Dangerous Business/Chapter 17
She went to the office in the morning, ignorant as to Lew's whereabouts, and learned that he had left town. No one regarded her differently; of course, no one knew. Jay was the same to her but every contact with him was charged with the stir within her aroused by Lew.
Working for Jay with her head and hands, she slipped into sudden, pale inattentions which puzzled him and caused him to ask less of her.
"You're doing too much," he said.
She denied it, ineffectively; he took his matters to another girl but with her he still talked over matters at the end of a day.
One bit of luck she had; Lew remained away. Indeed, he went off on a round of his sales offices in California and the northwest coast. When Ellen read this in a letter to Mr. Rountree, she felt lightened and as if given a reprieve. No longer, for a while at least, might he descend upon her with the morning train from Stanley.
However, he proved his persisting thought of her by bestowal of flowers with which Di had filled two vases, when Ellen reached home; as before, she cast them out and made no acknowledgment; but, as before, he had sent a card which discounted immediate expectations of gratitude.
Continually, through the office, he displayed the power of his position. It had been the habit of Stanley Alban, from the beginning, to pay to John Rountree the invoices of each week; and Lew, taking over from his father, continued the practice. Evidently he had left signed checks to be filled in and countersigned by the treasurer, during his absence; so upon each Monday morning, Ellen took from an Alban envelope Lew's draft for twelve thousand or fifteen thousand dollars.
The amount, whichever it happened to be, now exceeded the total income from all other sources. It met Rountree bills, provided the Rountree payroll and supplied what profit there was. Never, since the very start, had the firm been so completely dependent on the faithfulness of the friendship of the man, old and bedridden now and slowly failing, in his home in the little town of central Illinois.
Mr. Rountree phoned him daily and went down on weekends, at fortnight intervals; whereat Di laughed, after report of these visits reached her through the Slengels.
"Mr. Rountree goes because he cares; I hear him when he phones," Ellen declared. "He's not hypocritical."
"I'll scream to the sunny sky that he's not," granted Di. "I bet not a sincerer prayer for long life ever lifted to the Gates than Mr. Rountree sends up at that bedside."
"Who've you got down there?" demanded Ellen.
"Oh, Art," said Di. "But he's only lookin' through their plant. Lew asked him to make suggestions. Art hasn't been up to the house; he says he's never developed a Baptist bedside manner." Di stretched languorously, but Ellen was trembling.
The prospect of old Stanley's end precipitated her into that—she could not know what—which she had determined to do to help hold the Alban business and Lew.
"Hot to-day," Di offered a neutral subject.
"The water's all blue," said Ellen, accepting it. "You can't see ice anywhere now." The floe in the lake, she meant, viewed from the high vantage of the office windows. "It's breaking up in the straits, mother says. Father's in Duluth." With his ship, she meant, loading with iron ore to be ready for the first break through of the ice in Lake Superior and the opening of Sault Ste. Marie—"The Soo."
In a week or two, possibly more but maybe less, for it depended on elements far beyond man's contrast she might spy from the office window the long, low hull of the laden Blenmora with its iron for South Chicago. Slowly, steadily, unswerving, straight to its course the ship would appear from the north, pass far out and slowly, with her eyes lingering upon it, lessen and lessen and vanish; and that night, near the ore slips of the Calumet, Ellen would sup with her father.
"I'll be glad to see father," she said to Di, who knew all this.
"Uhuh," agreed Di, with head down. "You would."
Di did not want to see her father, nor her mother. Di did not, in these days, discuss her family. Except for mention of the money she sent home, she never brought up the subject of Hoster. She tossed back her auburn curls and, as upon the night when momentarily she had dropped beside her bed, Di arose whistling. From the closet she produced such a gown of the new spring mode as had confronted Ellen from Michigan Avenue shop windows when Lew had bid her to pick what she pleased.
"Like it?" questioned Di, with a touch of defiance and of wonder as she watched Ellen's face burn with a slow, deepening glow.
The heat, breaking the long winter-look over the lakes, increased also in the Caribbean and Lida became more communicative. Thrice only in more than two months had she written Jay, and each epistle had been no more than a memorandum of a mood.
"Here we are," she had inscribed from Santa Lucia. "Palms are appallingly overplayed. We switch the setting, but we're the same. There was a tail end of a hurricane yesterday, and we rode it out, where do you suppose? In the harbor."
The three had been like that and now arrived a cablegram from Caracas informing him that she was returning to New York, leaving him to guess at the time. Perhaps she did not know it, he thought; and the message did not make clear whether she stayed with her party or traveled independently. Then a radio arrived, supplying him with the due date of a mail boat, two days ahead.
It meant, plainly, that she wanted him to meet her, and he prepared to go east, without either opposition or approval from his father, except an offer to supply him with expenses, if he needed money.
"I don't," said Jay; for he had been saving and was not required, therefore, to apply to Ellen as upon the occasion of his previous departure for New York. When they were alone, at the end of the day, he referred to his trip.
"Mrs. Rountree's returning," he said.
"Here?" asked Ellen, naturally enough.
"I don't think so," replied Jay. "Just to New York, I believe."
"Oh," said Ellen, and looked at him, immediately to resort to arranging papers on his father's desk, which she did with the half-dreaming inattention he had noticed, recently. "When are you to be back?" she asked finally. "Or are you to be?"
"I'll be back," said Jay; and, to save herself, she could not check a start. He'd be back, whether with his wife or without; he'd return to work here with her. "When, I don't know," he said, watching her with appreciation of that difference in her mood which Lew Alban, feeling, had deemed not business-like at all but domestic. "Did you suppose I was quitting now?" he asked her.
"No," she rejoined, without looking up. She had wanted him to bind himself to return, no matter what his wife did. "What can I 'tend to for you when you're gone?"
"Lew Alban," he replied, and laughed when she jumped. He had no idea of what was within her! "Now if you could only tie him up somehow long enough to give me time to work up my prospects, I'd be much obliged. I've got a lot of stuff started, you know, but there's a good personal reason everywhere, just at present, why I don't get the business.
"Somebody is giving it to somebody else because he's his brother or his wife's brother or because he likes him or because he is afraid of him or because he has something on him; so you've got to become closer than a brother, or a wife's brother, or you've got to make him more afraid of you or you've got to get more on him than the other fellow has—then you'll get the business. I'm working around to it, but it takes time; and it doesn't look like we had a lot of time, does it?"
"No."
He held out his hand. "Good-by," he said to her. To-morrow morning, he would see her again here in the office, but to-morrow they would not be together at the end of the day. It was good-by to this intimacy, he meant. She took his hand and looked up at him and slowly a hot flush crept up to the roots of her hair.
He left at noon on the morrow; and on the next day, when he was in New York, the Soo was open! The ice, even in Superior, was conquered. Day before yesterday the ice-breakers, plunging and charging, had cleared a channel through White Fish Bay where, at the outlet of the greatest of lakes, the west winds of April had rallied the last bulwarks of winter. St. Mary's River and the canals of the Soo were clear; the freighters, heavy with iron, were coming through!
There in the north (as Ellen gazed from the office window) hung a spot above the clear, blue horizon. It was sunny and mild on Lake Michigan; spring securely stood. So the spot in the north was smoke. Now appeared a prow with a pilothouse and mast above it; a long, lean hull lay low abaft it, and there was the after mast and funnel!
The Blenmora! The Blenmora! For her father would be among the first to send his ship through.
She was with him in his cabin. What matter the scream and scrape of the enormous clamshell maws lifting the ore from the holds? What matter the clangor of the red iron bounding in the chutes, the hiss and heat of steam, the spread of the brown hematite dust? Ellen loved it; it brought her father.
She was in his arms, her cheek against his; he lifted her a little and tossed her a bit, laughing aloud in his love and pride in her. They talked and laughed; they went about the ship; they had supper together, through which he studied her, seriously.
"Ye grow little, Ellen," he charged her at last.
"It's the rest at home growing bigger, father," she said.
"They grow," he agreed, "and ye—" suddenly he was out with it—"what have ye taken on, my little girl?"
"Nothing new, father," she denied.
He shook his head. "Do ye work too hard?"
"No."
"It's not work," he agreed, "I know the look of ye. It's loving, is it?"
"No, father!"
"So that's it; loving! Ellen, girl, does he love ye?"
"No."
"I felt it in ye, my arms about you. You'd have them—his own. Ellen, girl, look to what ye do! Loving like ye'd love your man, look to what ye do!"