Chambers Robert William
The Fighting Chance
Perhaps Plank had changed, perhaps Siward had; for he found nothing offensive in the bulky young man now—nothing particularly attractive, either, except for a certain simplicity, a certain direct candour in the heavy blue eyes which met his squarely.
“Come in for a cigar when you have a few moments idle,” said Siward slowly.
“It will give me great pleasure,” said Plank, bowing.
And that was all. He followed Fleetwood down the stairs; Wands held their coats, and bowed them out into the falling shadows of the winter twilight.
Siward, sitting beside his window, watched them enter their hansom and drive away up the avenue. A dull flush had settled over his cheeks; the aroma of spirits hung in the air, and he looked across the room at the decanter. Presently he drank some of his tea, but it was lukewarm, and he pushed the cup from him.
The clatter of the cup brought the old butler, who toddled hither and thither, removing trays, pulling chairs into place, fussing and pattering about, until a maid came in noiselessly, bearing a lamp. She pulled down the shades, drew the sad-coloured curtains, went to the mantelpiece and peered at the clock, then brought a wineglass and a spoon to Siward, and measured the dose in silence. He swallowed it, shrugged, permitted her to change the position of his chair and footstool, and nodded thanks and dismissal.
“Gumble, are you there?” he asked carelessly.
The butler entered from the hallway. “Yes, sir.”
“You may leave that decanter.”
But the old servant may have misunderstood, for he only bowed and ambled off downstairs with the decanter, either heedless or deaf to his master’s sharp order to return.
For a while Siward sat there, eyes fixed, scowling into vacancy; then the old, listless, careworn expression returned; he rested one elbow on the window-sill, his worn cheek on his hand, and with the other hand fell to weaving initials with his pencil on the margin of the newspaper lying on the table beside him.
Lamplight brought out sharply the physical change in him—the angular shadows flat under the cheek-bones, the hard, slightly swollen flesh in the bluish shadows around the eyes. The mark of the master-vice was there; its stamp in the swollen, worn-out hollows; its imprint in the fine lines at the corners of his mouth; its sign manual in the faintest relaxation of the under lip, which had not yet become a looseness.
For the last of the Siwards had at last stepped into the highway which his doomed forebears had travelled before him.
“Gumble!” he called irritably.
A quavering voice, an unsteady step, and the old man entered again. “Mr. Stephen, sir?”
“Bring that decanter back. Didn’t you hear me tell you just now?”
“Sir?”
“Didn’t you hear me?”
“Yes, Mr. Stephen, sir.”
There was a silence.
“Gumble!”
“Sir?”
“Are you going to bring that decanter?”
The old butler bowed, and ambled from the room, and for a long while Siward sat sullenly listening and scoring the edges of the paper with his trembling pencil. Then the lead broke short, and he flung it from him and pulled the bell. Wands came this time, a lank, sandy, silent man, grown gray as a rat in the service of the Siwards. He received his master’s orders, and withdrew; and again Siward waited, biting his under lip and tearing bits from the edges of the newspaper with fingers never still; but nobody came with the decanter, and after a while his tense muscles relaxed; something in his very soul seemed to snap, and he sank back in his chair, the hot tears blinding him.
He had got as far as that; moments of self-pity were becoming almost as frequent as scorching intervals of self-contempt.
So they all knew what was the matter with him—they all knew—the doctor, the servants, his friends. Had he not surprised the quick suspicion in Fleetwood’s glance, when he told him he had slipped, and sprained his ankle? What if he had been drunk when he fell—fell on his own doorsteps, carried into the old Siward house by old Siward servants, drunk as his forefathers? It was none of Fleetwood’s business. It was none of the servants’ business. It was nobody’s business except his own. Who the devil were all these people, to pry into his affairs and doctor him and dose him and form secret leagues to disobey him, and hide decanters from him? Why should anybody have the impertinence to meddle with him? Of what concern to them were his vices or his virtues?
The tears dried in his hot eyes; he jerked the old-fashioned bell savagely; and after a long while he heard servants whispering together in the passageway outside his door.
He lay very still in his chair; his hearing had become abnormally acute, but he could not make out what they were saying; and as the dull, intestinal aching grew sharper, parching, searing every strained muscle in throat and chest, he struck the table beside him, and clenched his teeth in the fierce rush of agony that swept him from head to foot, crying out an inarticulate menace on his household. And Dr. Grisby came into the room from the outer shadows of the hall.
He was very small, very meagre, very bald, and clean-shaven, with a face like a nut-cracker; and the brown wig he wore was atrocious, and curled forward over his colourless ears. He wore steel-rimmed spectacles, each glass divided into two lenses; and he stood on tiptoe to look out through the upper lenses on the world, and always bent almost double to use the lower or reading lenses.
Besides that, he affected frilled shirts, and string ties, which nobody had ever seen snugly tied. His loose string tie was the first thing Siward could remember about the doctor; and that the doctor had permitted him to pull it when he had the measles, at the age of six.
“What’s all this racket?” said the little old doctor harshly. “Got colic? Got the toothache? I’m ashamed of you, Stephen, cutting capers and pounding the furniture! Look up! Look at me! Out with your tongue! Well, now, what the devil’s the trouble?”
“You—know,” muttered Siward, abandoning his wrist to the little man, who seated himself beside him. Dr. Grisby scarcely noted the pulse; the delicate pressure had become a strong caress.
“Know what?” he grunted. “How do I know what’s the matter with you? Hey? Now, now, don’t try to explain, Steve; don’t fly off the handle! All right; grant that I do know what’s bothering you; I want to see that ankle first. Here, somebody! Light that gas. Why the mischief don’t you have the house wired for electricity, Stephen? It’s wholesome. Gas isn’t. Lamps are worse, sir. Do as I tell you!” And he went on loquaciously, grumbling and muttering, and never ceasing his talk, while Siward, wincing as the dressing was removed, lay back and closed his eyes.
Half an hour later Gumble appeared, to announce dinner.
“I don’t want any,” said Siward.
“Eat!” said Dr. Grisby harshly.
“I—don’t care to.”
“Eat, I tell you! Do you think I don’t mean what I say?”
So he ate his broth and toast, the doctor curtly declining to join him. He ate hurriedly, closing his eyes in aversion. Even the iced tea was flat and distasteful to him.
And at last he lay back, white and unstrung, the momentarily deadened desperation glimmering under his half-closed eyes. And for a long while Dr. Grisby sat, doubled almost in two, cuddling his bony little knees and studying the patterns in the faded carpet.
“I guess you’d better go, Stephen,” he said at length.
“Up the river—to Mulqueen’s?”
“Yes. Let’s try it, Steve. You’ll be on your feet in two weeks. Then you’d better go—up the river—to Mulqueen’s.”
“I—I’ll go, if you say so. But I can’t go now.”
“I didn’t say go now. I said in two weeks.”
“Perhaps.”
“Will you give me your word?” demanded the doctor sharply.
“No, doctor.”
“Why not?”
“Because I may have to be here on business. There seems to be some sort of crisis coming which I don’t understand.”
“There’s a crisis right here, Steve, which I understand!” snapped Dr. Grisby. “Face it like a man! Face it like a man! You’re sick—to your bones, boy—sick! sick! Fight the fight, Steve! Fight a good fight. There’s a fighting chance; on my soul of honour, there is, Steve, a fighting chance for you! Now! now, boy! Buckle up tight! Tuck up your sword-sleeve! At ‘em, Steve! Give ‘em hell! Oh, my boy, my boy, I know; I know!” The little man’s voice broke, but he steadied it instantly with a snap of his nut-cracker jaws, and scowled on his patient and shook his little withered fist at him.
His patient lay very still in the shadow.
“I want you to go,” said the doctor harshly, “before your self-control goes. Do you understand? I want you to go before your decision is undermined; before you begin to do devious things, sly things, cheating things, slinking things—anything and everything to get at the thing you crave. I’ve given you something to fight with, and you won’t take it faithfully. I’ve given you free rein in tobacco and tea and coffee. I’ve helped you as much as I dare to weather the nights. Now, you help me—do you hear?”
“Yes… I will.”
“You say so; now do it. Do something for yourself. Do anything! If you’re sick of reading—and I don’t blame you, considering the stuff you read—get people down here to see you; get lots of people. Telephone ‘em; you’ve a telephone there, haven’t you? There it is, by your elbow. Use it! Call up people. Talk all the time.”
“Yes, I will.”
“Good! Now, Steve, we know what’s the matter, physically, don’t we? Of course we do! Now, then, what’s the matter mentally?”
“Mentally?” repeated Siward under his breath.
“Yes, mentally. What’s the trouble? Stocks? Bonds? Lawsuits? Love?” the slightest pause, and a narrowing of the gimlet eyes behind the lenses. “Love?” he repeated harshly. “Which is it, boy? They’re all good to let alone.”
“Business,” said Siward. But, being a Siward, he was obliged to add “partly.”
“Business—partly,” repeated the doctor. “What’s the matter with business—partly?”
“I don’t know. There are rumours. Hetherington is pounding us—apparently. That Inter-County crowd is acting ominously, too. There’s something underhand, somewhere.” He bent his head and fell to plucking at the faded brocade on the arm of his chair, muttering to himself, “somewhere, somehow, something underhand. I don’t know what; I really don’t.”
“All right—all right,” said the doctor testily; “let it go at that! There’s treachery, eh? You suspect it? You’re sure of it—as reasonably sure as a gentleman can be of something he is not fashioned to understand? That’s it, is it? All right, sir—all right! Very well—ver-y well. Now, sir, look at me! Business symptoms admitted, what about the ‘partly,’ Stephen?—what about it, eh? What about it?”
But Siward fell silent again.
“Eh? Did you say something? No? Oh, very well, ver-y well, sir.... Perfectly correct, Stephen. You have not earned the right to admit further symptoms. No, sir, you have not earned the right to admit them to anybody, not even to yourself. Nor to—her!”
“Doctor!”
“Sir?”
“I have—admitted them.”
“To yourself, Steve? I’m sorry. You have no right to—yet. I’m sorry—”
“I have admitted them—admitted them—to her.”
“That settles it,” said the doctor grimly, “that clinches it! That locks you to the wheel! That pledges you. The squabble is on, now. It’s your honour that’s engaged now, not your nerves, not your intestines. It’s a good fight—a very good fight, with no chance of losing anything but life. You go up the river to Mulqueen’s. That’s the strategy in this campaign; that’s excellent manoeuvring; that’s good generalship! Eh? Mask your purpose, Steve; make a feint of camping out here under my guns; then suddenly fling your entire force up the Hudson and fortify yourself at Mulqueen’s! Ho, that’ll fix ‘em! That’s going to astonish the enemy!”
His harsh, dry, crackling laughter broke out like the distant rattle of musketry.
The ghost of a smile glimmered in Siward’s haunted eyes, then faded as he leaned forward.
“She has refused me,” he said simply.
The little doctor, after an incredulous stare, began chattering with wrath. “Refused you! Pah! Pooh! That’s nothing! That signifies absolutely nothing! It’s meaningless! It’s a detail. You get well—do you hear? You go and get well; then try it again! Then you’ll see! And if she is an idiot—in the event of her irrational persistence in an incredible and utterly indefensible attitude”—he choked up, then fairly barked at Siward—“take her anyway, sir! Run off with her! Dominate circumstances, sir! take charge of events!… But you can’t do it till you’ve clapped yourself into prison for life.... And God help you if you let yourself escape!”
And after a long while Siward said: “If I should ever marry—and—and—”
“Had children, eh? Is that it? Oh, it is, eh? Well, I say, marry! I say, have children! If you’re a man, you’ll breed men. The chances are they may not inherit what you have. It skips some generations—some, now and then. But if they do, good God! I say it’s better to be born and have a chance to fight than never to come into the arena at all! By winning out, the world learns; by failure, the world is no less wise. The important thing is birth. The main point is to breed—to produce—to reproduce! but not until you stand, sword in hand, and your armed heel on the breast of your prostrate and subconscious self!”
He jumped up and began running about the room with short little bantam steps, talking all the while.
“People say, ‘Shall criminals be allowed to mate and produce young? Shall malefactors be allowed to beget? No!’ And I say no, too. Never so long as they remain criminals and malefactors; so long as the evil in them is in the ascendant. Never, until they are cured. That’s what I say; that’s what I maintain. Crime is a disease; criminals are sick people. No marriage for them until they’re cured; no children for them until they’re well. If they cure themselves, let ‘em marry; let ‘em breed; for then, if their children inherit the inclination, they also inherit the grit to cauterise the malady.”
He produced a huge handkerchief from the tails of his coat, and wiped his damp features and polished his forehead so violently that his wig took a new and jaunty angle.
“I’m talking too much,” he said fretfully; “I’m talking a great deal—all the time—continually. I’ve other patients—several—plenty! Do you think you’re the only man I know who’s trying to disfigure his liver and make spots come out all over inside him? Do you?”
Siward smiled again, a worn, pallid smile.
“I can stand it while you are here, doctor, but when I’m alone it’s—hard. One of those crises is close now. I’ve a bad night ahead—a bad outlook. Couldn’t you—”
“No!”
“Just enough—”
“No, Stephen.”
“—Enough to dull it—just a little? I don’t ask for enough to make me sleep—not even to make me doze. You have your needle; haven’t you, doctor?”
“Yes.”
“Then, just this once—for the last time.”
“No.”
“Why? Are you afraid? You needn’t be, doctor. I don’t care for it except to give me a little respite, a little rest on a night like this. I’m so tired of this ache. If I could only have some sleep, and wake up in good shape, I’d stand a better chance of fighting.... Wait, doctor! Just one moment. I don’t mean to be a coward, but I’ve had a hard fight, and—I’m tired.... If you could see your way to helping me—”
“I dare not help you any more that way.”
“Not this once?”
“Not this once.”
There was a dead silence, broken at last by the doctor with a violent gesture toward the telephone. “Talk to the girl! Why don’t you talk to the girl! If she’s worth a hill o’ beans she’ll help you to hang on. What’s she for, if she isn’t for such moments? Tell her you need her voice; tell her you need her faith in you. Damn central! Talk out in church! Don’t make a goddess of a woman. The men who want to marry her, and can’t, will do that! The nincompoop can always be counted on to deify the commonplace. And she is commonplace. If she isn’t, she’s no good! Commend me to sanity and the commonplace. I take off my hat to it! I honour it. God bless it! Good-night!”
Siward lay still for a long while after the doctor had gone. More than an hour had passed before he slowly sat up and groped for the telephone book, opened it, and searched in a blind, hesitating way until he found the number he was looking for.
He had never telephoned to her; he had never written her except once, in reply to her letter in regard to his mother’s death—that strange, timid, formal letter, in which, grief-stunned as he was, he saw only the formality, and had answered it more formally still. And that was all that had come of the days and nights by that northern sea—a letter and its answer, and silence.
And, thinking of these things, he shut the book wearily, and lay back in the shadow of the faded curtain, closing his sunken eyes.
CHAPTER IX CONFESSIONS
In a city in transition, where yesterday is as dead as a dead century, where those who prepare the old year for burial are already taking the ante-mortem statement of the new, the future fulfils the functions of the present. Time itself is considered merely as a by-product of horse-power, discounted with flippancy as the unavoidable friction clogging the fly-wheel of progress.
Memory, once a fine art, is becoming a lost art in Manhattan.
His world and his city had almost ceased to think of Siward.
For a few weeks men spoke of him in the several clubs of which he had lately been a member—spoke of him always in the past tense; and after a little while spoke of him no more.
In that section of the social system which he had inhabited, his absence on account of his mother’s death being taken for granted, people laid him away in their minds almost as ceremoniously as they had laid away the memory of his mother. Nothing halted because he was not present; nothing was delayed, rearranged, or abandoned because his familiar presence chanced to be missing. There remained only one more place to fill at a cotillion, dinner, or bridge party; only another man for opera box or week’s end; one man the more to be counted on, one more man to be counted out—transferred to the credit of profit and loss, and the ledger closed for the season.
They who remembered him, among those who had not yet lost that old-fashioned art, were very few—a young girl here and there, over whom he had been absent-mindedly sentimental; a débutante or two who had adored him from a distance as a friend of elder sister or brother; here and there an old, old lady to whom he had been considerate, and who perhaps remembered something of the winning charm of the Siwards when the town was young—his father, perhaps, perhaps his grandfather—these thought of him at intervals; the remainder had no leisure to remember even if they had not forgotten how to do it. Several cabmen missed him for a while; now and then a privileged café waiter inquired about him from gay, noisy parties entering some old haunt of his. Mr. Desmond, of art gallery and roulette notoriety, whose business is not to forget, was politely regretful at his absence from certain occult ceremonies which he had at irregular intervals graced with votive offerings. And the list ended there—almost, not quite; for there were two people who had not forgotten Siward: Howard Quarrier and Beverly Plank; and one other, a third, who could not yet forget him if she would—but, as yet, she had not tried very desperately.
The day that Siward left New York to visit everybody’s friend, Mr. Mulqueen, in the country, Plank called on him for the second time in his life, and was presently received in the south drawing-room, the library being limited to an informality and intimacy not for Mr. Plank.
Siward, still lame, and using unskilfully two shiny new crutches, came down the stairs and stumped into the drawing-room, which, in spite of the sombre, clustering curtains, was brightly illuminated by the winter sunshine reflected from the snow in the street. Plank was shocked at the change in him—at the ghost of a voice, listlessly formal; at the thin, nerveless hand offered; startled, so that he forgot his shyness, and retained the bony hand tightly in his, and instinctively laid his other great cushion-like paw over it, holding it imprisoned, unable to speak, unconscious, in the impulse of the moment, of the liberty he permitted himself, and which he had never dreamed of taking with such a man as Siward.
The effect on Siward was composite; his tired voice ceased; surprise, inability to understand tinged with instinctive displeasure, were succeeded by humourous curiosity; and, very slowly it became plain to him that this beefy young man liked him, was naively concerned about him, felt friendly toward him, and was showing it as spontaneously as a child. Because he now understood something of how it is with a man who is in the process of being forgotten, his perceptions were perhaps the finer in these days, and the direct unconsciousness of Plank touched him more heavily than the pair of heavy hands enclosing his.
“I thought I’d come,” began Plank, growing redder and redder as he began to realise the enormity of familiarity committed only on the warrant of impulse. “You don’t look well.”
“It was good of you to think of me,” said Siward. “Come up to the library, if you’ve a few minutes to spare an invalid. Please go first; I’m a trifle lame yet.”
“I—I am sorry,” muttered Plank, “very, very sorry.”
At first, in the library, Plank was awkward and silent, finding nothing to say, and nowhere to dispose of his hands, until Siward gave him a cigar to occupy his fingers. Even then he continued to sit uncomfortably, his bulk balanced on a rickety, spindle-legged chair, which he stubbornly refused to exchange for another, at Siward’s suggestion, out of sheer embarrassment, and with a confused idea that his refusal would somehow ultimately put him at his ease with his surroundings.
Siward, secretly amused, rang for tea, although the hour was early. After a little while, either the toast or the tea appeared to act on Plank as a lingual laxative, for he began suddenly to talk, which is characteristic of bashful men; and Siward gravely helped him on when he floundered and turned shy. After a little, matters went very well with them, and Plank, much more at ease than he had ever dared to hope he could be with Siward, talked and talked; and Siward, his crutches across his knees, lay back in his arm-chair, chatting with that winning informality so becoming to men who are unconscious of their charm.
Watching Plank, it occurred to him gradually that this great, cumbersome creature was not a shrewd, thrifty, self-made and self-finished adult at all; only a big, wistful, lonely boy, without comrades and with nowhere to play. On Plank’s round face there remained no trace of shrewdness, of stubbornness, nothing even of the heavy, saturnine placidity of a dogged man who waits his turn.
Plank spoke of himself after a while, sounding the personal note with tentative timidity. Siward gravely encouraged him, and in a little while the outlines of his crude autobiography appeared, embodying his eventless boyhood in a Pennsylvania town; his career at the high school; the dawning desire for college equipment, satisfied by his father, who owned shares in the promising Deepvale Steel Plank Company; the unhappy years at Harvard—hard years, for he learned with difficulty; solitary years, for he was not sought by those whom he desired to know. Then he ventured to speak of his father’s growing interest in steel; the merging and absorbing of independent plants; his own entry upon the scene on the death of his father; and—the rest—material fortune and prosperity, which, perhaps, might stand substitute as a social sponsor for him; stand, perhaps, for something of what he lacked in himself, which only long residence amid the best, long-formed habits for the best, or a long inheritance of the best could give. Did Siward think so? Was the best beyond his reach? Was it hopeless for such a man as he to try? And why?
The innocent snobbery, the abashed but absolute simplicity of this ponderous pilgrim from the smelting pits clambering upward through the high school of the smoky town, groping laboriously through the chilly halls of Harvard toward the outer breastworks of Manhattan, interested Siward; and he said so in his pleasant way, without offence, and with a smiling question at the end.
“Worth while?” repeated Plank, flushing heavily, “it is worth while to me. I have always desired to be a part of the best that there is in my own country; and the best is here, isn’t it?”
“Not necessarily,” said Siward, still smiling. “The noisiest is here, and some of the best.”
“Which is the best?” inquired Plank naively.
“Why, all plain people, whose education, breeding, and fortune permit them the luxury of thinking, and whose tastes, intelligence, and sanity enable them to express their thoughts. There are such people here, and some of them form a portion of the gaudier and noisier galaxy we call society.”
“That is what I wish to be part of,” said Plank. “Could you tell me what are the requirements?”
“I don’t believe I could, exactly,” said Siward, amused. “With us, the social system, as an established and finished system, has too recently been evolved from outer chaos to be characteristic of anything except the crudity and energy of the chaos from which it emerged. The balance between wealth, intelligence, and breeding has not yet been established—not from lack of wealth or intelligence. The formula has not been announced, that is all.”
“What is the formula?” insisted Plank.
“The formula is the receipt for a real society,” replied Siward, laughing. “At present we have its uncombined ingredients in the raw—noisy wealth and flippant fashion, arrogant intelligence and dowdy breeding—all excellent materials, when filtered and fused in the retort; and many of our test tubes have already precipitated pure metal besides, and our national laboratory is turning out fine alloys. Some day we’ll understand the formula, and we’ll weld the entire mass; and that will be society, Mr. Plank.”
“In the meanwhile,” repeated Plank, unsmiling, “I want to be part of the best we have. I want to be part of the brightness of things. I mean, that I cannot be contented with an imitation.”
“An imitation?”
“Of the best—of what you say is not yet society. I ask no more than your footing among the people of this city. I wish to be able to go where such men as you go; be permitted, asked, desired to be part of what you always have been part of. Is it a great deal I ask? Tell me, Mr. Siward—for I don’t know—is it too much to expect?”
“I don’t think it is a very high ambition,” said Siward, smiling. “What you ask is not very much to ask of life, Mr. Plank.”
“But is there any reason why I may not hope to go where I wish to go?”
“I think it depends upon yourself,” said Siward, “upon your capacity for being, or for making people believe you to be exactly what they require. You ask me whether you may be able to go where you desire; and I answer you that there is no limit to any journey except the sprinting ability of the pilgrim.”
Plank laughed a little, and his squared jaws relaxed; then, after a few moments’ thought:
“It is curious that what you cast away from you so easily, I am waiting for with all the patience I have in me. And yet it is always yours to pick up again whenever you wish; and I may never live to possess it.”
He was so perfectly right that Siward said nothing; in fact, he could have no particular interest or sympathy for a man’s quest of what he himself did not understand the lack of. Those born without a tag unmistakably ticketing them and their positions in the world were perforce ticketed. Siward took it for granted that a man belonged where he was to be met; and all he cared about was to find him civil, whether he happened to be a policeman or a master of fox-hounds.
He was, now that he knew Plank, contented to accept him anywhere he met him; but Plank’s upward evolutions upon the social ladder were of no interest to him, and his naïve snobbery was becoming something of a bore.
So Siward directed the conversation into other channels, and Plank, accepting another cup of tea, became very communicative about his stables and his dogs, and the preservation of game; and after a while, looking up confidently at Siward, he said:
“Do you think it beastly to drive pheasants the way I did at Black Fells? I have heard that you were disgusted.”
“It isn’t my idea of a square deal,” said Siward frankly.
“That settles it, then.”
“But you should not let me interfere with—”
“I’ll take your opinion, and thank you for it. It didn’t seem to me to be the thing; only it’s done over here, you know. The De Coursay’s and the—”
“Yes, I know.... Glad you feel that way about it, Plank. It’s pretty rotten sportsmanship. Don’t you think so?”
“I do. I—would you—I should like to ask you to try some square shooting at the Fells,” stammered Plank, “next season, if you would care to.”
“You’re very good. I should like to, if I were going to shoot at all; but I fancy my shooting days are over, for a while.”
“Over!”
“Business,” nodded Siward, absently grave again. “I see no prospect of my idling for the next year or two.”
“You are in—in Amalgamated Electric, I think,” ventured Plank.
“Very much in,” replied the other frankly. “You’ve read the papers and heard rumours, I suppose?”
“Some. I don’t suppose anybody quite understands the attacks on Amalgamated.”
“I don’t—not yet. Do you?”
Plank sat silent, then his shrewd under lip began to protrude.
“I’m wondering,” he began cautiously, “how much the Algonquin crowd understands about the matter?”
Siward’s troubled eyes were on him as he spoke, watching closely, narrowly.
“I’ve heard that rumour before,” he said.
“So have I,” said Plank, “and it seems incredible.” He looked warily at Siward. “Suppose it is true that the Algonquin Trust Company is godfather to Inter-County. That doesn’t explain why a man should kick his own door down when there’s a bell to ring and servants to let him in—and out again, too.”
