Children of the Whirlwind Part 8

"I know I've got the makings of a real business man--I've already told you that," said Larry confidently. He had thought this out carefully during his days as a coal-pa.s.ser and his long nights upon the eighteen-inch bunk in his cell. "I've got a lot of the finishing touches; I know the high spots. What I need are the rudiments--the fundamentals--connecting links. You see, I had part of a business college training a long time before I went to work in a broker's office, stenography and typewriting; I've been a secretary in the warden's office the last few months and I've brushed up on the old stuff and I'm pretty good. That ought to land me a job. Then I'm going to study nights. Of course, I'd get on faster if I could have private lessons with one of the head men of one of these real business schools. I'd mop up this stuff about organization and management mighty quick, for that business stuff comes natural to me. A bit of that sort of going to school would connect up and give a working unity to what I already know.

But then I'll find a job and work the thing out some way. I'm in this to win out, and win out big!"

Once more the rarely heard voice of the d.u.c.h.ess sounded, and though thin it had a positive quality:

"You're not going to take any job at first. First thing, you're going to give all your time to those private lessons."

Larry gazed at the d.u.c.h.ess, surprised by the tone in which she spoke.

"But, grandmother, these lessons cost money. And I didn't have a thin dime left when my lawyers finished with me."

"I've got plenty of money--and it's yours. And the money you get from me will be honest money, too; the interest on loans made in my p.a.w.nshop is honest all right. It'll be better, anyhow, for you to be out in the world a few days, getting used to it, before you take a job."

"Why, grandmother!"

The explanation seemed bald and inadequate, but Larry did not know what else to say, he was so taken aback. The d.u.c.h.ess, as far as he had been able to see, had never shown much interest in him. And now, unless he was mistaken, there was something very much like emotion quavering in her thin voice and shining in her old eyes.

"I don't interfere with what people want to do," she continued--"but, Larry, I'm glad you've decided to go straight."

And then the d.u.c.h.ess went on to make the longest speech that any living person had ever heard issue from her lips, and to reveal more than had yet been heard of that unmysterious mystery which lived within her shriveled, misshapen figure:

"That's what made me interested in Joe Ellison's story--his wanting to get his child clear of the life he was living; though I didn't know he had any such ideas till you told me. Larry, I couldn't get out of this life myself; I was part of it, I belonged to it. But I felt the same as Joe Ellison, and over forty years ago I got your mother out of it, and your mother never came back to it. I did that much. After she died it made me sick when you, all I've got left, began to go crooked. But I had no control over you; I couldn't do anything. So I'm glad that at last you're going to go straight. I'm glad, Larry!"

The emotion that had given her voice a strange and increasing vibrance, was suddenly brought under control or snuffed out; and she added in her usual thin, mechanical tone: "The money will be ready for you in the morning."

Startled and embarra.s.sed by this outbreak of things long hidden beneath the dust in the secret chambers of her being, and wishing to avoid the further embarra.s.sment of thanks, the d.u.c.h.ess turned quickly and awkwardly back to her desk, and her bent old body became fixed above her figures. In a moment the ever-alert Hunt had out the little block of drawing-paper he always carried in a pocket, and with swift, eager strokes he was sketching the outline of that bent, shrunken shape that had subsided so swiftly from emotion to the commonplace.

Larry gazed at the d.u.c.h.ess in silent bewilderment. He had thought he had known his grandmother. He was now realizing that perhaps he did not know his grandmother at all.

CHAPTER VIII

That night Larry slept on a cot set up in Hunt's studio. Hunt had made the proposition that Larry consider the studio his headquarters for the present, and Larry had accepted. Of course the cot and the rough-and-ready furnishings of the studio were grotesquely short of the luxury of those sunny days when Larry had had plenty of easy money and had been free to gratify his taste for the best of everything; but the quarters were infinitely more luxurious and comfortable than his more recent three-by-seven room at Sing Sing with its damp and chilly stone walls.

There were many reasons why Larry was appealed to by the idea of making his home for the present in this old house in this dingy, unexciting, unromantic street. He was drawn toward this bluff, outspoken, autocratic painter, and was curious about him. And then the way his grandmother had spoken, the gleam in her old eyes, had stirred an affection for her that he had never before felt. And then there was Maggie, with her startlingly new dusky beauty, her admiration of him that had so swiftly altered to defiance, her challenge to a duel of purposes.

Yes, for the present, this dingy old house in this dingy old street was just the place he preferred to be.

It was not the part of wisdom to start forth on the beginning of his new career in his shapeless prison shoddy; so the next day Larry pottered about the studio, acting as maid-of-all-work, while the clothes in his trunk which had been stored with the d.u.c.h.ess were being sponged and pressed by the little tailor down the street, and while a laundress, driven by the d.u.c.h.ess, was preparing the rest of his outfit for his debut. In his capacity of maid, with a basket on his arm, he went out into the little street, where in his shabby clothes he was recognized by none and leaned for a time against the mongrel, underfed tree that was hesitatingly greeting the spring with a few half-hearted leaves. He bathed himself in the warm sun which seemed over-glorious for so mean a street; he filled his lungs with the tangy May air; yes, it was wonderful to be free again!

Then he strolled about the street on his business of marketing. It amused him to be buying three pounds of potatoes and a pound of chopped meat and a package of macaroni, and to be counting Hunt's pennies--remembering those days when he had been a personage to head waiters, and had had his table reserved, and with a careless Midas's gesture had left a dollar, or five, or twenty, for the waiter's tip.

When he climbed back into the studio he watched Hunt slashing about with his paint. Hunt growled and roared at him, and kidded him; and Larry came back at him with the same kind of verbal horseplay, after the fashion of men. Presently a relaxation, if not actual friendship, began to develop in their att.i.tude toward each other.

"Tell you what," Larry remarked, standing with legs wide apart gazing at the picture of the Italian mother throned on the curb nursing her child, "if I were dolled up all proper, I bet I could take some of this stuff out and sell it for real dough."

"Huh, n.o.body wants that stuff!" snorted Hunt. "It's too good. Sell it!

You're off your bean, young fellow!"

"I can sell anything, my bucko," Larry returned evenly. "All I need is a man who has plenty of money and a moderate willingness to listen.

I've sold pictures of an oil derrick on a stock certificate, exact value nothing at all, for a masterpiece's price--so I guess I could sell a real picture."

"Aw, you shut up!"

"The real trouble with you," commented Larry, "is that, though you can paint, as a business man, as a promoter of your own stock, the suckling infant in that picture is a J. Pierpont Morgan of multiplied capacity compared to--"

"Stop making that noise like a d.a.m.ned fool!"

This amiable pastime of throwing stones at each other was just then interrupted by the entrance of Maggie for an appointed sitting, before going to her business of carrying a tray of cigarettes about the Ritzmore. She gave Hunt a pleasant "good-morning," the pleasantness purposely stressed in order to make more emphatic her curt nod to Larry and the cold hostility of her eye. During the hour she posed, Larry, moving leisurely about his kitchen duties, addressed her several times, but no remark got a word from her in response. He took his rebuffs smilingly, which irritated her all the more.

"Maggie, I'll get my real clothes late this afternoon; how about my dropping in at the Ritzmore for a cup of tea, and letting me buy some cigarettes and talk to you when you're not busy?" he inquired when Hunt had finished with her.

"You may buy cigarettes, but you'll get no talk!" she snapped, and head high and dark eyes flashing contempt, she swept past him.

Hunt watched her out. As the door slammed behind her, he remarked dryly, his eyes searching Larry keenly:

"Our young queen doesn't seem wildly enthusiastic about you or your programme."

"She certainly is not."

"Don't let that worry you, young fellow. That's a common trait of her whole tribe; women simply cannot believe in a man!"

There was an emphasis and a cynicism in this last remark which caused Larry to regard the painter searchingly. "You seem to know what it is.

Don't mean to b.u.t.t in, Hunt, if there are any trespa.s.sing signs up--but there's a woman in your case?"

"Of course there is--there's always a woman; that's another reason I'm here," Hunt answered. "She didn't believe in me--didn't believe I could paint--didn't believe in the things I wanted to do--so I just picked up my playthings and walked out of her existence."

"Wife?" queried Larry.

"Thank G.o.d, no!" exclaimed Hunt emphatically. "No--'I thank whatever G.o.ds there be, I am the captain of my soul!' Oh, she's all right--altogether too good for me," he added. "Here, try this tobacco."

Larry picked up the pouch flung him and accepted without remark this being abruptly shunted off the track. But he surmised that this woman in the background of Hunt's life meant a great deal more to the painter than Hunt tried to indicate by his attempt to dismiss her casually--and Larry wondered what kind of woman she was, and what the story had been.

The following day, clean-shaven and in his freshened clothes--they were smart and well-tailored, though sober indeed compared with Barney's, and two years behind the style of which Barney's were the extreme expression--Larry pa.s.sed Maggie on the stairway with a smile, who gave him no smile in return, and started forth upon his quest. He was well-dressed, he had money in his pockets, he had a plan, and the air of freedom of a new life was sweet in his nostrils. He was going to succeed!

It was easy enough, with his mind alert for what he wanted, and with the d.u.c.h.ess's liberal allowance to pay for what he wanted, for Larry to find in this city of ten thousand inst.i.tutes teaching business methods, the particular article which suited his especial needs. He found this article in an inst.i.tute whose black-faced headline in its advertis.e.m.e.nts was, "We Make You a $50,000 Executive"; and the article which he found, by payment of a special fee, was an old man who had been the manager of a big brokerage concern until his growing addiction to drink and later to drugs had rendered him undependable. But old Bronson certainly did know the fundamentals and intricacies of the kind of big business which is straight, and it was a delight to him to pour out his knowledge to a keen intelligence.

Larry, in his own words, simply "mopped it up." His experience had been so wide and varied that he now had only to be shown a bone of fact and almost instantly he visioned in their completeness unextinct ichthyosauri of business. By day he fairly consumed old Bronson; he read dry books far into the night. Thus he rapidly filled the holes in the walls of his knowledge, and strengthened its rather sketchy foundation.

Of course he realized that what he was learning was in a sense academic; it had to be tested and developed and made flexible by experience; but then much of it became instantly a living enlargement of the things of which he was already a master.

Old Bronson was delighted; he had never had so apt a pupil. "In less than no time you'll be the real head of that house you're with!" he proudly declared. Larry had not seen it as needful to tell the truth about himself; his casual story was that he was there putting to use a month's holiday granted him by a mythical firm in Chicago.

The d.u.c.h.ess's statement that it would be best for him not to seek work at once was founded on wisdom. Larry was busy and interested, but he did not yet have to face the constant suspicion and hostility which are usually the disheartening lot of the ex-convict who asks for a position.

In this period his confidence and his purpose expanded with new vitality.

As the busy days pa.s.sed down in the little street, the bantering fellowship between Larry and Hunt took deeper root. The d.u.c.h.ess did not again show any of the emotion which had gleamed in her briefly when Larry had announced his new plan; but bent and silent went like an oddly revivified mummy about her affairs. And during these days he did not again see Barney or Old Jimmie; he had learned that on the day following his conference with them they had gone to Chicago on a very private matter of business.