II
Metastasis
It was ten minutes of eight when J. Montague Smith, having picked up thesalesman's sample cases at the town hotel, set Debritt down at therailroad station and bade him good-by. Five minutes later he had driventhe runabout to its garage and was hastening across to his suite ofbachelor apartments in the Kincaid Terrace. There was reason for thehaste. Though he had been careful, from purely hospitable motives, torefrain from intimating the fact to Debritt, it was his regular eveningfor calling upon Miss Verda Richlander, and time pressed.
The New York salesman, enlarging enthusiastically upon the provincialbeatitudes, had chosen a fit subject for their illustration in the youngcashier of the Lawrenceville Bank and Trust. From his earliestrecollections Montague Smith had lived the life of the well-behaved andthe conventional. He had his niche in the Lawrenceville socialstructure, and another in the small-city business world, and he filledboth to his own satisfaction and to the admiration of all and sundry.Ambitions, other than to take promotions in the bank as they came tohim, and, eventually, to make money enough to satisfy the demands whichJosiah Richlander might make upon a prospective son-in-law, had nevertroubled him. An extremely well-balanced young man his fellow townsmencalled him, one of whom it might safely be predicted that he would gostraightforwardly on his way to reputable middle life and old age;moderate in all things, impulsive in none.
Even in the affair with Miss Richlander sound common sense and sobersecond thought had been made to stand in the room of supersentiment.Smith did not know what it was to be violently in love; though he was acharter member of the Lawrenceville Athletic Club and took a certainpride in keeping himself physically fit and up to the mark, it was nothis habit to be violent in anything. Lawrenceville expected its youngmen and young women to marry and "settle down," and J. Montague Smith,figuring in a modest way as a leader in the Lawrenceville younger set,was far too conservative to break with the tradition, even if he hadwished to. Miss Richlander was desirable in many respects. Her father'sample fortune had not come early enough or rapidly enough to spoil her.In moments when his feeling for her achieved its nearest approach tosentiment the conservative young man perceived what a graciouslyresplendent figure she would make as the mistress of her own house andthe hostess at her own table.
Arrived at his rooms in the Kincaid, Smith snapped the switch of theelectrics and began to lay out his evening clothes, methodically andwith a careful eye to the spotlessness of the shirt and the freshimmaculacy of the waistcoat. There were a number of little preliminariesto the change; he made the preparations swiftly but with a certain airof calm deliberation, inserting the buttons in the waistcoat, choosinghose of the proper thinness, rummaging a virgin tie out of its box inthe top dressing-case drawer.
It was in the search for the tie that he turned up a mute reminder ofhis nearest approach to any edge of the real chasm of sentiment: a smallglove, somewhat soiled and use-worn, with a tiny rip in one of thefingers. It had been a full year since he had seen the glove or itsowner, whom he had met only once, and that entirely by chance. The girlwas a visitor from the West, the daughter of a ranchman, he hadunderstood; and she had been stopping over with friends in aneighboring town. Smith had driven over one evening in his runabout tomake a call upon the daughters of the house, and had found a lawn-partyin progress, with the Western visitor as the guest of honor.
Acquaintance--such an acquaintance as can be achieved in a short socialhour--had followed, and the sight of the small glove reminded himforcibly of the sharp little antagonisms that the hour had developed. Atall points the bewitching young woman from the barbaric wildernesses,whose dropped glove he had surreptitiously picked up and pocketed, hadproved to be a mocking critic of the commonplace conventions, and hadbeen moved to pillory the same in the person of her momentaryentertainer. Smith had recalled his first tasting of a certain Frenchliqueur with perfume in it, and the tingling sense of an awakening ofsome sort running through his veins as an after effect not altogetherpleasant, but vivifying to a degree. Some similar thrillings this youngperson from the wide horizons had stirred in him--which was his onlyexcuse for stealing her glove.
Though he was far enough from recognizing it as such, the theft had beenpurely sentimental. A week later, when he would have courted a return ofthe thrills, he had learned that she had gone back to her native wilds.It was altogether for the best, he had told himself at the time, and atother times during the year which now intervened. Perfumed liqueurs arenot for those whose tastes and habits are abstemious by choice; andthere remained now nothing of the clashing encounter at the lawn-partysave the soiled glove, a rather obscure memory of a face too piquant andattractive to be cheapened by the word "pretty"; these and a thing shehad said at the moment of parting: "Yes; I am going back home very soon.I don't like your smug Middle-West civilization, Mr. Smith--it smothersme. I don't wonder that it breeds men who live and grow up and diewithout ever having a chance to find themselves."
He was recalling that last little thrust and smiling reminiscently overit as he replaced the glove among its fellow keepsakes: handkerchiefboxes, tie-holders, and what not, given him on birthdays and Christmasesby the home-town girls who had known him from boyhood. Some day,perhaps, he would tell Verda Richlander of the sharp-tongued littleWestern beauty. Verda--and all sensible people--would smile at the ideathat he, John Montague Smith, was of those who had not "found"themselves, or that the finding--by which he had understood the Westernyoung woman to mean something radical and upsetting--could in any way beforced upon a man who was old enough and sane enough to know his ownlengths and breadths and depths.
He had closed the drawer and was stripping off his coat to dress when hesaw that, in entering the room in the dark, he had overlooked twoletters which had evidently been thrust under the door during hisabsence with Debritt. One of the envelopes was plain, with his namescribbled on it in pencil. The other bore a typewritten address with thecard of the Westfall Foundries Company in its upper left-hand corner.Smith opened Carter Westfall's letter first and read it with a littletwinge of shocked surprise, as one reads the story of a brave battlefought and lost.
"Dear Monty," it ran. "I have been trying to reach you by 'phone off and on ever since the adjournment of our stockholders' meeting at three o'clock. We, of the little inside pool, have got it where the chicken got the axe. Richlander had more proxies up his sleeve than we thought he had, and he has put the steam-roller over us to a finish. He was able to vote fifty-five per cent of the stock straight, and you know what that means: a consolidation with the Richlander foundry trust, and the hearse and white horses for yours truly and the minority stockholders. We're dead--dead and buried.
"Of course, I stand to lose everything, but that isn't all of it. I'm horribly anxious for fear you'll be tangled up personally in some way in the matter of that last loan of $100,000 that I got from the Bank and Trust. You will remember you made the loan while Dunham was away, and I am certain you told me you had his consent to take my Foundries stock as collateral. That part of it is all right, but, as matters stand, the stock isn't worth the paper it is printed on, and--well, to tell the bald truth, I'm scared of Dunham. Brickley, the Chicago lawyer they have brought down here, tells me that your bank is behind the consolidation deal, and if that is so, there is going to be a bank loss to show up on my paper, and Dunham will carefully cover his tracks for the sake of the bank's standing.
"It is a hideous mess, and it has occurred to me that Dunham can put you in bad, if he wants to. When you made that $100,000 loan, you forgot--and I forgot for the moment--that you own ten shares of Westfall Foundries in your own name. If Dunham wants to stand from under, this might be used against you. You must get rid of that stock, Monty, and do it quick. Transfer the ten shares to me, dating the transfer back to Saturday. I still have the stock books in my hands, and I'll make the entry in the r
ecord and date it to fit. This may look a little crooked, on the surface, but it's your salvation, and we can't stop to split hairs when we've just been shot full of holes.
"WESTFALL."
Smith folded the letter mechanically and thrust it into his pocket.Carter Westfall was his good friend, and the cashier had tried,unofficially, to dissuade Westfall from borrowing after he had admittedthat he was going to use the money in an attempt to buy up the controlof his own company's stock. As Smith took up the second envelope he wasnot thinking of himself, or of the possible danger hinted at inWestfall's warning. The big bank loss was the chief thing to beconsidered--that and the hopeless ruin of a good fellow like CarterWestfall. He was thinking of both when he tore the second envelopeacross and took out the enclosed slip of scratch-paper. It was a notefrom the president and it was dated within the hour. Mr. Dunham hadevidently anticipated his itinerary. At all events, he was back inLawrenceville, and the note had been written at the bank. It was a curtsummons; the cashier was wanted, at once.
At the moment, Smith did not connect the summons with the Westfallcataclysm, or with any other untoward thing. Mr. Watrous Dunham had ahabit of dropping in and out unexpectedly. Also, he had the habit ofsending for his cashier or any other member of the banking force atwhatever hour the notion seized him. Smith went to the telephone andcalled up the Richlander house. The promptness with which themultimillionaire's daughter came to the 'phone was an intimation thathis ring was not entirely unexpected.
"This is Montague," he said, when Miss Richlander's mellifluous "Mainfour six eight--Mr. Richlander's residence" came over the wire. Then:"What are you going to think of a man who calls you up merely to begoff?" he asked.
Miss Richlander's reply was merciful and he was permitted to go on andexplain. "I'm awfully sorry, but it can't very well be helped, you know.Mr. Dunham has returned, and he wants me at the bank. I'll be up alittle later on, if I can break away, and you'll let me come.... Thankyou, ever so much. Good-by."
Having thus made his peace with Miss Richlander, Smith put on his streetcoat and hat and went to obey the president's summons. The LawrencevilleBank and Trust, lately installed in its new marble-veneered quarters inthe town's first--seven-storied--sky-scraper, was only four squaresdistant; two streets down and two across. As he was approaching thesky-scraper corner, Smith saw that there were only two lights in thebank, one in the vault corridor and another in the railed-off open spacein front which held the president's desk and his own. Through the bigplate-glass windows he could see Mr. Dunham. The president wasapparently at work, his portly figure filling the padded swing-chair. Hehad one elbow on the desk, and the fingers of the uplifted hand werethrust into his thick mop of hair.
Smith had his own keys and he let himself in quietly through the door onthe side street. The night-watchman's chair stood in its accustomedplace in the vault corridor, but it was empty. To a suspicious personthe empty chair might have had its significance; but Montague Smith wasnot suspicious. The obvious conclusion was that Mr. Dunham had sent thewatchman forth upon some errand; and the motive needed not to be taggedas ulterior.
Without meaning to be particularly noiseless, Smith--rubber heels ontiled floor assisting--was unlatching the gate in the counter-railingbefore his superior officer heard him and looked up. There was anirritable note in the president's greeting.
"Oh, it's you, at last, is it?" he rasped. "You have taken your own goodtime about coming. It's a half-hour and more since I sent that note toyour room."
Smith drew out the chair from the stenographer's table and sat down.Like the cashiers of many little-city banks, he was only a salaried man,and the president rarely allowed him to forget the fact. None the less,his boyish gray eyes were reflecting just a shade of the militantantagonism in Mr. Watrous Dunham's when he said: "I was dining at theCountry Club with a friend, and I didn't go to my rooms until a fewminutes ago."
The president sat back in the big mahogany swing-chair. His face, withthe cold, protrusive eyes, the heavy lips, and the dewlap lower jaw, wasthe face of a man who shoots to kill.
"I suppose you've heard the news about Westfall?"
Smith nodded.
"Then you also know that the bank stands to lose a cold hundred thousandon that loan you made him?"
The young man in the stenographer's chair knew now very well why thenight-watchman had been sent away. He felt in his pocket for a cigar butfailed to find one. It was an unconscious effort to gain time for somelittle readjustment of the conventional point of view. The president'sattitude plainly implied accusation, and Smith saw the solid foundationsof his small world--the only world he had ever known--crumbling to athreatened dissolution.
"You may remember that I advised against the making of that loan whenWestfall first spoke of it," he said, after he had mastered thepremonitory chill of panic. "It was a bad risk--for him and for us."
"I suppose you won't deny that the loan was made while I was away in NewYork," was the challenging rejoinder.
"It was. But you gave your sanction before you went East."
The president twirled his chair to face the objector and brought hispalm down with a smack upon the desk-slide.
"No!" he stormed. "What I told you to do was to look up his collateral;and you took a snap judgment and let him have the money! Westfall isyour friend, and you are a stockholder in his bankrupt company. You tooka chance for your own hand and put the bank in the hole. Now I'd like toask what you are going to do about it."
Smith looked up quickly. Somewhere inside of him the carefully erectedwalls of use and custom were tumbling in strange ruins and out of thedebris another structure, formless as yet, but obstinately sturdy, wasrising.
"I am not going to do what you want me to do, Mr. Dunham--step in and beyour convenient scapegoat," he said, wondering a little in his innerrecesses how he was finding the sheer brutal man-courage to say such athing to the president of the Lawrenceville Bank and Trust. "I supposeyou have reasons of your own for wishing to shift the responsibility forthis particular loss to my shoulders. But whether you have or haven't, Idecline to accept it."
The president tilted his chair and locked his hands over one knee.
"It isn't a question of shifting the responsibility, Montague," he said,dropping the bullying weapon to take up another. "The loan was made inmy absence. Perhaps you may say that I went away purposely to give youthe chance of making it, but, if you do, nobody will believe you. Whenit comes down to the matter of authorization, it is simply your wordagainst mine--and mine goes. Don't you see what you've done? As thematter stands now, you have let yourself in for a criminal indictment,if the bank directors choose to push it. You have taken the bank's moneyto bolster up a failing concern in which you are a stockholder. Go toany lawyer in Lawrenceville--the best one you can find--and he'll tellyou exactly where you stand."
While the big clock over the vault entrance was slowly ticking off afull half-minute the young man whose future had become so suddenly andso threateningly involved neither moved nor spoke, but his silence wasno measure of the turmoil of conflicting emotions and passions that wererending him. When he looked up, the passions, passions which hadhitherto been mere names to him, were still under control, but to hisdismay his restraining hold upon them seemed to be growing momentarilyless certain.
"I may not prove quite the easy mark that your plan seems to prefigure,Mr. Dunham," he returned at length, trying to say it calmly. "Butassuming that I am all that you have been counting upon, and that youwill carry out your threat and take the matter into the courts, what isthe alternative? Just what are you expecting me to do?"
"Now you are talking more like a grown man," was the president's crustyadmission. "You are in a pretty bad boat, Montague, and that is why Isent for you to-night. It didn't seem safe to waste any time if you wereto be helped out. Of course, there will be a called meeting of the bankboard to-morrow, and it will all come out. With the best will in theworld to do you a good turn, I shan't be able to st
and between you andtrouble."
"Well?" said the younger man, still holding the new and utterlyincomprehensible passions in check.
"You can see how it will be. If I can say to the directors that you havealready resigned--and if you are not where they can too easily lay handson you--they may not care to push the charge against you. There is atrain west at ten o'clock. If I were in your place, I should pack acouple of suitcases and take it. That is the only safe thing for you todo. If you need any ready money----"
It was at this point that J. Montague Smith rose up out of thestenographer's chair and buttoned his coat.
"'If I need any ready money,'" he repeated slowly, advancing a steptoward the president's desk. "That is where you gave yourself away, Mr.Dunham. You authorized that loan, and you meant to authorize it. Morethan that, you did it because you were willing to use the bank's moneyto put Carter Westfall in the hole so deep that he could never climbout. Now, it seems, you are willing to bribe the only dangerous witness.I don't need money badly enough to sell my good name for it. I shallstay right here in Lawrenceville and fight it out with you!"
The president turned abruptly to his desk and his hand sought the row ofelectric bell-pushes. With a finger resting upon the one marked"police," he said: "There isn't any room for argument, Montague. You canhave one more minute in which to change your mind. If you stay, you'llbegin your fight from the inside of the county jail."
Now, as we have seen, there had been nothing in John Montague Smith'swell-ordered quarter century of boyhood, youth, and business manhood totell him how to cope with the crude and savage emergency which he wasconfronting. But in the granted minute of respite something within him,a thing as primitive and elemental as the crisis with which it wascalled upon to grapple, shook itself awake. At the peremptory bidding ofthe newly aroused underman, he stepped quickly across the interveningspace and stood under the shaded desk light within arm's reach of theman in the big swing-chair.
"You have it all cut and dried, even to the setting of the police trap,haven't you?" he gritted, hardly recognizing his own voice. "You meantto hang me first and try your own case with the directors afterward. Mr.Dunham, I know you better than you think I do: you are not only a damnedcrook--you are a yellow-livered coward, as well! You don't dare to pressthat button!"
While he was saying it, the president had half risen, and the hand whichhad been hovering over the bell-pushes shot suddenly under the piledpapers in the corner of the desk. When it came out it was gripping theweapon which is never very far out of reach in a bank.
Good judges on the working floor of the Lawrenceville Athletic Club hadsaid of the well-muscled young bank cashier that he did not know hisown strength. It was the sight of the pistol that maddened him and putthe driving force behind the smashing blow that landed upon the bigman's chest. Two inches higher or lower, the blow might have been merelybreath-cutting. As it was, the lifted pistol dropped from Mr. WatrousDunham's grasp and he wilted, settling back slowly, first into hischair, and then slipping from the chair to the floor.
In a flash Smith knew what he had done. Once, one evening when he hadbeen induced to put on the gloves with the Athletic Club's trainer, hehad contrived to plant a body blow which had sent the wiry littleIrishman to the mat, gasping and fighting for the breath of life. "Ifever yez'll be givin' a man that heart-punch wid th' bare fisht, MistherMontygue, 'tis you f'r th' fasht thrain widout shtoppin' to buy annyticket--it'll be murdher in th' first degree," the trainer had said,when he had breath to compass the saying.
With the unheeded warning resurgent and clamoring in his ears, Smithknelt horror-stricken beside the fallen man. On the president's heavyface and in the staring eyes there was a foolish smile, as of one mildlyastonished. Smith loosened the collar around the thick neck and laid hisear upon the spot where the blow had fallen. It was as the Irishtrainer had told him it would be. The big man's heart had stopped like asmashed clock.
In a flash Smith knew what he had done.]
Smith got upon his feet, turned off the electric light, and, from mereforce of habit, closed and snap-locked the president's desk. Thewatchman had not yet returned. Smith saw the empty chair beside thevault door as he passed it on his way to the street. Since the firstimpulse of the unwilling or unwitting homicide is usually sharplyretributive, the cashier's only thought was to go at once to policeheadquarters and give himself up. Then he remembered how carefully thetrap had been set, and how impossible it would be for him to make anyreasonable defense. As it would appear, he had first taken the bank'smoney to help Westfall, and afterward, when exposure had threatened, hehad killed the president. No one would ever believe that the blow hadbeen struck in self-defense.
It was at the hesitating instant that Debritt's curiously propheticwords came back to him with an emphasis that was fairly appalling:"To-morrow we may both be asking for a hand-out, and inquiring, a bithoarsely, perhaps, if the walking is good. That is just how thin thepartitions are." With one glance over his shoulder at the darkenedfront windows of the bank, Smith began to run, not toward the policestation, but in the opposite direction--toward the railroad station.
This was at nine o'clock or, perhaps, a few minutes later. Coincidentwith J. Montague Smith's dash down the poorly lighted cross street, arather weak-faced young man of the sham black-sheep type of the smallercities was lounging in the drawing-room of an ornate timber-and-stuccomansion on Maple Street hill and saying to his hostess: "Say--I thoughtthis was Monty's night to climb the hill, Miss Verda. By Jove, I've gotit in for Monty, don't y' know. He's comin' here a lot too regular toplease me."
"Mr. Smith always puts business before pleasure; haven't you found thatout yet, Mr. Jibbey?" was the rather cryptic rejoinder of the Olympianbeauty; and after that she talked, and made the imitation rounder talk,pointedly of other things.