as if stricken by sudden inability. His eyes were upon the scandalized throng that had crowded into the room, rather than his opponent. He protected himself in a confused, inadequate way from a succession of attacks. The while he was considering a plan to spare the girl odium and involve her tormentor.

Evidently elated by the success of his tactics, Seff paused for emphasis.

“What d’you mean butting into my affairs?” he demanded.

“This,” answered John.

With the word, he sent his right fist to a particular spot in the aesthetic’s neck.

The effect was startling. Seff’s head lopped, his eyes rolled, his body wavered and stretched its length upon the floor.

Fright-cries rose from the crush about the door; above them, a shrill demand in Catherine’s voice.

“John, are you mad?”

The first person to reach the prone figure was, however, without utterance. An equivocal look of dread and triumph was on Mary Hutton’s face as she knelt beside the man who was her employer and more; raised his head to her knee; held a bottle of smelling salts to his nose.

John Cabot’s attention returned to the cause of the bout.

She had wrapped the negligee closely around her and stood awaiting developments with dilated eyes—the model. On her cheek the mark of teeth showed redder than before. At his glance, she took a forward step, as if to thank him, then, embarrassed by the press of people around the door, stopped.

Without words, they two regarded only each other. Quite still they stood, looking.

And as they looked, comrade spirits seemed to become visible in the glow of an incipient understanding. Beside her—faded in until to John it became as plain as her body—appeared a vision of loveliness and lure. Shy, yet unafraid, this vision beckoned him. From eyes bluer than the troubled deeps of the girl’s gaze, it smiled on him. With hair golden as the dreams of a child and tenuous as woman’s wiles, it awoke in him a thrill like that on seeing the home-land banner in foreign climes.

The while, in imagination, he heard the Spring Song of Mendelssohn, vaguely passionate, played by the pure-yearning notes of a flute. The fragrance that accompanies the aspirations of youth filled his nostrils. A thought of apple-blossoms hurt his mind with midsummer weariness.

From his heart, as if aroused by its increasing beat, uprose response to the vision. Not as if born of the moment—rather as if long protected from impious eyes—an emotion new to him seemed to take form. He felt that the girl, as well as he, must see and recognize.

Cruel with tenderness, eager with fear, the emotion that had arisen from his heart-beats passed, like a gallant shape, from him to her. In command that was, in truth, but a prayer, it faced the comrade soul of her.

For a moment and an age, the eyes of the financier and those of the shopgirl met and held, each pair the other. Met also, in that age of moment’s length, the lad Amor, a creature of the spirit whose first desire is to have and to hold, with Innocentia, one not more to cherish than to fear.

A low-voiced, fragmentary conversation recalled John to the more material present.

“You, Mary?”

“Who else? At your worst I wouldn’t dare to desert you.”

“Any more than I would you. If you hadn’t poured me so much of—— Anyhow I’ve done what you said I couldn’t do—put over a sweatshop fake that——”

“Hush, Vin. Come, get up.”

Turning, John saw Mrs. Hutton steady Seff to his feet.

An imperative voice at his own elbow advised: “Better come with me at once, John, unless you wish to get into the newspapers.”

“That is just what I do wish, Catherine,” he said.

“But as the protector of this latest Inconnue?”

“Unknown?” John glanced at his wife surprisedly, then on to the wall against which the manikin had stood.

Gone was the luring vision which his mother had taught him to believe was the soul of womanhood. Gone also the girl.

His sense of loss must have shown in his face.

“Why not play Don Quixote for some one more ambitious?” Catherine gibed. “Ask me to nominate them—as your wife I could choose the subjects with regard to the family honor and glory. I tell you there are reporters in that crowd. Once they recognize you——”

“Reporters?” He took a step toward the crush. “Publicity—that’s the cure for this scourge. Where are they?”

“But, John——” The wife who never could decide whether she disapproved or admired her husband the more, remembered in the emergency to be guileful. “Would you crush the victim to cure the scourge? Shouldn’t chivalry protect the good name of that girl? At least, she is young.”

“And pure as a white violet. For once you are right. Excuse me a moment. I must find a telephone.”

He strode away.

“Mule and mad, at that—a mad mule!”

The finality of Catherine’s thought-tribute returned her to her own predicament. Her shrug redraped about her shoulders the satin-smooth mantle of her social superiority. There was a chance that she might escape inclusion in whatever notoriety should ensue. Did not a woman and a mother—the occasion evoked a thought of Jackie—owe her first duty to herself? Let John take the consequences of his mania for reform, even to being advertised as loitering alone at the lingerie show!

Directly upon the decision to detach herself from possibly unpleasant consequences, she skimmed the edge of the crowd and left the store.

When John Cabot returned to the stage he saw that Seff already was surrounded by the reporters. Mrs. Hutton stood at his elbow, a bottle from which she evidently had poured some sort of restorative in one hand, an emptied glass in the other.

The shopman looked distressed, either by the dose pressed upon him or by his recent experience—perhaps by both. He was speaking with something of the fluency of his recent “speech,” the while adjusting his delicately-toned tie and brushing from one sleeve a reminder of his fall.

“I am Vincent Seff, owner of this establishment. A slight misunderstanding occurred inside, yes. But I have a hope that you good people, also guests at my entertainment, will respect my hospitality enough to withhold its unfortunate finale from your papers.”

The press representatives, three women and a lone man, looked dubious at this hypothetical claim. A second man, tilted in a chair against the wall, who was in the act of finishing a creditable sketch of the manikin, lifted to Cabot a companionable grin.

“Good, ain’t it?”

“Yes, it is. What will you take for it?”

“What will I take?” The grin broadened. “Why, a better art job than the one I’ve got.”

“Unfortunately I can’t pay that.”

“Sorry not to oblige an admirer of my work.” The artist banged down the forelegs of the tilted chair and gathered up his paraphernalia for departure. “If it’s your nice little idea to keep the girl’s picture out of the paper, it wouldn’t help any to withhold this. The camera gang departed on the run some time ago.”

Seff, at Mrs. Hutton’s touch on his arm, had turned and seen the addition to their group. He continued in urgent tones:

“Of course you must write your stories right, boys and girls. But I do wish you’d go light on this finish. For the sake of a highly valued patron, I should regret to have a certain name figured. Also, it scarcely seems fair to jeopard the chances of an overly impulsive young girl, just at her start of life.”

“But her scream, Mr. Seff?”

“And the door-smashing?”

“Not to mention that lively bout?”

The trio of women scribes prodded him, as though satellites of the sport instead of fashion page.

The dapper designer plunged.

“I admit that there was a small fracas, but it was due entirely to a misunderstanding. It is all patched up now, therefore not worth mentioning. For once I was at fault in my choice of an employee. You will agree, I am sure, that my little attempt at an artistic display would not have carried an evil suggestion to the clean minds for whose pleasure and profit it was planned. I scarcely know how to express myself, friends. Do try to appreciate my position.”

He glanced, as if for helpful suggestion, toward Mary Hutton, then went on, evidently planning his defense in its delivery.

“The poor girl was hysterical from nervous strain over her first public appearance. She could not have intended to give such rein to her impulses as—as—— Of course, a woman who will exhibit herself in such a rôle is not exactly—— Well, I’ll not go into that. But I owe it to myself to say that even I, experienced at judging women by their face values, would not have believed our guileless-looking Dolores Trent capable of a deliberate attempt to compromise an employer who——”

“Cad!”

At the interruption, Seff took a backward step, evidently remembering the reach and force of the speaker’s punch.

John Cabot, with a frown, stayed the three women and lone man who, having been given the all-important name of the woman in the case, were on the point of taking wing.

“Best give a minute,” he advised. “You haven’t got the real story yet. This sale is a fake. The goods were manufactured in Seff’s own sweatshops right here in New York. The money was taken under false pretenses. I am not in position to state just how usual among supposedly high-class shops is the sort of indelicacy we’ve witnessed this morning. Fortunately, however, I am able to make an example of this instance. I am John Cabot. I ask you to investigate.”

“I have heard enough of this contemptible attack, no matter who or what you are.” Seff hurled himself into the breach as bravely as his condition would permit. “Nothing but respect for the feelings of your wife has kept me from having you ejected before this. You cannot influence the newspapers against us. We are, as you should know, persistent advertisers. I ask you now to go quietly and at once, before I——”

For a moment it seemed that his advice had been accepted. John Cabot turned and crossed to the rim of the stage. There he lifted his hand to the lingering society contingent.

“I have sent for the police,” he said. “They’ll be here any minute now. They have a habit, I’m told, of taking the names of eye-witnesses. Subpoenas generally arrive at elsewhere-essential moments, so I’d suggest that such of you as have any important engagements for the near future——”

He had said enough. The remaining “valued patrons” broke the leash of curiosity and hurried away after the example of the “thoroughbred” Mrs. Cabot. Be it added that they waited not for the elevator, nor counted the steps in the flight of their descent.

For diverse reasons, a group remained with John Cabot during his brief wait for the detectives of the nearby Tenderloin police station. The reporters stayed because of the “realer” crux of the story explaining the scream of a shopgirl; Mrs. Hutton because, as she had asserted, she dared not desert Seff; the owner himself because of the competent look of a golf-steeled right, swinging from an arm whose length and strength he knew.

The while, Seff gained considerable reassurance from a sotto voce consultation with his forewoman who, in the emergency, seemed to have reversed the usual relationship of employed to employer. He greeted the officers as though they had come at his request and asked that they search the store for the model. She, although the cause of the disturbance, would be needed, he declared, as his chief witness.

Upon the report that no trace of her could be found, he addressed himself to the financier with a noticeable cessation of resentment.

The girl was gone, he pointed. That fact was substantial evidence of her guilty intent toward himself. No real harm had been done and nothing would be gained by going through with his arrest on a charge that could not be proved. Certainly, with their combined influence, the unpleasant aftermath of what so many had voted a pleasant morning could be kept from the papers. Had Mr. Cabot no thought for the consequence of the use of his name in such a connection? Even though he cared nothing for his own reputation, did he not owe something to his family? Sentiment aside, with no complaining witness what could he gain to equal what he should lose by carrying out his threat?

“But there is a complainant,” John assured him pleasantly enough. “That rôle is mine.”

“You? Can you possibly intend——”

Mrs. Hutton it was who found voice for direct demand. “What is the charge? We have a right to know, sir.”

“Assault.” John Cabot directly faced the shopman. Humor twitched his mouth as he asked: “Did you think I let you hit me for my own selfish pleasure?”

As the motor patrol purred its way to the station house, however, the amusement faded from his face. The Fall air whipped his longing for the gentler zephyrs of Spring, for the breath of apple-blooms, for the sound of a flute playing Mendelssohn’s vaguely passionate theme.

He forced himself back to certain troubleful questions of the moment. The manikin, Dolores Trent—what of her? The very strength of his desire to find her advised that he should not look for her. Why favor himself as a trailer, while jailing Seff? But where would she hide herself—what do?