Stubble Part 18

"How's this?" she heard Claybrook say. "Full up?" He had turned from his idle inspection of the lobby. "Not in two weeks. You can rent a floor in this hotel."

He looked at Mary Louise. "You want a room here?" He seemed a bit surprised.

"Yes," she stammered. "For the night."

Claybrook turned to the clerk. "Tell McLean Miss McCallum wants a room here for the night," he said.

"But----" interrupted the clerk.

Claybrook cut him off short, tossing a card across the desk. "Take that to McLean and tell him Miss McCallum wants a room. And give her the best service you've got."

The clerk disappeared again. Mary Louise was hot and embarra.s.sed and uncomfortable. She looked up and saw Claybrook regarding her quizzically but kindly. He seemed very big and she warmed to him. He asked her no questions. She was about to speak when the clerk returned again and, calling a bell-boy, tossed out a key to him, bowed, and murmured, "Six fourteen," indicating Mary Louise.

Before following the waiting boy, she held out her hand impulsively to Claybrook and looked into his eyes.

"Thank you so much," she said. "I don't know what I would have done without you. It's all so ridiculous. Tell you all about it sometime."

She left him standing there in front of the desk, with a puzzled look upon his face, a big, reliant, kindly figure. He had not asked her a single question. He had come to her a.s.sistance when she needed it sorely. His was a friendship worth having.

She waited until the bell-boy had left her in the room and then she closed the door and locked it. Then she threw herself face down upon the bed and buried her flushed cheeks in the pillow. What a disgraceful, disreputable affair it all was. All on account of her own blindness and folly. She felt like a little child helped out of a sc.r.a.pe. But all the mischief was not remedied. She at least could find other lodgings to-morrow. She would not wait another day. Thanks to Claybrook she was in off the street. Suppose she had had to spend the night on a park bench? Once that had had a humorous sound to it.

Claybrook _was_ a masterful person. He had made that clerk step around. How humiliating it had all been.

She got up and switched off the lights. Then she lay down again and watched the twinkle of the lamps of an electric sign about a block away across the roofs. What was she going to do about Maida? What was she going to do about the tea room? Something would have to be done.

It was impossible to go on with it any further.

She would have to buy Maida out. She could force her to sell, she supposed. But where would she get the money? She was already in debt for part of her share. Perhaps Maida would buy her out. What would she do then? Go back to Bloomfield? Just when the venture was beginning to pan out nicely? Not without a struggle, she wouldn't. Back and forth she debated the question, her mind a welter of confused decisions.

After a while she fell asleep....

Two days later she met Claybrook again. Nothing had been decided.

Maida had seemed utterly indifferent. "Perfectly satisfied with things as they are," she had said; there was a diabolical stubbornness in her manner. She made capital of her own inertia. She was as cool as if dealing with an entire stranger. Finally, after two days of backing and filling, of bickering and contesting, she had named her price.

"Fifteen hundred," she had said and there was nothing in the way she said it that gave the slightest hope that it would be any less. It was a hold-up.

Mary Louise met Claybrook; she was pa.s.sing through the lobby of the Patterson where she still had her expensive room. He saw the trouble in her face and drew her to the lounge in the ladies' entrance.

"What's wrong?" he said shortly. "You've been hard to catch lately--something's on your mind."

"No, there isn't. Honestly," she protested. She saw that he was not to be put off. Moreover, she was feeling entirely weak and helpless, no longer the masterful and self-reliant female. And she told him the story--most of it.

When she finished he smiled at her. He seemed genuinely amused. "It's quite a tragedy," he admitted.

"And what am I going to do?"

"That's just the point," he agreed. "Has the tea room been making you money? Does it look good to you?"

"Yes," she said. "Too good to let go of." And then she launched into a digressive and rather vague prospectus of its activities and profits.

"How much money would it take?" he asked at length.

She told him.

"Well, then, forget it," he concluded. "I told you that if you got in a jam, to call on me. Well, I was not talking just to hear myself talk. I meant it." He paused and stared away at the opposite wall.

"Meet me here this afternoon at three and I'll have a check for you."

Mary Louise was for the moment incredulous. Then a great sense of relief flooded over her, and then a feeling of regret.

"But I couldn't," she faltered.

"Why couldn't you?" He rose to his feet and looked down at her.

"I couldn't take money from you. You don't know what I'd do with it, don't know what sort of business woman I am, or anything."

"I know enough to satisfy myself," Claybrook a.s.sured her soothingly.

"And I'm not giving you the money. You can write me out a note for it. Six per cent. is better than four," he added. And then he smiled.

Two days later Maida Jones moved out and Mary Louise saw her no more.

CHAPTER XII

Loneliness wages a Fabian warfare. It is likewise a craven. At the slightest opposition it turns tail and flees, frequently to steal back furtively and lurk slinking in the vicinity, clouding it. Only on rare occasions does it boldly come out and proclaim itself.

Another week had pa.s.sed. Joe was finding leisure. And in leisure there are echoes, as in all vast vaulted s.p.a.ces, where slight sounds linger reverberating and faint shadows stretch away to void. There was time to see the drabness of his boarding place, so he changed it. The change cost him more money and left him more leisure. He took his meals wherever he happened to be. The town was full of people, kindly enough, but each with his own circle of interests. To some of these he sold motor cars. There would be a short period of contact, then that would pa.s.s and the customer would slip into the whirlpool of casuality and be swept away. None of the relationships seemed to last. Each one left him more alone than ever.

He ran across Mrs. LeMasters. Mrs. LeMasters was an ancient lady with a penchant for lavender. The day he called on her she was wearing a flowered dress with a sash, with bits of lace about the neck and cuffs. She put on a bonnet of lavender straw before the gla.s.s in her front hall and bound it to her by yards of voluminous cream tulle, wrapped under her chin and about her neck with trembling fingers.

"Does it blow much in your car?" she called to him in a quavery voice.

He a.s.sured her that it was quite desirably calm.

"The Stokes car is most delightful," she said. "Just like sitting in my own room. Not the sign of a b.u.mp--and I could not realize we had been going twenty-five miles an hour."

He smiled politely. "We'll see what this one will do."

"I've been struggling to keep off this evil hour for, oh, so long,"

she explained as she followed him timidly down the walk to the curb.

"It was a terrible thing when the world went mad for haste and now has to be jerked around from place to place without ever drawing a sane breath. I've two horses and three carriages, one a Victoria that I bought in Paris. What am I going lo do with these if I buy your car, Mr. Hooper? Oh, what a pretty car!"

She narrowed her sharp little eyes--she was quite near sighted--and stepped out into the street and around the rear of the automobile, caught sight of her image in the back panel, came around and felt of the leather in the seat, rubbed the polished surface of the bow socket as though she had bought motors for years. Then she turned to Joe: "And the engine? Is it a good engine?"

"It is guaranteed to be the best." And then he went on quietly to tell her a few of the more spectacular things about it. He did not overdo it.

As he was speaking she was watching his face with a dreamy, vague expression on her wrinkled features. When he had finished, she brightened and laid her hand on his arm. "And now let's go for a nice ride." She was as enthusiastic as a girl. "I'm sure this is a nice car."

They went out in the country a short distance, out on the Bloomfield pike. She found he was from Bloomfield and trilled away in a high, shrill cackle that she loved every stick and stone in that adorable country. And when she found that he was the nephew of Mrs. Mosby, or, rather, Loraine Fawcette, that was, her ecstasy knew no bounds.