# Dangerous Business/Chapter 5

In the waiting room outside his father's office, Jay was hailed by an agreeable, vigorous voice and a bald, neatly barbered man of forty-five extended a broad, firm hand cordially, at the same time repeating Jay's name. Jay had no idea of his, but supposed that he had met the man with his father. Evidently this was a buyer, and an important buyer or he would not be in this inner room nor would Lowry, the salesmanager, be so full of fidgets because Jay had forgotten him.
"Mr. Metten and I were speaking of the round you shot at Skokie last summer with Melhorn—or was it Hagen?" Lowry said quickly, to supply Jay with the name.
He was Metten, of course; one of the Mettens, for there were two; a younger, fat brother and this one, Phil Metten. Jay shook hands and said it was Melhorn who had showed him up.
"Not at all," protested Metten. "You shot one beautiful game. Par, my God! A sandtrap is nothing to you. A birdie; an eagle; a birdie, you drop in a row like that! If just once I drop a birdie . . ."
Metten embarked upon a vivid description of his own game, gratified that Jay stood listening or seeming to listen. Actually, Jay's mind had gone again to New York and to Nucast who was paying him for marrying Lida.
He could put no other interpretation upon the message wired by Ralph last night. It could be no mere coinci​dence that on the same day that Jay Rountree had assumed responsibility for Lida, Nucast had called Ralph and promised to Rountree his profitable business for another year; the business which had been in doubt until yesterday. No; this was reward to Jay; and reward extended in such form that it could never involve Nucast, personally, and also could not be refused. How could Jay step back to his father's desk and demand the rejection of the Nucast business without exposing everything he was pledged to keep from public view?
"Where do you play, South?"
"What?" inquired Jay, aware that a question was asked him.
Metten repeated it, drawing him toward the chairs, where they all sat down. Metten, it seemed, was going to the South to play after Christmas and he wanted to know about southern clubs.
"Some place with good golf and nice people," particularized Metten; "not the crowd."
Jay mentioned a few resorts, while trying to recall what Ellen Powell had just said about Metten. Oh, yes; the Metten business was up in the air, as the Nucast account had been. Slengels were after the Mettens. So that was why Lowry had Phil Metten here this morning and was so nervous about the impression made by Jay.
He realized that he had been keeping Metten waiting for an appointment with his father; but Metten did not seem to mind or to be in any hurry now. He made a joke and Jay smiled; at what, he wondered afterwards. The funny thing was in his own mind; and it was that Nucast ​was paying him, and he was put in the position of receiving payment, but no penny of it went to his empty pockets. You might as well smile at being broke, absolutely, and marrying under the conditions.
Of course, he could not marry without obtaining funds somehow. So, while he discussed southern golf courses, he inventoried his assets with regard to new necessities. What, in cash, did marriage cost?
Metten mentioned a wish for a place pleasant for his wife; and Jay wondered how much Metten estimated as the cost of taking his wife to the South after Christmas. How much must he have to take Lida Haige away with him? Not Lida Haige, then; Lida Rountree. She would require much more than Mrs. Metten.
From fifty dollars, which Jay had borrowed from Ben in New York, he had sixteen left. Not even the fare back east. In his checking account at Cambridge, he had, at best, ten or twelve dollars; at worst, and more probably, an overdraft. Every month a forgotten check or two surprised him. Bills at Cambridge and in Boston would total a couple of thousand more, maybe. They had not bothered him before; he had planned to pay most of them when he would leave next June. But he was leaving now. In fact, he realized with something of a start, he already had left. He would never go back to his rooms on Mount Auburn Street.
"Tryston?" said Metten. "Do you know Tryston?"
"No," said Jay. What was Metten talking about?
"Certainly you know Tryston," Lowry rebuked him. "You won a cup there."
​"Oh; the Tryston club!" Jay was listening to his father who, by another door, had returned to the office. Had Ellen Powell completed the call to Mrs. Lytle?
"Tryston is a good, sporty course," he said to Phil Metten. "The best mountain course I know in the South."
"You think, Mrs. Metten and me, we will like it? Nice people go there? You know them?"
"Yes," said Jay. There was his father's voice, phoning to New York while he talked southern golf courses. No matter. His father could not bind him more firmly than already he had bound himself to Lida. "You'll like it. I know the people."
Ellen Powell appeared in the doorway and Jay jumped up. Her eyes lingered on him but she had not come for him; she did not speak to him; she invited Phil Metten, "Will you come in, please?" And she apologized, "Mr. Rountree is very sorry to have kept you waiting."
No harm done from that, Jay thought; for Metten stayed where he was, asking more details about Tryston. Lowry was over his fidgets and was keeping Metten there with Jay, instead of trying to move him on into the office.
"Can you lunch with me?" Metten asked Jay.
"What?"
"I'd like to take you to lunch."
"Oh, thanks," said Jay, "I can't to-day."
"How is to-morrow for you?"
"All right," accepted Jay, absentmindedly, as Lowry jostled him. "That is, if I'm in town."
"We make it to-morrow. Very glad to know you better," said Metten, again grasping Jay's hand before he went with Lowry and Ellen Powell.
​She looked back, as she closed the door, and smiled soberly at him. For the moment, he wondered about her; then, left alone, he dropped upon his chair. No; he would never return to Mount Auburn Street; Ben would go back to the rooms, after Christmas vacation, and pack up his things and send them to him. Where? Where would he be having his room with Lida? How would he pay for it?
Not with Lida's money; so much was certain. But what would Lida do with her money? She had a great deal, which she surely would spend. How could he stop her? He had not reckoned with the difficulty of Lida with a lot of money; he with nothing and less than nothing—debts.
He went out and, upon Michigan avenue in the blowing snow, he wandered as far as the University Club. There he turned in upon Christmas meetings of college groups, undergrads and grads, sons and fathers, Harvard, Yale and Princeton people and boys whom he had known in prep school. They called to him noisily and claimed him.
Late in the afternoon, he took a taxi home. It was a gay, cheery house, in its exterior aspect—his home. It was of tan brick, with its wooden trim painted a light blue which, with the help of little heaps of snow on the sills, held the last brightness of the failing day. The windows were wide and here and there they flickered with firelight. Beedy had built for him, Jay realized, a wood fire on the big hearth in the hall.
The gayness and color represented, to Jay, his mother, for she had "built" the house here on Astor Street amid the duller dwellings of wives of men who were presidents of banks, of railroads, of companies manufacturing things.
​His father had restored, with each repainting, the bright, agreeable hues and tints which denied the nearness of the huge, surrounding city, denied even the close-neighboring mansions on both sides. Eastward, to be sure, the fringe of the city was scant; behind the house was only another house faced to the Drive which was saved from the waves by a narrow strip of snowy parkway and a buttress of stone and concrete upon which the breakers beat and beat.
Jay let himself in with his latchkey and halted before the flaming hearth in the hall. Silence in the house, except for the snapping of the maple wood; silence and oppressiveness.
His father had not maintained, when redecorating the interior, the original papers and hangings. Perhaps he could not; perhaps he had not tried. Slowly sombreness had overtaken the hall, the drawing-room, the dining-room and spread through the house.
Defying it, Jay had a habit of whistling when coming in; but he did not whistle now. He went up to his own room, which he could remember when it had been the nursery with a glorious band about it picturing Jack and Jill, Humpty Dumpty and the Cow jumping over the Moon. That had been a bit of his mother who, he had been told, had had the room so painted when Margaret was the baby.
Since Jay was the younger child, the nursery had remained his room and his sister had been moved to the chamber which still was Margaret's, though she had been married for two years and lived in New York. Her door was closed; it was always closed. The doors of the rooms ​in front were closed; his father's door and the one which had been his mother's. In front, on the third floor, were the chambers of Lloyd Dill and his wife, who had come to keep house after Margaret had married. Lloyd was a second cousin and worked in the Rountree offices.
Ann Dill was not about. No one was about, though some one, Beedy undoubtedly, had unpacked Jay's suitcase, which Ben dutifully had delivered.
Mail heaped Jay's table, the large white and cream envelopes, thick from containing another, enclosing cards of invitation to holiday teas, dances, dinners. He pulled the switch of his lamp and opened the envelopes. Some of them were from people whom he knew, but more, after the modern manner, were from persons of whom he had never heard. He stopped before he had opened all, switched out the lights and threw himself across his bed.
Marrying—marrying Lida Haige! Not just dancing with her; not just kissing her and pressing her close within his arms. Marrying! A bedroom like this somewhere with her . . . his wife . . .
There was a knock, Beedy's knock. "Come in," called Jay, and rolled to face the door. "Hello, Beedy."
"I didn't hear you come in," said Beedy. "I was in back. If you'd called—or whistled . . ."
Beedy remembered he whistled. Beedy liked his whistling; Beedy, Jay knew, liked him and he felt Beedy's fealty to him more than to his father. Beedy was fifty, grayish, lonely—a butler.
"Beedy," said Jay, sitting up, "thanks for unpacking me. I wish I were staying; but I'm not."
"You're off before Christmas?" said Beedy.
​"To-morrow, I think."
"Oh," said Beedy, retreating a little, and reported: "Your father's come in."
"Any one with him?" asked Jay.
Habitually, indeed almost invariably, his father brought home a guest; a member of some missionary board, a bishop, a field worker in the Near East Relief, a man from China Inland Missions or some one of the same kind. If he had not a guest, he would come home only to go out to a dinner of some board of relief or well-doings.
"No one is with him," said Beedy; and Jay knew that this was intentional to-night and that his father would not go out.
He found his father in the alcove where the piano was playing. It performed electrically and was rendering Chopin's A-fiat Polonaise while his father stood ten feet away watching the ghostly miracle of the keys moving without fingers.
"Hello, father," said Jay.
His father looked at him, stepped to the piano and stopped it. "Where have you been?"
"Oh, club and here."
"I expected you again at the office. I have talked with Mrs. Lytle. I have told her you are returning to New York. I have made a reservation for you."
"Century to-morrow?" asked Jay.
"Miss Powell has your ticket."
"I'll need more than tickets—marrying," said Jay.
​"I have arranged more," replied his father, and switched on the piano.
Ellen had his tickets, but she had not left them at the office. She had kept them in her handbag. How could she give them to him to send him to marry Lida Haige?
She had returned to Di, who was in negligée, never having stirred from the room during the day. Di possessed the ability, incomprehensible to Ellen, to idle and loiter hours on end at small bodily ministrations. She liked to bathe leisurely and lie on the bed when the room was hot, day dreaming and dozing or telephoning or munching marzipan and turning the pages of picture papers. She could employ hours with complexion creams and over her hands; she stained and polished not only her finger nails but toe nails, as well.
Marzipan, in a red lacquer box with gold dragons, reposed beside the bed.
"Art Slengel," said Di, carelessly, indicating its source. "He's phoned me, too. He's bringing Jello around at seven."
"Here?" asked Ellen.
"Silly," laughed Di. "He's picking me up. We're going out."
"Where?"
"Where I certainly hope and pray dinner'll be ready," replied Di. "We'll have cocktails in the car. Art has the cutest cubby for his shaker. . . . I don't know where we're going, Ellen, and I don't care long as dinner'll be ​ready when we land. I'll say I'm starved. . . . Ellen, listen. . . ."
Ellen gave up, guiltily. She had done nothing about Di all day and had returned with nothing better than words. Even now she could not consider Di, solely. What Di was doing linked itself with what Jay Rountree was about to do.
She watched Di bedecking her lovely, soft, seductive body with silk gathered close or left loose with Di's instinct to tantalize a man; almost any man. Di was bedecking herself to please Sam Metten to-night; to-morrow night, another man, likely; or even to-night, if it happened that Art Slengel brought with him another than Jello.
Di simply felt no sense of need of inviolateness of her body, no joy of saving it until she could consecrate it in love to one man.
Jay was leaving, to-morrow, to marry Lida Haige, whom he did not love. For some reason, other than love, he would marry Lida Haige, not regarding, not imagining, probably, what it would do to him.
Jay did not dine with his father and the Dills. He decided to go out, indifferent as to his destination except that it would not be Ben's table or an entertainment of other friends. He looked in the heap of invitations for a dance being given that night by some one whom he did not know; finding one, he put the card in his pocket.
Arriving at the door of a strange mansion, he did not produce the card. No one knew him; but it was not neces​sary that any one should. Many of the young men within were, Jay knew, complete strangers to the hosts.
The hostess, having daughters, had bought, from a professional purveyor of such things, a list of eligible and presentable young men. Jay and Ben were both on such a list in Boston; Harvard Yard and Mount Auburn Street mails were heavy with invitations to strange Back Bay ballrooms.
Jay went to the ballroom.
A girl whose looks he liked danced by and Jay tapped her partner. The man yielded. The girl—she was a nice little thing with pretty shoulders and pleasant gray eyes—smiled at him and clasped him for the dance. He was tapped in turn and yielded; but he obtained the same girl later; and later, again. He realized only when he was searching for her, the third time, that she was somewhat like Ellen Powell.
There was a girl a lot like Lida, with bright, black eyes; very lively, full of the devil. He watched her but did not tap her partner.
He discovered plenty of "stick" in the punch.
Beedy awoke him. "It's eleven, sir. Miss Powell has telephoned from the office. She said to remind you of your train."
At the office, Ellen Powell handed him tickets and currency. He did not count the money until the train had started; then he ascertained that his father had given him a thousand dollars.