The Fighting Chance

He stretched out one ponderous arm, pointing full between Quarrier’s unwinking eyes.

“Take your fighting chance—it is the cleanest thing you ever touched; and use it cleanly, or there’ll be no mercy shown you when your time comes. Let the courts alone—do you hear me? Let the legislature alone. Keep your manicured hands off the ermine. And tell Harrington to shove his own cold, splay fingers into his own pockets for a change. They’ll be warmer than his feet by this time next year.”

For a moment he towered there, powerful, bulky, menacing; then his arm dropped heavily—the old stolid expression came back into his face, leaving it calm, bovine, almost stupid again. And he turned, moving slowly toward the door, holding his hat carefully in his gloved hand.

Stepping out of the elevator on the ground floor he encountered Mortimer, and halted instinctively. He had not seen Mortimer for weeks; neither had Leila; and now he looked at him inquiringly, disturbed at his battered and bloodshot appearance.

“Oh,” said Mortimer, “you down here?”

“Have you been out of town?” asked Plank cautiously.

Mortimer nodded, and started to pass on toward the bronze cage of the elevator, but something seemed to occur to him suddenly; he checked his pace, turned, and waddled after Plank, rejoining him on the marble steps of the rotunda.

“See here,” he panted, holding Plank by the elbow and breathing heavily even after the short chase across the lobby, “I meant to tell you something. Come over here and sit down a moment.”

Still grasping Plank’s elbow in his puffy fingers, he directed him toward a velvet seat in a corner of the lobby; and here they sat down, while Mortimer mopped his fat neck with his handkerchief, swearing at the heat under his breath.

“Look here,” he said; “I promised you something once, didn’t I?”

“Did you?” said Plank, with his bland, expressionless stare of an overgrown baby.

“Oh, cut that out! You know damn well I did; and when I say a thing I make good. D’ye see?”

“I don’t see,” said Plank, “what you are talking about.”

“I’m talking about what I said I’d do for you. Haven’t I made good? Haven’t I put you into everything I said I would? Don’t you go everywhere? Don’t people ask you everywhere?”

“Yes—in a way,” said Plank wearily. “I am very grateful; I always will be.... Can I do anything for you, Leroy?”

Mortimer became indignant at the implied distrust of the purity of his motives; and Plank, failing to stem the maudlin tirade, relapsed into patient silence, speculating within himself as to what it could be that Mortimer wanted.

It came out presently. Mortimer had attended a “killing” at Desmond’s, and, as usual, had provided the pièce de résistance for his soft-voiced host. All he wanted was a temporary deposit to tide over matters. He had never approached Plank in vain, and he did not do so now, for Plank had a pocket cheque-book and a stylograph.

“It’s damn little to ask, isn’t it?” he muttered resentfully. “That will only square matters with Desmond; it doesn’t leave me anything to go on with,” and he pocketed his cheque with a scowl.

Plank was discreetly silent.

“And that is not what I chased you for, either,” continued Mortimer. “I didn’t intend to say anything about Desmond; I was going to fix it in another way!” He cast an involuntary and sinister glance at the elevators gliding ceaselessly up and down at the end of the vast marble rotunda; then his protruding eyes sought Plank’s again:

“Beverly, old boy, I’ve got a certain mealy-faced hypocrite where any decent man would like to have him—by the scruff of his neck. He’s fit only to kick; and I’m going to kick him good and plenty; and in the process he’s going to let go of several things.” Mortimer leered, pleased with his own similes, then added rather hastily: “I mean, he’s going to drop several things that don’t belong to him. Leave it to me to shake him down; he’ll drop them all right.... One of ‘em’s yours.”

Plank looked at him.

“I told you once that I’d let you know when to step up and say ‘Good evening’ didn’t I?”

Plank continued to stare.

“Didn’t I?” repeated Mortimer peevishly, beginning to lose countenance.

“I don’t understand you,” said Plank, “and I don’t think I want to understand you.”

“What do you mean?” demanded Mortimer thickly; “don’t you want to marry that girl!” but he shrank dismayed under the slow blaze that lighted Plank’s blue eyes.

“All right,” he stammered, struggling to his fat legs and instinctively backing away; “I thought you meant business. I—what the devil do I care who you marry! It’s the last time I try to do anything for you, or for anybody else! Mark that, my friend. I’ve plenty to worry over; I’ve a lot to keep me busy without lying awake to figure out how to do kindnesses to old friends. Damn this ingratitude, anyway!”

Plank gazed at him for a moment; the anger in his face had died out.

“I am not ungrateful,” he said. “You may say almost anything except that, Leroy. I am not disloyal, no matter what else I may be. But you have made a bad mistake. You made it that day at Black Fells when you offered to interfere. I supposed you understood then that I could never tolerate from anybody anything of such a nature. It appears that you didn’t. However, you understand it now. So let us forget the matter.”

But Mortimer, keenly appreciative of the pleasures of being misunderstood, squeezed some moisture out of his distended eyes, and sat down, a martyr to his emotions. “To think,” he gulped, “that you, of all men, should turn on me like this!”

“I didn’t mean to. Can’t you understand, Leroy, that you hurt me?”

“Hurt hell!” retorted Mortimer vindictively. “You’ve had sensation battered out of you by this time. I guess society has landed you a few while I was boosting you over the outworks. Don’t play that old con game on me! You tried to get her and you couldn’t. Now I come along and offer to put you next and you yell about your hurt feelings! Oh, splash! There’s another lady, that’s all.”

“Let it go at that, then,” said Plank, reddening.

“But I tell you—”

“Drop it!” snapped Plank.

“Oh, very well! if you’re going to take it that way again—”

“I am. Cut it! And now let me ask you a question: Where were you going when I met you?”

“What do you want to know for?” asked Mortimer sullenly.

“Why, I’ll tell you, Leroy. If you have any idea of identifying yourself with Quarrier’s people, of seeking him at this juncture with the expectation of investing any money in his schemes, you had better not do so.”

“Investing!” sneered Mortimer. “Well, no, not exactly, having nothing to invest, thanks to my being swindled into joining his Amalgamated Electric gang. Don’t worry. If there’s any shaking down to be done, I’ll do it, my friend,” and he rose, and started toward the elevators.

“Wait,” said Plank. “Why, man, you can’t frighten Quarrier! What did you sell your holdings for? Why didn’t you come to us—to me? What’s the use of going to Quarrier now, and scolding? You can’t scare a man like that.”

Mortimer fairly grinned in his face.

“Your big mistake,” he sneered, “is in undervaluing others. You don’t think I amount to very much, do you, Beverly? But I’m going to try to take care of myself all the same.” He laughed, showing his big teeth, and the vanity in him began to drug him. “No, you think I don’t know much. But men like you and Quarrier will damn soon find out! I want you to understand,” he went on excitedly, forgetting the instinctive caution which in saner moments he was only too certain that his present business required—“I want you to understand a few things, my friend, and one of them is that I’m not afraid of Quarrier, and another is, I’m not afraid of you!”

“Leroy—”

“No, not afraid of you, either!” repeated Mortimer with an ugly stare. “Don’t try any of your smug, aint-it-a-shame-he-drinks ways on me, Beverly! I’m getting tired of it; I’m tired of it now, by God! You keep a civil tongue in your head after this—do you understand?—and we’ll get on all right. If you don’t, I’ve the means to make you!”

“Are you crazy?”

“Not a bit of it! Too damn sane for you and Leila to hoodwink!”

“You are crazy!” repeated Plank, aghast.

“Am I? You and Leila can take the matter into court, if you want to—unless I do. And”—here he leaned forward, showing his teeth again—“the next time you kiss her, close the door!”

Then he went away up the marble steps and entered an elevator; and Plank, grave and pale, went out into the street and entered his big touring-car. But the drive up town and through the sunlit park gave him no pleasure, and he entered his great house with a heavy, lifeless step, head bent, as though counting every crevice in the stones under his lagging feet. For the first time in all his life he was afraid of a man.

The man he was afraid of had gone directly to Quarrier’s office, missing the gentleman he was seeking by such a small fraction of a minute that he realised they must have passed each other in the elevators, he ascending while Quarrier was descending.

Mortimer turned and hurried to the elevator, hoping to come up with Quarrier in the rotunda, or possibly in the street outside; but he was too late, and, furious to think of the time he had wasted with Plank, he crawled into a hansom and bade the driver take him to a number he gave, designating one of the new limestone basement houses on the upper west side.

All the way up town, as he jolted about in his seat, he angrily regretted the meeting with Plank, even in spite of the cheque. What demon had possessed him to boast—to display his hand when there had been no necessity? Plank was still ready to give him aid at a crisis—had always been ready. Time enough when Plank turned stingy to use persuasion; time enough when Plank attempted to dodge him to employ a club. And now, for no earthly reason, intoxicated with his own vanity, catering to his own long-smouldering resentment, he had used his club on a willing horse—deliberately threatened a man whose gratitude had been good for many a cheque yet.

“Ass that I am!” fumed Mortimer; “now when I’m stuck I’ll have to go at him with the club, if I want any money out of him. Confound him, he’s putting me in a false position! He’s trying to make it look like extortion! I won’t do it! I’m no blackmailer! I’ll starve, before I go to him again! No blundering, clumsy Dutchman can make a blackmailer out of me by holding hands with that scoundrelly wife of mine! That’s the reason he did it, too! Between them they are trying to make my loans from Plank look like blackmail! It would serve them right if I took them up—if I called their bluff, and stuck Plank up in earnest! But I won’t, to please them! I won’t do any dirty thing like that, to humour them! Not much!”

He lay back, rolling about in the jouncing cab, scowling at space.

“Not much!” he repeated. “I’ll shake down Quarrier, though! I’ll make him pay for his treachery—scaring me out of Amalgamated! That will be restitution, not extortion!”

He was the angrier because he had been for days screwing up his courage to the point of seeking Quarrier face to face. He had not wished to do it; the scene, and his own attitude in it, could only be repugnant to him, although he continually explained to himself that it was restitution, not extortion.

But whatever it was, he didn’t like to figure in it, and he had hung back as long as circumstances permitted. But his new lodgings and his new friends were expensive; and Plank, he supposed, was off somewhere fishing; so he hung on as long as it was possible; then, exasperated by necessity, started for Quarrier’s office, only to miss him by a few seconds because he was fool enough to waste his temper and his opportunity in making an enemy out of a friend!

“Oh,” he groaned, “what an ass I am!” And he got out of his cab in front of a very new limestone basement house with red geraniums blooming on the window-sills, and let himself in with a latch-key.

The interior of the house was attractive in a rather bright, new, clean fashion. There seemed to be a great deal of white wood-work about, a wilderness of slender white spindles supporting the dark, rich mahogany handrail of the stairway; elaborate white grilles between snowy, Corinthian pillars separating the hall from the drawing-room, where a pale gilt mirror over a white, colonial mantel reflected a glass chandelier and panelled walls hung with pale blue silk.

All was new, very clean, very quiet; the maid, too, who appeared at the sound of the closing door and took his hat and gloves was as newly groomed as the floors and wood-work, and so noiseless as to be conspicuous in her swift, silent movements.

Yet there was something about it all—about the bluish silvery half-light, the spotless floors and walls, the abnormally noiseless maid in her flamboyant cap and apron—that arrested attention and fixed it. The soundless brightness of the house was as conspicuous as the contrast between the maid’s black gown and her snow-white cuffs. There was nothing subdued about anything, although the long, silvery blue curtains were drawn over the lace window hangings; no shadows anywhere, no half-lights. The very stillness was gay with suspense, like a pretty woman’s suppressed laughter glimmering in her eyes.

And into this tinted light, framed in palest blue and white, waddled Mortimer, appropriate as a June-bug scrambling in a Sèvres teacup.

“Anybody here?” he growled, leering into the drawing-room at a tiny grand piano cased in unvarnished Circassian walnut.

“There is nobody at home, sir,” said the maid.

“Music lesson over?”

“Yes, sir, at three.”

He began to ascend the stairway, breathing heavily, thud, thud over the deep velvet strip, his fat hand grasping the banister rail.

Somewhere on the second floor a small dog barked, and Mortimer traversed the ball and opened the door into a room hung with gold Spanish leather and pale green curtains.

“Hello, Tinto!” he said affably as a tiny Japanese spaniel hurled herself at him, barking furiously, then began writhing and weaving herself about him, gurgling recognition and welcome.

He sat down heavily in a padded easy-chair. The spaniel sprang into his lap, wheezing, sniffling, goggling its protruding eyes. Mortimer liked the dog, but he didn’t like what the owner of the dog said about the resemblance between his own and Tinto’s eyes.

“Get down!” he said; “you’re shedding black and white hairs all over me.” But the dog didn’t want to get down, and Mortimer’s good nature permitted her to curl up on his fat knees and sleep that nervous, twitching sleep peculiar to overpampered toy canines.

The southern sun was warm in the room; the windows open, but not a silken hanging stirred.

Presently another maid entered, with an apple cut into thin wafers and a decanter of port; and Mortimer lay back in his chair, sopping his apple in the thick, crimson wine, and feeding morsels of the combination to himself and to Tinto at intervals until the apple was all gone and the decanter three-fourths empty.

It was very still in the room—so still, that Mortimer, opening his eyes at longer and longer intervals to peer at the door, finally opened them no more.

The droning gurgle that he made kept Tinto awake. When his lower jaw sagged, and he began to really show what snoring could be, Tinto, very nervous, got up and hopped down.

It was still daylight when Mortimer awoke, conscious of people about him. As he opened his eyes, a man laughed; several people seated by the windows joined in. Then, straightening up with an effort, something tumbled from his head to the floor and he started to rise.

“Oh, look out, Leroy! Don’t step on my hat!” cried a girl’s voice; and he sank back in his chair, gazing stupidly around.

“Hello! you people!” he said, amused; “I guess I’ve been asleep. Oh, is that you Millbank? Whose hat was that—yours, Lydia?”

He yawned, laughed, turning his heavy eyes from one to another, recognising a couple of young girls at the window. He didn’t want to get up; but there is, in the society he now adorned, a stringency of etiquette known as “re-finement,” and which, to ignore, is to become unpopular.

So he got onto his massive legs and went over to shake hands with a gravity becoming the ceremony.

“How d’ye do, Miss Hutchinson? Thought you were at Asbury Park. How de do, Miss Del Garcia. Have you been out in Millbank’s motor yet?”

“We broke down at McGowan’s Pass,” said Miss Del Garcia, laughing the laugh that had made her so attractive in “A Word to the Wise.”

“Muddy gasoline,” nodded Millbank tersely—an iron-jawed, over-groomed man of forty, with a florid face shaved blue.

“We passed Mr. Plank’s big touring-car,” observed Lydia Vyse, shifting Tinto to the couch and brushing the black and white hairs from her automobile coat. “How much does a car like that cost, Leroy?”

“About twenty-five thousand,” he said gloomily. Then, looking up, “Hold on, Millbank, don’t be going! Why can’t you all dine with us? Never mind your car; ours is all right, and we’ll run out into the country for dinner. How about it, Miss Del Garcia?”

But both Miss Del Garcia and Miss Hutchinson had accepted another invitation, in which Millbank was also included.

They stood about, veils floating, leather decorated coats thrown back, lingering for awhile to talk the garage talk which fascinates people of their type; then Millbank looked at the clock, made his adieux to Lydia, nodded significantly to Mortimer, and followed the others down-stairs.

There was something amiss with his motor, for it made a startling racket in the street, finally plunging forward with a kick.

Lydia laughed as the two young girls in the tonneau turned to nod to her in mock despair; then she came running back up-stairs, holding her skirt free from her hurrying little feet.

“Well?” she inquired, as Mortimer turned back from the window to confront her.

“Nothing doing, little girl,” he said with a sombre smile.

She looked at him, slowly divesting herself of her light leather-trimmed coat.

“I missed him,” said Mortimer.

She flung the coat over a chair, stood a moment, her fingers busy with her hair-pegs, then sat down on the couch, taking Tinto into her lap. She was very pretty, dark, slim, marvellously graceful in her every movement.

“I missed him,” repeated Mortimer.

“Can’t you see him to-morrow?” she asked.

“I suppose so,” said Mortimer slowly. “Oh, Lord! how I hate this business!”

“Hasn’t he misused your confidence? Hasn’t he taken your money?” she asked. “It may be unpleasant for you to make him unbelt, but you’re a coward if you don’t!”

“Easy! easy, now!” muttered Mortimer; “I’m going to shake it out of him. I said I would, and I will.”

“I should hope so; it’s yours.”

“Certainly it’s mine. I wish I’d held fast now. I never supposed Plank would take hold. It was that drivelling old Belwether who scared me stiff! The minute I saw him scurrying to cover like a singed cat I was fool enough to climb the first tree. I’ve had my lesson, little girl.”

“I hope you’ll give Howard his. Somebody ought to,” she said quietly.

Then gathering up her hat and coat she went into her own apartments. Mortimer picked up a cheap magazine, looked over the portraits of the actresses, then, hunching up into a comfortable position, settled himself to read the theatrical comment.

Later, Lydia not appearing, and his own valet arriving to turn on the electricity, bring him his White Rock and Irish and the Evening Telegraph, he hoisted his legs into another chair and sprawled there luxuriously over his paper until it was time to dress.

About half past eight they dined in a white and pink dining-room furnished in dull gray walnut, and served by a stealthy, white-haired, pink-skinned butler, chiefly remarkable because it seemed utterly impossible to get a glimpse of his eyes. Nobody could tell whether there was anything the matter with them or not—and whether they were only very deep set or were weak, like an albino’s, or were slightly crossed, the guests of the house never knew. Lydia herself didn’t know, and had given up trying to find out.

They had planned to go for a spin in Mortimer’s motor after dinner, but in view of the Quarrier fiasco neither was in the mood for anything.

Mortimer, as usual, ate and drank heavily. He was a carnivorous man, and liked plenty of thick, fat, underdone meat. As for Lydia, her appetite was as erratic as her own impulses. Her table, always wastefully elaborate, no doubt furnished subsistence for all the relatives of her household below stairs, and left sufficient for any ambitious butler to make a decent profit on.

“Do you know, Leroy,” she observed, as they left the table and sauntered back into the pale blue drawing-room, “do you know that the servants haven’t been paid for three months?”

“Oh, for Heaven’s sake,” he expostulated, “don’t begin that sort of thing! I get enough of that at home; I get it every time I show my nose!”

“I only mentioned it,” she said carelessly.

“I heard you all right. It isn’t any pleasanter for me than for you. In fact, I’m sick of it; I’m dead tired of being up against it every day of my life. When a man has anything somebody gets it before he can sidestep. When a man’s dead broke there’s nobody in sight to touch.”

“You had an opportunity to make Howard pay you back.”

“Didn’t I tell you I missed him?”

“Yes. What are you going to do?”

“Do?”

“Of course. You are going to do something, I suppose.”

They had reached the gold and green room above. Lydia began pacing the length of a beautiful Kermanshah rug—a pale, delicate marvel of rose and green on a ground of ivory—lovely, but doomed to fade sooner than the pretty woman who trod it with restless, silk-shod feet.

Mortimer had not responded to her last question. She said presently: “You have never told me how you intend to make him pay you back.”

“What?” inquired Mortimer, turning very red.

“I said that you haven’t yet told me how you intend to make Howard return the money you lost through his juggling with your stock.”

“I don’t exactly know myself,” admitted Mortimer, still overflushed. “I mean to put it to him squarely, as a debt of honour that he owes. I asked him whether to invest. Damn him! he never warned me not to. He is morally responsible. Any man who would sit there and nod monotonously like a mandarin, knowing all the while what he was doing to wreck the company, and let a friend put into a rotten concern all the cash he could scrape together, is a swindler!”

“I think so too,” she said, studying the rose arabesques in the rug.

There was a little click of her teeth when she ended her inspection and looked across at Mortimer. Something in her expressionless gaze seemed to reassure him, and give him a confidence he may have lacked.

“I want him to understand that I won’t swallow that sort of contemptible treatment,” asserted Mortimer, lighting a thick, dark cigar.

“I hope you’ll make him understand,” she said, seating herself and resting her clasped, brilliantly ringed hands in her lap.

“Oh, I will—never fear! He has abused my confidence abominably; he has practically swindled me, Lydia. Don’t you think so?”

She nodded.

“I’ll tell him so, too,” blustered Mortimer, shaking himself into an upright posture, and laying a pudgy, clinched fist on the table. “I’m not afraid of him! He’ll find that out, too. I know enough to stagger him. Not that I mean to use it. I’m not going to have him think that my demands on him for my own property resemble extortion.”

“Extortion?” she repeated.

“Yes. I don’t want him to think I’m trying to intimidate him. I won’t have him think I’m a grafter; but I’ve half a mind to shake that money out of him, in one way or another.”

He struck the table and looked at her for further sign of approval.

“I’m not afraid of him,” he repeated. “I wish to God he were here, and I’d tell him so!”

She said coolly: “I was wishing that too.”

For a while they sat silent, preoccupied, avoiding each other’s direct gaze. When she rose he started, watching her in a dazed way as she walked to the telephone.

“Shall I?” she asked quietly, turning to him, her hand on the receiver.

“Wait. W-what are you going to do?” he stammered.

“Call him up. Shall I?”

A dull throb of fright pulsed through him.