Читать книгу The Ball of Fire - George Randolph Chester - Страница 4

Table of Contents

“Snow!” exclaimed Gail in delight, turning up her face to the delicate flakes. “And the sun shining. That means snow to-morrow!”

Allison helped her into his big, piratical looking runabout, and tucked her in as if she were some fragile hot-house plant which might freeze with the first cool draught. He looked, with keen appreciation, at her fresh cheeks and sparkling eyes and softly waving hair. He had never given himself much time for women, but this girl was a distinct individual. It was not her undeniable beauty which he found so attractive. He had met many beautiful women. Nor was it charm of manner, nor the thing called personal magnetism, nor the intelligence which gleamed from her eyes. It was something intangible and baffling which had chained his interest from the moment she had appeared in the vestry doorway, and since he was a man who had never admitted the existence of mysteries, his own perplexity puzzled him.

“The pretty white snow is no friend of mine,” he assured her, as he took the wheel and headed towards the Avenue. He looked calculatingly into the sky. “This particular downfall is likely to cost the Municipal Transportation Company several thousand dollars.”

“I’m curious to know the commercial value of a sunset in New York,” Gail smiled up at him. Her eyes closed for a swift instant, her long, brown lashes curving down on her cheeks, but beneath them was an infinitesimal gleam; and Allison had the impression that under the cover of her exquisitely veined lids she was looking at him corner-wise, and having a great deal of fun all by herself.

“We haven’t capitalised sunsets yet, but we have hopes,” he laughed.

“Then there’s still a commercial opportunity,” she lightly returned. “I feel quite friendly to money, but it’s so intimate here. I’ve heard nothing else since I came, on Monday.”

“Even in church,” he chuckled. “You delivered a reckless shock to the Reverend Smith Boyd’s vestry.”

“Well?” she demanded. “Didn’t he ask my opinion?”

“I don’t think he’ll make the mistake again,” and Allison took the corner into the Avenue at a speed which made Gail, unused to bare inches of leeway, class Allison as a demon driver. The tall traffic policeman around whose upraised arm they had circled smiled a frank tribute to her beauty, and she felt relieved. She had cherished some feeling that they should be arrested.

“However, even a church must discuss money,” went on Allison, as if he had just decided a problem to which he had given weighty thought.

“Fifty millions isn’t mere money,” retorted Gail; “it’s criminal wealth. If no man can make a million dollars honestly, how can a church?”

Allison swerved out into the centre of the Avenue and passed a red limousine before he answered. He had noticed that everybody in the street stared into his car, and it flattered him immensely to have so pretty a girl with him.

“The wealth of Market Square Church is natural and normal,” he explained. “It arises partly from the increase in value of property which was donated when practically worthless. Judicious investment is responsible for the balance.”

“Oh, bother!” and Gail glanced at him impatiently. “Your natural impulse is to defend wealth because it is wealth; but you know that Market Square Church never should have had a surplus to invest. The money should have been spent in charity. Why are they saving it?”

Allison began to feel the same respect for Gail’s mental processes which he would for a man’s, though, when he looked at her with this thought in mind, she was so thoroughly feminine that she puzzled him more than ever.

“Market Square Church has an ambition worthy of its vestry,” he informed her, bringing his runabout to rest, with a swift glide, just an accurate three inches behind the taxi in front of them. “When it has fifty million dollars, it proposes to start building the most magnificent cathedral on American soil.”

Gail watched the up-town traffic piling around them, wedging them in, packing them tightly on all sides, and felt that they must be hours in extricating themselves from this tangle of shining-bodied vehicles. The skies had turned grey by now, and the snow was thicker in the air. The flakes drove, with a cool, refreshing snap, into her face.

“Why?” she pondered. “Will a fifty million dollar cathedral save souls in proportion to the amount of money invested?”

Allison enjoyed that query thoroughly.

“You must ask the Reverend Smith Boyd,” he chuckled. “You talk like a heathen!”

“I am,” she calmly avowed. “I’ve been a heathen ever since a certain respectable old religious body dropped the theory of infant damnation from its creed. Its body of elders decided to save the souls of unbaptised babies from everlasting hell-fire; and the anti-damnation wing won by three grey-whiskered votes.”

Proper ladies in the nearby cars stared with haughty disapproval at Allison, whose degree of appreciation necessitated a howl. Gail, however, did not join in the mirth. That telltale red spot had appeared in the delicate pink of her checks. She was still angry with the man-made creed which had taught a belief so horrible. The traffic blockade was lifted, and Allison’s clutch slammed. The whole mass of vehicles moved forwards, and in two blocks up the Avenue they had scattered like chaff. Allison darted into an opening between two cars, his runabout skidded, and missed a little electric by a hair’s breadth. He had no personal interest in religion, but he had in Gail.

“So you turned infidel.”

“Oh no,” returned Gail gravely, and with a new tone. “I pray every morning and every night, and God hears me.” The note of reverence in her voice was a thing to which Allison gave instant respect. “I have no quarrel with religion, only with theology. I attend church because its spiritual influence has survived in spite of outgrown rites. I take part in the services, though I will not repeat the creed. Why, Mr. Allison, I love the church, and the most notable man in the future history of the world will be the man who saves it from dead dogma.” Her eyes were glowing, the same eyes which had closed in satirical mischief. Now they were rapt. “What a stunning collie!” she suddenly exclaimed.

Allison, who had followed her with admiring attention, his mind accompanying hers in eager leaps, laughed in relief. After all, she was a girl—and what a girl! The exhilaration of the drive, and of the snow beating in her face, and of the animated conversation, had set the clear skin of her face aglow with colour. Her deep red lips, exquisitely curved and half parted, displayed a row of dazzling white teeth, and the elbow which touched his was magnetic. Allison refused to believe that he was forty-five!

“You’re fond of collies,” he guessed, surprised to find himself with an eager interest in the likes and dislikes of a young girl. It was a new experience.

“I adore them!” she enthusiastically declared. “Back home, I have one of every marking but a pure white.”

There was something tender and wistful in the tone of that “back home.” No doubt she had hosts of friends and admirers there, possibly a favoured suitor. It was quite likely. A girl such as Gail Sargent could hardly escape it. If there was a favoured suitor Allison rather pitied him, for Gail was in the city of strong men. Busy with an entirely new and strange group of thoughts, Allison turned into the Park, and Gail uttered an exclamation of delight as the fresh, keen air whipped in her face. The snow was like a filmy white veil against the bare trees, and enough of it had clung, by now, to outline, with silver pointing, the lacework of branches. On the turf, still green from the open winter, it lay in thin white patches, and squirrels, clad in their sleek winter garments, were already scampering to their beds, crossing the busy drive with the adroitness of accomplished metropolitan pedestrians, their bushy tails hopping behind them in ungainly loops.

The pair in the runabout were silent, for the east drive at this hour was thronged with outward bound machines, and the roadway was slippery with the new-fallen snow. Steady of nerve, keen of eye, firm of hand! Gail watched the alert figure of Allison, tensely and yet easily motionless, in the seat beside her. The terrific swiftness of everything impressed her. Every car was going at top speed, and it seemed that she was in a constant maze of hair-breadth escapes. By and by, however, she found another and a greater marvel; that in all this breathless driving, there was no recklessness. Capability, that was the word for which she had been groping. No man could survive here, and rest his feet upon the under layer, unless he possessed superior ability, superior will, superior strength. She arrived at exactly the same phrase Allison had entertained five minutes before; “the city of strong men!” Again she turned to the man at her side for a critical inspection, in this new light. His frame was powerful, and the square, high forehead, with the bulges of concentration above the brows, showed his mental equipment to be equally as rugged. His profile was a crisply cut silhouette against the wintry grey; straight nose, full, firm lips, pointed chin, square jaw. He was a fair example of all this force.

Perhaps feeling the steady gaze, Allison turned to her suddenly, and for a moment the grey eyes and the brown ones looked questioningly into each other, then there leaped from the man to the woman a something which held her gaze a full second longer than she would have wished.

“Air’s great,” he said with a smile.

“Glorious!” she agreed. “I don’t want to go in.”

“Don’t,” he promptly advised her.

“That’s a simple enough solution,” and her laugh, in the snow-laden air, reminded him, in one of those queer flashes of memory, of a little string of sleighbells he had owned as a youngster. “However, I promised Cousin Lucile.”

“We’ll stop at the house long enough to tell her you’re busy,” suggested Allison, as eager as a boy. He had been on his way home to dress for a business banquet, but such affairs came often, and impulsive adventures like this could be about once in a lifetime with him. He had played the grubbing game so assiduously that, while he had advanced, as one of his lieutenants said, from a street car strap to his present mastership of traction facilities, he had missed a lot of things on the way. He was energetic to make up for the loss, however. He felt quite ready to pour a few gallons of gasolene into his runabout and go straight on to Boston, or any other place Gail might suggest; and there was an exhilaration in his voice which was contagious.

“Let’s!” cried Gail, and, with a laugh which he had discarded with his first business promotion, Allison threw out another notch of speed, and whirled from the Seventy-second Street entrance up the Avenue to the proper turning, and halfway down the block, where he made a swift but smooth stop, bringing the step with marvellous accuracy to within an inch of the curb.

“Won’t you come in?” invited Gail.

“We’d stay too long,” grinned Allison, entering into the conspiracy with great fervour.

She flashed at him a smile and ran up the steps. She turned to him again as she waited for the bell to be answered, and nodded to him with frank comradery.

“Time me,” she called, and he jerked out his watch as she slipped in at the door.

Two vivacious looking young women, one tall and black-haired and the other petite and blonde, and both fashionably slender and both pretty, rushed out into the hall and surrounded her.

“We thought you’d never come,” rattled Lucile Teasdale, who was the petite blonde, and the daughter of the sister of the wife of Gail’s Uncle Jim.

“Who’s the man?” demanded Mrs. “Arly” Fosland, with breathless interest.

“Where’s my tea?” answered Gail.

“We saw you dash up,” supplemented Lucile. “We thought it was a fire.”

“Why doesn’t he come in?” this from Arly, in whom two years of polite married life had not destroyed an innocently eager curiosity to inspect eligibles at close range, for her friends.

“Who is he?” insisted Lucile, peeping out of the hall window.

“Edward E. Allison,” primly announced Gail, suppressing a giggle. “I got him at Uncle Jim’s vestry meeting. He’s waiting to take me riding in the Park. Where’s my tea?”

“Edward E. Allison!” gasped “Arly” Fosland. “Why, he’s the richest bachelor in New York, even if he isn’t a social butterfly,” and she contemplated Gail in sisterly wonder and admiration. “Good gracious, child, run!”

“Come for the tea to-morrow!” urged Lucile.

They were all three laughing, and the two young married women were pushing Gail forward. At the door Lucile and Arly separated from her, to peer out of the two side windows.

“He doesn’t look so old,” speculated Arly; and Lucile opened the door.

“Good-bye, dearie,” and Lucile kissed her cousin in plain sight of the curb, upon which there was nothing for that young lady to do but go.

For an instant, Edward E. Allison had a glimpse of her, in her garnet and turquoise, flanked by a sprightly vision in blue and another sprightly vision in pink, and he thought he heard the suppressed sounds of tittering; then the door closed, and the lace curtains of the hall windows bulged outward, and Gail came tripping down the steps.

“Two minutes and forty-eight seconds,” called Allison, putting away his stop watch with one hand and helping her with the other. He tucked her in more quickly than at the church, but with equal care, then he jumped in beside her, and never had he cut so swift and sure a circle with his sixty horse-power runabout.

They raced up and into the Park, and around the winding driveways with the light-hearted exhilaration of children, and if there was in them at that moment any trace of mature thought, they were neither one aware of it. They were glad that they were just living, and moving swiftly in the open air, glad that it was snowing, glad that the light was beginning to fade, that there were other vehicles in the Park, that the world was such a bright and happy place; and they were quite pleased, too, to be together.

It was still light, though the electric lamps were beginning to flare up through the thin snow veil, when they rounded a rocky drive, and came in view of a little lookout house perched on a hill.

“Oh!” called Gail, involuntarily putting her hand on his arm. “I want to go up there!”

The work of Edward E. Allison was well nigh perfection. He stopped the runabout exactly at the centre of the pathway, and was out and on Gail’s side of the car with the agility of a youngster after a robin’s egg. He helped her to alight, and would have helped her up the hill with great pleasure, but she was too nimble and too eager for that, and was in the lookout house several steps ahead of him.

“It’s glorious,” she said, and her low, melodious voice thrilled him again with that strange quality he had noticed when she had first spoken at the vestry meeting.

Below them lay a grey mist, dotted here and there with haloed lights, which receded in the distance into tiny yellow blurs, while the nearer lamps were swathed in swirling snowflakes. Nearby were ghosts of trees projecting their tops from the misty lake, and out of what seemed a vast eerie depth came the clang of street cars, and the rumble of the distant elevated, and the honks of auto horns, and all the rattle and roar of the great city, muffled and subdued.

“It’s like being out of the world.” He was astonished to find in himself the sudden growth of a poetic spirit, and his voice had in it the modulation which went with the sentiment.

“This was created,” mused Gail, as if answering an inner question. “Why should the clumsy minds of men destroy the simplicity of anything so vast, and good, and beautiful, as our instinctive belief in the Creator?”

Finding no answer in his experience to this unfathomable mystery, Edward E. Allison very wisely kept still and admired the scenery, which consisted of one girl framed tastefully in a miscellaneous assortment of snowflakes. When he tried to unravel the girl, he found her a still more fathomless mystery, and gave up the task in a hurry. After all, she was right there, and that was enough.

When she was quite finished with the view, she turned and went down the hill, and Edward Allison nearly sprained his spinal column in getting just ahead of her on the steepened narrow path. It was treacherous walking just there, with the freshly fallen snow on the shale stones. He was heartily glad that he had taken this precaution, for, near the bottom of the hill, one of her tiny French heels slid, and she might have fallen had it not been for the iron-like arm which he threw back to support her. For just an instant she was thrown fairly in his embrace, with his arm about her waist, and her weight upon his breast; and, in that instant, the fire which had been smouldering in him all afternoon burst into flame. With a mighty repression he resisted the impulse to crush her to him, and handed her to the equilibrium which she instinctively sought, though the arm trembled which had been pressed about her. His heart sang, as he helped her into the machine, and sprang in beside her. He felt a savage joy in his strength as he started the car and felt the wheel under his hard grip. He was young, younger than he had ever been in his boyhood; strong, stronger than he had ever been in his youth. What worlds he might conquer now with this new blood racing through his veins. It was as if he had been suddenly thrust into the fires of eternal life, and endowed with all the vast, irresistible force of creation!

Gail, too, was disturbed. While she had laughed to cover the embarrassment of her mishap, she had been quite collected enough to thank Allison for his ready aid; but she had felt the thrill of that tensed arm, and it had awakened in her mind an entirely new vein of puzzled conjecture. They were both silent, and busy with that new world which opens up when any two congenial personalities meet, as they raced out of the Park, and over One Hundred and Tenth Street, and up Riverside Drive, and out Old Broadway. Occasionally they exchanged bits of spineless repartee, and laughed at it, but this was only perfunctory, for they had left the boy and girl back yonder in the park.

Gravity with a man invariably leads him back to the consideration of his leading joy in life, business; and the first thing Allison knew he was indulging in quite a unique weakness, for him; he was bragging! Not exactly flat-footed; but, with tolerably strong insinuation, he gave her to understand that the consolidation of the immense traction interests of New York was about as tremendous an undertaking as she could comprehend, and that, having attained so dizzy a summit, he felt entitled to turn himself to lighter things, to enjoy life and gaiety and frivolity, to rest, as it were, upon his laurels.

Gail was amused, as she always was when men of strong achievement dropped into this weakness to interest girls. She did appreciate and admire his no doubt tremendous accomplishment; it was only his naïvete which amused her, and to save her she could not resist the wicked little impulse to nettle him. To his suggestion that he could now lead a merry life because he was entitled to rest upon his laurels, she had merely answered “Why?”

He dropped into a silence so dense that the thump was almost audible, and she was contrite. She had pricked him deeper than she knew, however. She had not understood how gigantic the man’s ambitions had been, nor how vain he was of his really marvellous progress. After all, why should he pause, when he had such power in him? She did well to speak slightingly of any achievement made by a man of such proved ability. New ambitions sprang up in him. The next time he talked of business with her he would have something startling under way; something to compel her respect. The muscles of his jaws knotted. It was like being dared to climb higher in a swaying tree.

“Oh, it’s dark!” suddenly discovered Gail. “Aunty will be frantic.”

“That’s so,” regretfully agreed Allison, who, having no Aunties of his own, was prone to forget them. “We’ll stop up at this roadhouse, and you can telephone her,” and he turned in at the drive where rose petalled lights gleamed out from the latticed windows of a low-eaved building. Dozens of autos, parked amid the snow-sheeted shrubbery, glared at them with big yellow eyes, and, through the windows, were white cloths and sparkling glassware, and laughing groups about the tables, and hurrying waiters. There was music, too, slow, languorous music!

“Doesn’t it look inviting!” exclaimed Allison, becoming instantly aware of the pangs of hunger.

“It’s an enchanting place!” agreed Gail enthusiastically.

Allison hesitated a moment.

“Tell your aunt we’re dining here,” he suggested.

She laughed aloud.

“Wouldn’t it be fun,” she speculated, and Allison led her in to the phone. She turned to him with a snap in her eyes at the door of the booth. “It depends on who answers.”