The Guarded Heights Part 41

Because he believed that, George took the other's address. Allen was loyal, aggressive, and extraordinarily bright, as he had proved at Princeton. It might be convenient to help him. Besides, he hated to see a man he knew so well waste his time and look like a fool.

IV

By late July the off chance had pretty thoroughly defined itself except to the blind. Blodgett, however, was still skeptical. He thought George's plans were sound, provided a war should come. But there wouldn't be any war. His correspondents were optimistic.

"Have I your permission to use Mundy in his off time?" George asked.

"As far as I'm concerned," Blodgett said, "Mundy can play parchesi in his off time."

George telephoned Lambert Planter and sent a telegram to Goodhue. He took them to luncheon and had Mundy there, too. He outlined his plans for the formation of the firm of Morton, Planter, and Goodhue.

"He's called the turn of the cards," Mundy offered.

Such cards as he possessed George placed on the table. He furnished the idea, and the preliminary organization, and what money he had. He took, therefore, the major share of the profits. The others would give what time to the business they could, but it was their money he wanted, and the credit their names would give the firm. Mundy and he had made lists of buyers and sellers. No man in the Street was better equipped than Mundy to pick such a force. If Lambert and Goodhue agreed, these men could be collected within a week. Some would go to Europe. Others would scatter over the United States. It would cost a lot, but it meant an immeasurable amount in return, for the war was inevitable.

Goodhue and Lambert were as skeptical as Blodgett, but they agreed to give him what he needed to get his organization started. By that time, he promised them, they would see how right he was, and then he could use more of their money.

"It's the nearest I've ever come to gambling," he thought as he left them. "Gambling on a war!"

Because of his confidence, before a frontier had been crossed he had bought or contracted for large quant.i.ties of shoes and cloths and waterproofing. He had taken options on stock in small and wavering automobile concerns, and outlying machine shops and foundries, some of them already closed down, some struggling along without hope.

"If the war lasts a month," he told his partners, "those stocks will come from the bottom of nothing to the sky."

Goodhue became thoroughly interested at last. He cancelled his vacation and installed himself in the offices George had rented in Blodgett's building. With the men Mundy had picked, and under Mundy's tutelage, he took charge of the routine. George went to Blodgett the first of August.

"I want to quit," he said. "I've got a big thing. I want to give it all my time."

Blodgett mopped his face. His grin was a little sheepish.

"I want to invest some money in your firm," he jerked out.

"I can use it," George said.

"You've got Goodhue there," Blodgett went on in a complaining way, "and Mundy's working nights for you. Don't desert an old man without notice.

I'll give you plenty of time upstairs. Other things may come off here. I can use you."

"If you want to pay me when you know my chief interest is somewhere else," George said, "it's up to you."

"When I think I'm getting stung I'll let you know," Blodgett roared.

George sent for Allen, and urged him to go to London to open an office with an expert Lambert had got from his father's marble temple. Allen would be a check on the more experienced men whose scruples might not stand the temptations of this vast opportunity. Allen said he couldn't do it; couldn't abandon the work he had already commenced.

"There'll be precious little talk of socialism," George said, "until this thing is over. It's a great chance for a man to study close up the biggest change the world has ever undergone. Those fellows will want everything, and I'll give them everything I can lay my hands on. I'm ahead of a lot of jobbers here. I'll pay you well to see I don't get robbed on that side. Come on. Take a shot at hard facts for a change."

Allen gasped at the salary George mentioned. He hesitated. He went.

George was glad to have helped him. He experienced also an ugly sense of triumph. He felt that he wanted to tell Squibs Bailly right away.

Sylvia and her mother, he heard later, had come home out of the turmoil, unacquainted with the discomforts of people who had travelled without the Planter prestige. Whether the war was to blame or not, she had returned without a single rumour touching fact. He didn't see her right away, because she clung to Oakmont. More and more, as his success multiplied, keeping pace with the agony in Europe, he longed to see her.

All at once a return to Oakmont was, in a sense, forced upon him, but he went without any thought of encountering Sylvia, hoping, indeed, to avoid her.

It was like his mother to express her letter with telegraphic bluntness without, however, going to the expense of actually wiring. Where he had expected her customary stiff grat.i.tude for money sent he found a scrawled announcement of his father's death, and her plans for the funeral the following afternoon.

"Of course you won't come," she ended.

Yet it seemed to him that he should go, to arrange her future. This was the moment to snap the last enslaving tie between the Mortons and Oakmont. There was, of course, the chance of running into Sylvia, or some visitor who might connect him with the little house. Suppose Dalrymple, for example, should be staying with the Planters as he often did? George shrugged his shoulders. Things were coming rather rapidly to him. Besides, it was extremely unlikely that any one from the great house would see the Morton ceremony. The instincts of those people would be to avoid such sights.

V

About his return there was a compelling thrill. He drove from the station in one of the cheap automobiles that had made his father practically a pensioner of the Planters. With an incredulous appreciation that he had once accepted its horizon as the boundary of his life, he examined the familiar landscape and the scar made upon it by the village. Curtly he refused to satisfy the driver's curiosity. He had some business at the little house on the Planter estate.

There, through the nearly stripped trees, it showed, almost audibly confessing its debt to the Planter carpenters, painters, and gardeners.

In a clouded light late fall flowers waved from ma.s.ses of dead leaves.

Their gay colours gave them an appearance melancholy and apprehensive.

Here he was back at last, and he wasn't going in at the great gate.

He walked around the shuttered house and crossed the porch where his father had liked to sit on warm evenings. He rapped at the door. Feet shuffled inside. The door swayed open, and his mother stood on the threshold. Most of the changes had come to him, but in her red eyes sparkled a momentary and mournful importance. At first she didn't recognize her son.

"What is it?"

George stooped and kissed her cheek.

"I'm sorry, Mother."

Instead of holding out her arms she drew away, staring with fascination, a species of terror, at his straight figure, at his clothing, at his face that wouldn't coa.r.s.en now. When she spoke her voice suggested a placating of this stranger who was her son.

"I didn't think you'd come. I can't believe you're George--my Georgie."

Over her shoulders in the shadowed house he saw the inquisitive faces of women. It was clear that for them such an arrival was more divertive than the sharing of a sorrow that scarcely touched their hearts.

George went in. He remembered most of the faces that disclosed excitement while fawning upon his prosperity. He received an unpleasant impression that these poor and ignorant people concealed a dangerous envy, that they would be glad to grasp in one moment, even of violence, all that it had taken him years of difficult struggle to acquire.

Whether that was so or not they ought not to stand before him as if his success were a crown. He tried to keep contempt from his voice.

"Please sit down. I want to talk to my mother. Where----"

With slow steps she crossed the kitchen and opened the door of the parlour, beckoning. He followed, knowing what he would find in that uncomfortable, gala room of the poor.

He closed the door. In the half light he saw standing on trestles an oblong box altogether too large for the walls that seemed to crowd it.

He had no feeling that anything of his father was there. He realized with a sense of helpless regret that all that remained to him of that unhappy man were the ghosts of such emotions as avarice, fear, and the instinct to sacrifice one's own flesh and blood for a competence.

"Why don't you look at him, George?"

"I don't think he'd care to have me looking at him now."

She wiped her eyes.