Deuces Wild/Chapter 3
III
A WILD GOOSE CHASE
AT the exact moment when J. Mortimer Forbes was being apprised of the fact that this was an amazing world and that previously he had been meandering only among the foot-notes of the Great Story, an elderly gentleman and a very handsome young woman sat in a subway train which roared emptily on its way down-town. The elderly man was gray-haired and he wore a closely cropped gray mustache, a style much affected by Americans living in New York. He possessed all the hall-marks of a prosperous clubman. The spats spoke eloquently of the reading-room and of moderately heated political arguments. Attached to his eye-glasses was a heavy cord, up and down which he continually ran his fingers; to those who knew him, a sign of perturbation. Now and then he poked the ferrule of his Malacca walking-stick into the matting on the floor, or tapped it, causing little puffs of dust to rise, like musketry down in a valley.
The young woman stared with unseeing eyes at the opposite window; fine eyes they were, blue as Russian lapis-lazuli, similarly streaked with threads of gold, and heavily fringed. The girl was really and truly beautiful; even the few belated ones realized this, and forgot their nightly study of the alluring advertisements. She was a tonic to the weary eyes; a tonic like the unexpected vision of green fields, crystal waters and the blue haze on the hills far away. Her hair was not the least of her attractions; it smoldered mysteriously, as if fire lay hidden in the deeps of it.
“Wonder what on earth he wants,” said the man, and nibbled the ivory head of his stick.
The girl did not reply. Perhaps she had not heard him.
“I can't think of anything he should want, unless it's about some old investment that's turned out bad. But then, he'd write. I give it up.”
Across the aisle the little shop-girl, who was going home to Brooklyn (imagine having a home there!) dropped her gaze from the brilliant lithograph of Chaffem's toasted wheaties (one of Forbes's earlier pieces) to the furs of the beautiful young lady. She sat up with a start. Sables! she thought Not Manchurian, but the genuine North-Russian. She was a clerk in an up-town furrier's and knew her business. Off-hand she measured the length and breadth of the cloak; not a penny under seven thousand. And riding in the subway when she ought to be in a limousine, with chauffeur and footman! Swells were funny folk; they were always doing things like every-day people. And the muff wouldn't have left more than the price of a theater ticket out of a thousand. And what's more, she knew how to wear them. She wasn't any of those actresses. Catch them riding in the subway!
“Some legal muddle,” the elderly man complained. “Your mother's brother wasn't in his right mind.”
“There's nothing for you to complain of,” spoke the girl at last, without, however, turning her head.
“Wonder what on earth he wants”
“Can't say there is. Three millions, mostly out at seven per cent.” He coughed slightly. “He was novel-reading mad; no sane man would have drawn up such a will. It's as much as our lives are worth to keep all that junk about. Wouldn't give the stuff to the Metropolitan because they wouldn't take any stock in his claim that that ruby belonged to the Nana-Sahib. Anyhow, history says that Hindu beggar died in the jungles and that he took the jewel along with him.”
“Junk! How can you call all those beautiful things junk? I love every one of them. He was right. Only one person in a thousand who visit the museums would understand or appreciate them.”
“That may be, but no light-fingered gentry would be prowling about.”
The beautiful young lady shrugged. She had gone over the ground so often that the subject wearied her. She loved her father, but she could not understand his utter lack of appreciation for the wonderful curios her uncle had bequeathed her, with the single stipulation that she should use them. The shrug discovered for a second the milky depth of the fur. And the little shop-girl shivered with delight. But she vaguely wondered why the beautiful young lady's face wasn't a happy one. Any woman in such sables (even if she had just lost her husband) ought to be supremely happy. The rule which measures happiness is available alike to the field-mouse and the elephant: it's all in the angle of vision.
That the girl in the sables was unhappy was quite apparent. It was not a petulant sadness, as in having had her will crossed, as in having stumbled over some temporary disappointment. Her face reflected a deep sorrow from within; of a kind for which money at her age is no balm. Great peace and great sorrow have the same brushes in limning in a face; the result is generally a beatific placidity. If you looked at the girl's eyes they told you nothing, nor the droop of her mouth, nor the pallor of her fine skin; and yet the ensemble produced a haunting sadness. It made you remember the face for days.
At Madison Square the two got out, and the little shop-girl continued her journey, to dream of dukes and duchesses and wolds and gabled manses.
The girl in the sables and her father hurried over to the monolith of marble and were shot up to the eighteenth floor. The suite of law-offices to which they had been so strangely summoned were in total darkness. The bell rang and rang and echoed eerily through the empty rooms so mightily busy during the secular days of the year.
“Looks like a hoax.”
“Perhaps we've come too late.”
“Too late? It isn't nine yet,” growled the father, recollecting the quiet rubber at the club he had been forced to postpone. “He phoned that it would be very, even exceedingly, important for us to be here before nine. Shall we wait?”
“Certainly.” The girl began pulling down the finger-tips of her gloves and twisting them.
“I'm a doddering old fool!” exclaimed her father suddenly.
“Father!”
“I never telephoned his house to make sure. Why should we come down here to his offices?”
They hastened back to the elevator and went down. The elderly man stepped into the pay-station booth. Presently he emerged, wrathful of countenance.
“Never called up at all. Doesn't know what I'm talking about. A whole evening spoiled!”
“But what can it mean? What can it mean?”
Down into the dank subway again; and twenty minutes later, at nine-fifteen, the two arrived at the apartment on the third floor of the Dryden. The girl opened the door impetuously, fearing she knew not what. In the plain ordinary safe in the living-room reposed the Nana-Sahib's ruby and fifteen thousand dollars.
A few blocks over the way, in a dark and cavernous studio, a lonesome dachel was baying at the intermittent ting-a-linging of the telephone.
Across the city there stood a series of apartments which had never been fashionable, though many of the inhabitants put up brave pretense for such recognition; wherein the real estate agents reaped sundry profits. By some, the indifferent principally, they were called flats. In one of these, comfortably appointed, with a few really good rugs on the floors and furniture which was neither acrobatic nor offensive, there lived a woman. She was young and pretty in a faded way. She was preparing for bed; and as she let down her hair, the many gray threads caused a pucker to come between her eyes. Her expression was placid; but it was the placidity of the crushed and the beaten, not of the resigned.
From a brick house in another quarter of the town, a quarter which had fallen under the edict of mobile fashion along about war-time, a man stepped forth noiselessly and disappeared into the night, became a shadow among shadows.