The Street Called Straight. Basil King

Table of Contents

      he three men being left together, Davenant's conviction of inner excitement on the part of his host was deepened. It was as if, on the withdrawal of the ladies, Guion had less intention of concealing it. Not that at first he said anything directly or acted otherwise than as a man with guests to entertain. It was only that he threw into the task of offering liqueurs and passing cigars a something febrile that caused his two companions to watch him quietly. Once or twice Davenant caught Temple's eye; but with a common impulse each hastily looked elsewhere.

      "So, Mr. Davenant, you've come back to us. Got here only this afternoon, didn't you? I wonder why you came. Having got out of a dull place like Waverton, why should you return to it?"

      Looking the more debonair because of the flush in his face and the gleam in his eye, Guion seated himself in the place his daughter had left vacant between his two guests. Both his movements and his manner of speech were marked by a quick jerkiness, which, however, was not without a certain masculine grace.

      "I don't know that I've any better reason," Davenant laughed, snipping off the end of his cigar, "than that which leads the ox to his stall—because he knows the way."

      "Good!" Guion laughed, rather loudly. Then, stopping abruptly, he continued, "I fancy you know your way pretty well in any direction you want to go, don't you?"

      "I can find it—if I know where I'm going. I came back to Boston chiefly because that was just what I didn't know."

      "He means," Rodney Temple explained, "that he'd got out of his beat; and so, like a wise man, he returns to his starting-point."

      "I'd got out of something more than my beat; I'd got out of my element. I found that the life of elegant leisure on which I'd embarked wasn't what I'd been cut out for."

      "That's interesting—very," Guion said. "How did you make the discovery?"

      "By being bored to death."

      "Bored?—with all your money?"

      "The money isn't much; but, even if it were, it couldn't go on buying me a good time."

      "That, of course, depends on what your idea of a good time may be; doesn't it, Rodney?"

      "It depends somewhat," Rodney replied, "on the purchasing power of money. There are things not to be had for cash."

      "I'm afraid my conception of a good time," Davenant smiled, "might be more feasible without the cash than with it. After all, money would be a doubtful blessing to a bee if it took away the task of going out to gather honey."

      "A bee," Guion observed, "isn't the product of a high and complex civilization—"

      "Neither am I," Davenant declared, with a big laugh. "I spring from the primitive stratum of people born to work, who expect to work, and who, when they don't work, have no particular object in living on."

      "And so you've come back to Boston to work?"

      "To work—or something."

      "You leave yourself, I see, the latitude of—something."

      "Only because it's better than nothing. It's been nothing for so long now that I'm willing to make it anything."

      "Make what—anything?"

      "My excuse for remaining on earth. If I'm to go on doing that, I've got to have something more to justify it than the mere ability to pay my hotel bill."

      "You're luckier than you know to be able to do that much," Guion said, with one of his abrupt, nervous changes of position. "But you've been uncommonly lucky, anyhow, haven't you? Made some money out of that mine business, didn't you? Or was it in sugar?"

      Davenant laughed. "A little," he admitted. "But, to any one like you, sir, it would seem a trifle."

      "To any one like me! Listen." He leaned forward, with feverish eyes, and spoke slowly, tapping on the table-cloth as he did so. "For half a million dollars I'd sell my soul."

      Davenant resisted the impulse to glance at Temple, who spoke promptly, while Guion swallowed thirstily a glass of cognac.

      "That's a good deal for a soul, Henry. It's a large amount of the sure and tangible for a very uncertain quantity of the impalpable and problematical."

      Davenant laughed at this more boisterously than the degree of humor warranted. He began definitely to feel that sense of discomfort which in the last half-hour he had been only afraid of. It was not the commonplace fact that Guion might be short of money that he dreaded; it was the possibility of getting a glimpse of another man's inner secret self. He had been in this position more than once before—when men wanted to tell him things he didn't want to know—when, whipped by conscience or crazed by misfortune or hysterical from drink, they tried to rend with their own hands the veil that only the lost or the desperate suffer to be torn. He had noted before that it was generally men like Guion of a high strung temperament, perhaps with a feminine streak in it, who reached this pass, and because of his own reserve—his rather cowardly reserve, he called it—he was always impelled to run away from them. As there was no possibility of running away now, he could only dodge, by pretending to misunderstand, what he feared Guion was trying to say.

      "So everything you undertook you pulled off successfully?" his host questioned, abruptly.

      "Not everything; some things. I lost money—often; but on the whole I made it."

      "Good! With me it was always the other way."

      The pause that followed was an uneasy one, otherwise Temple would not have seized on the first topic that came to hand to fill it up.

      "You'll miss Olivia when she's gone, Henry."

      "Y-yes; if she goes."

      The implied doubt startled Davenant, but Temple continued to smoke pensively. "I've thought," he said, after a puff or two at his cigar, "I've thought you seemed to be anticipating something in the way of a—hitch."

      Guion held his cigar with some deliberation over an ash-tray, knocking off the ash with his little finger as though it were a task demanding precision.

      "You'll know all about it to-morrow, perhaps—or in a few days at latest. It can't be kept quiet much longer. I got the impression at dinner that you'd heard something already."

      "Nothing but gossip, Henry."

      Guion smiled, but with a wince. "I've noticed," he said, "that there's a certain kind of gossip that rarely gets about unless there's some cause for it—on the principle of no smoke without fire. If you've heard anything, it's probably true."

      "I was afraid it might be. But in that case I wonder you allowed Olivia to go ahead."

      "I had to let fate take charge of that. When a man gets himself so entangled in a coil of barbed wire that he trips whichever way he turns, his only resource is to stand still. That's my case." He poured himself out another glass of cognac, and tasted it before continuing. "Olivia goes over to England, and gets herself engaged to a man I never heard of. Good! She fixes her wedding-day without consulting me and irrespective of my affairs. Good again! She's old enough to do it, and quite competent. Meanwhile I lose control of the machine, so to speak. I see myself racing on to something, and can't stop. I can only lie back and watch, to see what happens. I've got to leave that to fate, or God, or whatever it is that directs our affairs when we can no longer manage them ourselves." He took another sip of cognac, and pulled for a minute nervously at his cigar. "I thought at first that Olivia might be married and get, off before anything happened. Now, it looks to me as if there was going to be a smash. Rupert Ashley arrives in three or four days' time, and then—"

      "You don't think he'd want to back out, do you?"

      "I haven't the remotest idea. From Olivia's description he seems like a decent sort; and yet—"