Читать книгу Dead Man's Hat - Footner Hulbert - Страница 3

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Eleven o’clock at night in the collection department of the Chambers National Bank. Dave Westover and his friend and room-mate Bill Fielder, were still at work searching for a stubborn ninety cents that refused to come to light. It was the last day of the month, when a general balance had to be struck. Bill was reading off figures from a sheaf of adding-machine slips, while Dave checked them on the carbon copies of the day’s collection sheets. The other eighteen clerks in the department had left.

Each time Dave paused to turn over a sheet, Bill took occasion to glance through a doorway in the front of the room, where he could see a fair-haired girl busy at her desk. Bill was a tall, gangling young man, all abroad, light-headed, a general favorite. “Little Wrenn is working late tonight,” he remarked.

“Yeah?” said Dave, coolly. He often looked through the doorway himself, but took care not to let Bill see him do it. Dave was much the hardier specimen of the two; notable for his steady, level glance and firm, humorous mouth.

“I don’t see what she has to work late for,” said Bill. “There are no books in the correspondence department to be balanced.”

“Well, that’s her business,” said Dave.

“Wish we could ask her out to supper,” said Bill.

“Go to it, my lad!”

“You do it.”

“Yours was the idea!”

“Gee!” said Bill. “I’d as lief ask Mrs. Vanderbilt to go out with me, as high hat as she is!”

“She isn’t so, really,” said Dave. “She just puts that on to discourage the pills around here.”

“Well I must be one of them,” said Bill, cheerfully. “I admit she’s got me scared.... Such a darn pretty girl, too!” he added, regretfully.

The two men lit cigarettes.

“Hanged if I can make you out,” Bill presently went on. “Here you’ve been working almost alongside Paula Wrenn all this time, and you’ve never addressed a word to her except in the way of business. You’re not usually so backward about coming forward.”

“I know enough girls,” said Dave.

“That’s a lie,” said Bill; “no fellow could. And you don’t know any half so attractive as she is.”

Dave said nothing.

“You’re so darn secretive I never know what’s cooking inside your skull,” Bill continued. “I believe you’re crazy about the girl, and you won’t go near her because she’s got a better job here than you have.”

“Forget it!” said Dave.

“Now I’m sure of it,” said Bill. “Because she’s the one girl you won’t talk about.”

“You must have taken a correspondence course in psychology.”

Bill glanced enviously at Dave’s shapely brown head and wide shoulders. “If I had your personal attractions I wouldn’t stand on pride,” he said.

“Let’s get on with the work,” said Dave.

“Have you noticed she’s had a funny look in her eyes all afternoon?” said Bill. “As if she’d seen a ghost or something.”

“For God’s sake cut out the romancing and get on with the work,” said Dave, with an unnecessary heat.

“Well, it’s nothing in my life,” said Bill, arranging his slips.

Dave glanced through the doorway in a manner suggesting that the girl in the front room meant a great deal in his life, though he had never spoken to her.

Bill droned out the figures, and Dave checked them on the slips.

The collection department was on the second floor of the bank building. The door from the stair hall was a little way ahead of where the young men sat, and to their left. In a moment or two it opened, and to their great astonishment the vice-president of the bank entered, followed by the president himself. Nobody had ever heard of these dignitaries remaining at work so late.

Bill instinctively dropped his cigarette and put a sly foot on it. Not so Dave. He looked at the approaching officials, and went on smoking. The vice-president, J. J. Stuart, who was in advance, ran up his eyebrows at the sight. He was a tall man in his ’sixties, with a hard, sanctimonious face.

“What! Smoking?” he said. “You know the rules, Mr. Westover.”

Dave was not one to take kindly to reproof. At any rate not from Stuart. “It’s after hours,” he said. “I thought we were alone here.”

“The rule applies to all hours, sir,” said Stuart, severely.

“Mr. Beekman is smoking,” said Dave, quietly.

Beekman was obliged to put his cigarette to his lips to cover his smile. This was the famous Irvin Beekman, whom Wall Street called “the boy bank president,” though he was hardly a boy. Still, he was young enough to have a fellow feeling for Dave.

Stuart was so outraged he could scarcely speak. “Upon my word!” he gasped. “Upon my word! Such insolence! You may report to me at my office tomorrow morning at nine, Mr. Westover.”

“Very well, sir,” said Dave.

Bill, angry on Dave’s account and flustered, blurted out, “I was smoking too.”

“Very well,” snarled Stuart. “You can come with your friend.”

Beekman stepped into the picture. “Don’t be too hard on the men, Mr. Stuart,” he said, persuasively. “It’s eleven o’clock and they’ve been at it fourteen hours today.”

“The smoking I might condone,” said Stuart, bitterly, “but not such gratuitous insolence!”

“You are absolutely right,” said Beekman, placatingly, “but I ask you to overlook it. Because, you see, I was smoking.”

“You are the head of this institution. You can do what you like about the matter,” said Stuart, stiffly.

“No,” said Beekman, smiling; “it’s up to you. I’m just asking mercy for them like any outsider.”

“I wouldn’t presume for a moment to set up my judgment against yours,” said Stuart, primming his lips together and marching away. He disappeared through the door of the board room at the back.

Beekman lingered, rubbing his lip. Dave, and Bill could see that he was hard put to it to keep from laughing, and they wanted to laugh, too. Any spark would have produced an explosion of laughter. However, they succeeded in restraining themselves. Beekman, a handsome, confident, frank man, said to Dave:

“Look, Westover, I wouldn’t ask you to apologize to him direct. Because ... well, I know what it is myself. But do you mind if I carry your apology to him by proxy, just to smooth down the old man’s feelings?”

“Why, certainly, Mr. Beekman,” said Dave. “I spoke too quickly, anyhow.”

Beekman gave him a friendly pat on the shoulder. “Good man! ... I expect you were surprised to see us turning up at this hour,” he went on; “just as we were surprised to see you still working. As a matter of fact, we are going to have an important meeting here directly, and I want to ask you men to say nothing about it. It’s not bank business, but a public matter. There’s dynamite in it if it gets out.”

“It won’t get out through me,” said Dave.

“And what Dave says goes for me,” put in Bill.

“Thanks, both of you,” said Beekman, and went on into the board room.

“Gosh! he’s a wonder!” said Bill, admiringly. “He’s the greatest man in New York. He’s ... He’s ...” Speech failed him entirely.

Dave smiled at his friend’s extravagance. “He’s just a man like you and me,” he said, provokingly. “He’s a white man. That’s praise enough for anybody. I’m for him.”

“What a fellow you are!” said Bill, accusingly. “What you want to get Stuart started for, anyhow?”

“Old Salt Cod just naturally riles me,” said Dave, frowning at the recollection. He looked at Bill and his face softened in a friendly grin. “What for you want to get yourself fired just because I was?”

“Aah, I wasn’t going to stand by and see him put on you,” said Bill, scowling.

Dave gave him a friendly shove with his shoulder. “You are a soft guy!” he said. “But you’re a good fellow at that.... Come on, let’s get on with this.”

Presently other men began to arrive for the meeting: Snowden of the First National Bank; Gray of the Steel Trust; Hochschild, the famous international banker; Richmond of the Stock Exchange; and others. Dave and Bill glanced at them out of the corners of their eyes as they passed by. All these individuals were frequently pictured in the rotogravure supplements.

“Gosh! Some of the biggest men in town!” murmured Bill. “What the dickens do you suppose is doing in there?”

“You can search me,” said Dave.

“This must be something nation-wide in scope!”

“You talk like a newspaper,” said Dave. “Mind you say nothing about it to the fellows tomorrow. Your tongue is hung in the middle and wags at both ends.”

“I know it,” said Bill, ruefully, “but when I look at you I’ll remember to tie it down.”

Beekman appeared at the door of the board room behind them. “Oh, Fielder,” he said, “will you do me a favor?”

Bill hastened to him.

“The cigars have been forgotten,” Beekman said, with a twinkle, “and we can’t very well remind our guests of the rules. I hate to ask you, but would you mind hopping in a taxi and running up to my house at one hundred and eight Washington Square North? Ask my valet to give you a box of the special cigars, and bring them back here quickly. I will certainly be obliged to you.”

“Glad to do it, Mr. Beekman.” Bill ran into the coat-room alongside Dave’s desk, and seizing hat and coat on the fly, clattered on down the stairs.

Left alone in the room, Dave was free to look at the fair-haired girl without danger of being caught at it. She distracted him from his work. However, he presently found the ninety cents. With an expression of the relief that every bank man knows, he marked the offending slip, and clipping the papers together, thrust them into a drawer.

Then he could look at her again. She was not working. She sat with her chin resting in her palm, staring into vacancy. She was as blond and pretty as a movie queen, but discouragingly business-like. Only her dark blue eyes seemed to speak of things far from the office. Suddenly she looked straight at Dave, and he turned away his head in confusion. The next thing he knew she was beside him and speaking.

“You’re working late tonight, Mr. Westover.”

Dave scrambled to his feet. There was a quality of poignant feeling in her voice that nobody in the bank had ever heard before. He looked into her face to seek the cause of it. She quickly lowered her eyes.

“One of the boys made a mistake,” he said. “I just found it.... You’re here late, too.”

“Yes,” she said, evasively. “I had a lot of letters to get out.”

There was a silence. She said, nervously: “Funny, isn’t it, that we’ve never spoken before.”

“Often wanted to,” said Dave.

“Why didn’t you?”

“Well ... being just one of the adding-machine gunners, I thought that you ...”

“You’re not like the others,” she said, quickly. “I could see it from the first. You’re not broken to the adding-machines.”

Dave seemed to add an inch or two to his stature. Another silence. He still searched her face for an explanation of the shake in her voice, the look of pain drowned in her eyes.

“What’s the matter?” he asked, suddenly.

“Oh! ... Why do you ask that?” she countered, startled.

“I could see it all afternoon.... Something wrong.”

“Do I show it in my face?” she asked, in plain fright.

“Well, I could see it ... because ...” He pulled himself up, growing red.

“I’m almost afraid of you,” she murmured.

“That’s funny. Why should you be?”

“Never having spoken before, and all at once to be talking so intimately.”

“Why not? It seemed like a terrible hurdle to take ...”

“What did?”

“Speaking to you the first time. Now it’s perfectly natural.”

“It’s true, I am in trouble,” she said very low. “I want to tell somebody.”

“Will I do?”

“You’re the one I picked out to tell.”

Dave flushed, and then paled again. He wanted to say a whole lot, but nothing came. “Here, let’s go somewhere where we can talk by ourselves,” he said, gruffly, as a cover for his feelings.

“Where can we go?”

He considered. “All the downtown places are closed now.... Would you mind going to a speakeasy?”

“Why should I mind?” she answered, with a faint smile. “I’m a business woman.”

“I know a good place, then. Let’s go.”

She hung back in embarrassment. “Wait a minute. You ... you room with Mr. Fielder, don’t you? I don’t want him to know.”

“All right.”

“Is he ... a sound sleeper?” she asked.

Dave laughed in pure surprise. “Sleeps like the dead. What of it?”

“What must you be thinking of me?” she murmured, in distress.

“I’m for you,” he said quickly, “whatever it may be.”

“I hate to have everybody around the bank talking about our going out together.”

“You’re dead right,” he agreed. “And Bill couldn’t keep his mouth shut.”

She turned away her head. “Could you ... go home and go to bed the same as usual. And get up afterwards ... when he was asleep. And come to meet me?”

Dave perceived that there was more in this than what appeared on the surface. “Sure!” he said. “If it wouldn’t be too late for you.”

“I don’t mind how late it is, if you don’t.”

“Plenty of other nights for sleeping,” said Dave.

“I’ll meet you at the speakeasy at one o’clock.”

“Couldn’t I call for you?”

“No. No,” she said, nervously. “I’ll go in a taxi.”

“It’s Adolph’s, forty-one West Forty-first,” said Dave. “Ask for me at the door.”

She nodded and slipped away.