VANITY VALIANT
"The witness is excused."
In the ripple that stirred across the court room at the examiner's
abrupt conclusion, John Valiant, who had withstood that pitiless hail
of questions, rose, bowed to him and slowly crossed the cleared space
to his counsel. The chairman looked severely over his eye-glasses, with
his gavel lifted, and a statuesque girl, in the rear of the room, laid
her delicately gloved hand on a companion's and smiled slowly without
withdrawing her gaze, and with the faintest tint of color in her face.
Katharine Fargo neither smiled nor flushed readily. Her smile was an
index of her whole personality, languid, symmetrical, exquisitely
perfect. The little group with whom she sat looked somewhat out of
place in that mixed assemblage. They had not gasped at the tale of the
Corporation's unprecedented earnings, the lavish expenditure for its
palatial offices. The recital of the tragic waste, the nepotism, the
mole-like ramifications by which the vast structure had been undermined,
had left them rather amusedly and satirically appreciative. Smartly
groomed and palpably members of a set to whom John Valiant was a
familiar, they had had only friendly nods and smiles for the young man
at whom so many there had gazed with jaundiced eyes.
To the general public which read its daily newspaper perhaps none
of the gilded set was better known than "Vanity Valiant." The very
nickname--given him by his fellows in facetious allusion to a flippant
newspaper paragraph laying at his door the alleged new fashion of a
masculine vanity-box--had taken root in the fads and elegancies he
affected. The new Panhard he drove was the smartest car on the avenue,
and the collar on the white bulldog that pranced or dozed on its leather
seat sported a diamond buckle. To the space-writers of the social
columns, he had been a perennial inspiration. They had delighted to
herald a more or less bohemian gathering, into which he had smuggled
this pet, as a "dog-dinner"; and when one midnight, after a staid and
stodgy "bridge," in a gust of wild spirits he had, for a wager, jumped
into and out of a fountain on a deserted square, the act, dished up
by a night-hawking reporter had, the following Sunday, inspired three
metropolitan sermons on "The Idle Rich." The patterns of his waistcoats,
and the splendors of his latest bachelors' dinner at Sherry's--with such
items the public had been kept sufficiently familiar. To it, he stood
a perfect symbol of the eider ease and insolent display of inherited
wealth. And the great majority of those who had found place in that
roomy chamber to listen to the ugly tale of squandered millions, looked
at him with a resentment that was sharpened by his apparent nonchalance.
For the failure of the concern upon which a legislature had now turned
the search-light of its inquiry, might to him have been a thing of
trivial interest, and the present task an alien one, which he must
against his will go through with. Often his eyes had wandered to the
window, through which came the crisp _clip-trip-clop_ of the cab horses
on the asphalt, the irritant clang of trolleys and the monstrous panther
purr of motors. Only once had this seeming indifference been shaken:
when the figures of the salary voted the Corporation's chief officers
had been sardonically cited--when in the tense quiet a woman had laughed
out suddenly, a harsh jeering note quickly repressed. For one swift
second then Valiant's gaze had turned to the rusty black gown, the
flushed face of the sleeping child against the tawdry fall of the
widow's veil. Then the gaze had come back, and he was once more the
abstracted spectator, boredly waiting his release.
Long before the closing session it had been clear that, as far as
indictments were concerned, the investigation would be barren of result.
Of individual criminality, flight and suicide had been confession, but
more sweeping charges could not be brought home. The gilded fool had
not brought himself into the embarrassing purview of the law. This
certainty, however, had served to goad the public and sharpen the satire
of the newspaper paragraphist; and the examiner, who incidentally had a
reputation of his own to guard, knew his cue. There were possibilities
for the exercise of his especial gifts in a vice-president of the
Corporation who was also Vanity Valiant, the decorative idler of social
fopperies and sumptuous clothes.
Valiant took the chair with a sensation almost of relief. Since that day
when he had spun down-town in his motor to that sharp enlightenment,
his daily round had gone on as usual, but beneath the habitual pose,
the worldly mask of his class, had lain a sore sensitiveness that had
cringed painfully at the sneering word and the envenomed paragraph.
Always his mental eye had seen a white-faced crowd staring at a marble
building, a coarsely-dressed woman crossing the street with a
handkerchief pressed to her face.
And mingling with the sick realization of his own inadequacy had woven
panging thoughts of his father. The shattered bits of recollection of
him that he had preserved had formed a mosaic which had pictured the
hero of his boyhood. Yet his father's name would now go down, linked
not to success and achievement, but to failure, to chicanery, to the
robbing of the poor. The thought had become a blind ache that had
tortured him. Beneath the old characteristic veneer it had been working
a strange change. Something old had been dying, something new budding
under the careless exterior of the man who now faced his examiner in the
big armchair that May afternoon.
John Valiant's testimony, to those of his listeners who cherished a
sordid disbelief in the ingenuousness of the man who counts his wealth
in seven figures, seemed a pose of gratuitous insolence. It had a
clarity and simplicity that was almost horrifying. He did not stoop to
gloze his own monumental flippancy. He had attended only one directors'
meeting during that year. Till after the crash, he had known little, had
cared less, about the larger investments of the Corporation's capital:
he had left all that to others.
Perhaps to the examiner himself this blunt directness--the bitter
unshadowed truth that searched for no evasions--had appeared effrontery;
the contemptuous and cynical frankness of the young egoist who sat
secure, his own millions safe, on the ruins of the enterprise from
which they were derived. The questions, that had been bland with suave
innuendo, acquired an acrid sarcasm, a barbed and stinging satire, which
at length touched indiscretion. He allowed himself a scornful reference
to the elder Valiant as scathing as it was unjustified.
To the man in the witness-chair this had been like an electric shock.
Something new and unguessed beneath the husk of boredom, the indolent
pose of body, had suddenly looked from his blazing eyes: something
foreign to Vanity Valiant, the club habitue, the spoiled scion of
wealth. For a brief five minutes he spoke, in a fashion that surprised
the court room--a passionate defense of his father, the principles on
which the Corporation had been founded and its traditional policies: few
sentences, but each hot as lava and quivering with feeling. Their very
force startled the reporters' bench and left his inquisitor for a moment
silent.
The latter took refuge in a sardonic reference to the Corporation's
salary-list. Did the witness conceive, he asked with effective
deliberation, that he had rendered services commensurate with the annual
sums paid him? The witness thought that he had, in fact, received just
about what those services were worth. Would Mr. Valiant be good enough
to state the figures of the salary he had been privileged to draw as a
vice-president?
The answer fell as slowly in the sardonic silence. "I have never drawn a
salary as an officer of the Valiant Corporation."
Then it was that the irritated examiner had abruptly dismissed the
witness. Then the ripple had swept over the assemblage, and Katharine
Fargo, gazing, had smiled that slow smile in which approval struggled
with mingled wonder and question.
* * * * *
The jostling crowd flocked out into the square, among them a fresh-faced
girl on the arm of a gray-bearded man in black frock coat and
picturesque broad-brimmed felt hat. She turned her eyes to his.
"So that," she said, "is John Valiant! I'd almost rather have missed
Niagara Falls. I must write Shirley Dandridge about it. I'm so sorry I
lost that picture of him that I cut out of the paper."
"I reckon he's not such a bad lot," said her uncle. "I liked the way he
spoke of his father."
He hailed a cab. "Grand Central Station," he directed, with a glance at
his watch, "and be quick about it. We've just time to make our train."
"Yessir! Dollar'n a half, sir."
The gentleman seated the girl and climbed in himself. "I know the legal
fare," he said, "if I am from Virginia. And if you try to beat me out of
more, you'll be sorry."
* * * * *
Some hours later, in an inner office of a down-town sky-scraper, the
newly-appointed receiver of the Valiant Corporation, a heavy, thick-set
man with narrow eyes, sat beside a table on which lay a small black
satchel with a padlock on its handle, whose contents--several bundles
of crisp papers--he had been turning over in his heavy hands with a look
of incredulous amazement. A sheet containing a mass of figures and
memoranda lay among them.
The shock was still on his face when a knock came at the door, and a man
entered. The newcomer was gray-haired, slightly stooped and lean-jowled,
with a humorous expression on his lips. He glanced in surprise at the
littered table.
"Fargo," said the man at the desk, "do you notice anything queer about
me?"
His friend grinned. "No, Buck," he said judicially, "unless it's that
necktie. It would stop a Dutch clock."
"Hang the haberdashery! Read this--from young Valiant." He passed over a
letter.
Fargo read. He looked up. "Securities aggregating three millions!" he
said in a hushed voice. "Why, unless I've been misinformed, that
represents practically all his private fortune."
The other nodded. "Turned over to the Corporation with his resignation
as a vice-president, and without a blessed string tied to 'em! What do
you think of that?"
"Think! It's the most absurdly idiotic thing I ever met. Two weeks ago,
before the investigation ... but _now_, when it's perfectly certain they
can bring nothing home to him--" He paused. "Of course I suppose it'll
save the Corporation, eh? But it may be ten years before its securities
pay dividends. And this is real money. Where the devil does _he_ come in
meanwhile?"
The receiver pursed his lips. "I knew his father," he said. "He had the
same crazy quixotic streak."
He gathered the scattered documents and locked them carefully with the
satchel in a safe. "Spectacular young ass!" he said explosively.
"I should say so!" agreed Fargo. "Do you know, I used to be afraid my
Katharine had a leaning toward him. But thank God, she's a sensible
girl!"