“WHY?”
“Snow!” exclaimed Gail in delight, turning up her face to the delicate
flakes. “And the sun shining. That means snow to-morrow!”
Allison helped her into his big, piratical looking runabout, and tucked
her in as if she were some fragile hot-house plant which might freeze
with the first cool draught. He looked, with keen appreciation, at her
fresh cheeks and sparkling eyes and softly waving hair. He had never
given himself much time for women, but this girl was a distinct
individual. It was not her undeniable beauty which he found so
attractive. He had met many beautiful women. Nor was it charm of manner,
nor the thing called personal magnetism, nor the intelligence which
gleamed from her eyes. It was something intangible and baffling which
had chained his interest from the moment she had appeared in the vestry
doorway, and since he was a man who had never admitted the existence of
mysteries, his own perplexity puzzled him.
“The pretty white snow is no friend of mine,” he assured her, as he took
the wheel and headed towards the Avenue. He looked calculatingly into
the sky. “This particular downfall is likely to cost the Municipal
Transportation Company several thousand dollars.”
“I’m curious to know the commercial value of a sunset in New York,” Gail
smiled up at him. Her eyes closed for a swift instant, her long, brown
lashes curving down on her cheeks, but beneath them was an infinitesimal
gleam; and Allison had the impression that under the cover of her
exquisitely veined lids she was looking at him corner-wise, and having a
great deal of fun all by herself.
“We haven’t capitalised sunsets yet, but we have hopes,” he laughed.
“Then there’s still a commercial opportunity,” she lightly returned. “I
feel quite friendly to money, but it’s so intimate here. I’ve heard
nothing else since I came, on Monday.”
“Even in church,” he chuckled. “You delivered a reckless shock to the
Reverend Smith Boyd’s vestry.”
“Well?” she demanded. “Didn’t he ask my opinion?”
“I don’t think he’ll make the mistake again,” and Allison took the
corner into the Avenue at a speed which made Gail, unused to bare inches
of leeway, class Allison as a demon driver. The tall traffic policeman
around whose upraised arm they had circled smiled a frank tribute to her
beauty, and she felt relieved. She had cherished some feeling that they
should be arrested.
“However, even a church must discuss money,” went on Allison, as if he
had just decided a problem to which he had given weighty thought.
“Fifty millions isn’t mere money,” retorted Gail; “it’s criminal wealth.
If no man can make a million dollars honestly, how can a church?”
Allison swerved out into the centre of the Avenue and passed a red
limousine before he answered. He had noticed that everybody in the
street stared into his car, and it flattered him immensely to have so
pretty a girl with him.
“The wealth of Market Square Church is natural and normal,” he
explained. “It arises partly from the increase in value of property
which was donated when practically worthless. Judicious investment is
responsible for the balance.”
“Oh, bother!” and Gail glanced at him impatiently. “Your natural impulse
is to defend wealth because it is wealth; but you know that Market
Square Church never should have had a surplus to invest. The money
should have been spent in charity. Why are they saving it?”
Allison began to feel the same respect for Gail’s mental processes which
he would for a man’s, though, when he looked at her with this thought in
mind, she was so thoroughly feminine that she puzzled him more than
ever.
“Market Square Church has an ambition worthy of its vestry,” he informed
her, bringing his runabout to rest, with a swift glide, just an accurate
three inches behind the taxi in front of them. “When it has fifty
million dollars, it proposes to start building the most magnificent
cathedral on American soil.”
Gail watched the up-town traffic piling around them, wedging them in,
packing them tightly on all sides, and felt that they must be hours in
extricating themselves from this tangle of shining-bodied vehicles. The
skies had turned grey by now, and the snow was thicker in the air. The
flakes drove, with a cool, refreshing snap, into her face.
“Why?” she pondered. “Will a fifty million dollar cathedral save souls
in proportion to the amount of money invested?”
Allison enjoyed that query thoroughly.
“You must ask the Reverend Smith Boyd,” he chuckled. “You talk like a
heathen!”
“I am,” she calmly avowed. “I’ve been a heathen ever since a certain
respectable old religious body dropped the theory of infant damnation
from its creed. Its body of elders decided to save the souls of
unbaptised babies from everlasting hell-fire; and the anti-damnation
wing won by three grey-whiskered votes.”
Proper ladies in the nearby cars stared with haughty disapproval at
Allison, whose degree of appreciation necessitated a howl. Gail,
however, did not join in the mirth. That telltale red spot had appeared
in the delicate pink of her checks. She was still angry with the
man-made creed which had taught a belief so horrible. The traffic
blockade was lifted, and Allison’s clutch slammed. The whole mass of
vehicles moved forwards, and in two blocks up the Avenue they had
scattered like chaff. Allison darted into an opening between two cars,
his runabout skidded, and missed a little electric by a hair’s breadth.
He had no personal interest in religion, but he had in Gail.
“So you turned infidel.”
“Oh no,” returned Gail gravely, and with a new tone. “I pray every
morning and every night, and God hears me.” The note of reverence in her
voice was a thing to which Allison gave instant respect. “I have no
quarrel with religion, only with theology. I attend church because its
spiritual influence has survived in spite of outgrown rites. I take part
in the services, though I will not repeat the creed. Why, Mr. Allison, I
love the church, and the most notable man in the future history of the
world will be the man who saves it from dead dogma.” Her eyes were
glowing, the same eyes which had closed in satirical mischief. Now they
were rapt. “What a stunning collie!” she suddenly exclaimed.
Allison, who had followed her with admiring attention, his mind
accompanying hers in eager leaps, laughed in relief. After all, she was
a girl—and what a girl! The exhilaration of the drive, and of the snow
beating in her face, and of the animated conversation, had set the clear
skin of her face aglow with colour. Her deep red lips, exquisitely
curved and half parted, displayed a row of dazzling white teeth, and the
elbow which touched his was magnetic. Allison refused to believe that he
was forty-five!
“You’re fond of collies,” he guessed, surprised to find himself with an
eager interest in the likes and dislikes of a young girl. It was a new
experience.
“I adore them!” she enthusiastically declared. “Back home, I have one of
every marking but a pure white.”
There was something tender and wistful in the tone of that “back home.”
No doubt she had hosts of friends and admirers there, possibly a
favoured suitor. It was quite likely. A girl such as Gail Sargent could
hardly escape it. If there was a favoured suitor Allison rather pitied
him, for Gail was in the city of strong men. Busy with an entirely new
and strange group of thoughts, Allison turned into the Park, and Gail
uttered an exclamation of delight as the fresh, keen air whipped in her
face. The snow was like a filmy white veil against the bare trees, and
enough of it had clung, by now, to outline, with silver pointing, the
lacework of branches. On the turf, still green from the open winter, it
lay in thin white patches, and squirrels, clad in their sleek winter
garments, were already scampering to their beds, crossing the busy drive
with the adroitness of accomplished metropolitan pedestrians, their
bushy tails hopping behind them in ungainly loops.
The pair in the runabout were silent, for the east drive at this hour
was thronged with outward bound machines, and the roadway was slippery
with the new-fallen snow. Steady of nerve, keen of eye, firm of hand!
Gail watched the alert figure of Allison, tensely and yet easily
motionless, in the seat beside her. The terrific swiftness of everything
impressed her. Every car was going at top speed, and it seemed that she
was in a constant maze of hair-breadth escapes. By and by, however, she
found another and a greater marvel; that in all this breathless driving,
there was no recklessness. Capability, that was the word for which she
had been groping. No man could survive here, and rest his feet upon the
under layer, unless he possessed superior ability, superior will,
superior strength. She arrived at exactly the same phrase Allison had
entertained five minutes before; “the city of strong men!” Again she
turned to the man at her side for a critical inspection, in this new
light. His frame was powerful, and the square, high forehead, with the
bulges of concentration above the brows, showed his mental equipment to
be equally as rugged. His profile was a crisply cut silhouette against
the wintry grey; straight nose, full, firm lips, pointed chin, square
jaw. He was a fair example of all this force.
Perhaps feeling the steady gaze, Allison turned to her suddenly, and for
a moment the grey eyes and the brown ones looked questioningly into each
other, then there leaped from the man to the woman a something which
held her gaze a full second longer than she would have wished.
“Air’s great,” he said with a smile.
“Glorious!” she agreed. “I don’t want to go in.”
“Don’t,” he promptly advised her.
“That’s a simple enough solution,” and her laugh, in the snow-laden air,
reminded him, in one of those queer flashes of memory, of a little
string of sleighbells he had owned as a youngster. “However, I promised
Cousin Lucile.”
“We’ll stop at the house long enough to tell her you’re busy,” suggested
Allison, as eager as a boy. He had been on his way home to dress for a
business banquet, but such affairs came often, and impulsive adventures
like this could be about once in a lifetime with him. He had played the
grubbing game so assiduously that, while he had advanced, as one of his
lieutenants said, from a street car strap to his present mastership of
traction facilities, he had missed a lot of things on the way. He was
energetic to make up for the loss, however. He felt quite ready to pour
a few gallons of gasolene into his runabout and go straight on to
Boston, or any other place Gail might suggest; and there was an
exhilaration in his voice which was contagious.
“Let’s!” cried Gail, and, with a laugh which he had discarded with his
first business promotion, Allison threw out another notch of speed, and
whirled from the Seventy-second Street entrance up the Avenue to the
proper turning, and halfway down the block, where he made a swift but
smooth stop, bringing the step with marvellous accuracy to within an
inch of the curb.
“Won’t you come in?” invited Gail.
“We’d stay too long,” grinned Allison, entering into the conspiracy with
great fervour.
She flashed at him a smile and ran up the steps. She turned to him again
as she waited for the bell to be answered, and nodded to him with frank
comradery.
“Time me,” she called, and he jerked out his watch as she slipped in at
the door.
Two vivacious looking young women, one tall and black-haired and the
other petite and blonde, and both fashionably slender and both pretty,
rushed out into the hall and surrounded her.
“We thought you’d never come,” rattled Lucile Teasdale, who was the
petite blonde, and the daughter of the sister of the wife of Gail’s
Uncle Jim.
“Who’s the man?” demanded Mrs. “Arly” Fosland, with breathless interest.
“Where’s my tea?” answered Gail.
“We saw you dash up,” supplemented Lucile. “We thought it was a fire.”
“Why doesn’t he come in?” this from Arly, in whom two years of polite
married life had not destroyed an innocently eager curiosity to inspect
eligibles at close range, for her friends.
“Who is he?” insisted Lucile, peeping out of the hall window.
“Edward E. Allison,” primly announced Gail, suppressing a giggle. “I got
him at Uncle Jim’s vestry meeting. He’s waiting to take me riding in the
Park. Where’s my tea?”
“Edward E. Allison!” gasped “Arly” Fosland. “Why, he’s the richest
bachelor in New York, even if he isn’t a social butterfly,” and she
contemplated Gail in sisterly wonder and admiration. “Good gracious,
child, run!”
“Come for the tea to-morrow!” urged Lucile.
They were all three laughing, and the two young married women were
pushing Gail forward. At the door Lucile and Arly separated from her, to
peer out of the two side windows.
“He doesn’t look so old,” speculated Arly; and Lucile opened the door.
“Good-bye, dearie,” and Lucile kissed her cousin in plain sight of the
curb, upon which there was nothing for that young lady to do but go.
For an instant, Edward E. Allison had a glimpse of her, in her garnet
and turquoise, flanked by a sprightly vision in blue and another
sprightly vision in pink, and he thought he heard the suppressed sounds
of tittering; then the door closed, and the lace curtains of the hall
windows bulged outward, and Gail came tripping down the steps.
“Two minutes and forty-eight seconds,” called Allison, putting away his
stop watch with one hand and helping her with the other. He tucked her
in more quickly than at the church, but with equal care, then he jumped
in beside her, and never had he cut so swift and sure a circle with his
sixty horse-power runabout.
They raced up and into the Park, and around the winding driveways with
the light-hearted exhilaration of children, and if there was in them at
that moment any trace of mature thought, they were neither one aware of
it. They were glad that they were just living, and moving swiftly in the
open air, glad that it was snowing, glad that the light was beginning to
fade, that there were other vehicles in the Park, that the world was
such a bright and happy place; and they were quite pleased, too, to be
together.
It was still light, though the electric lamps were beginning to flare up
through the thin snow veil, when they rounded a rocky drive, and came in
view of a little lookout house perched on a hill.
“Oh!” called Gail, involuntarily putting her hand on his arm. “I want to
go up there!”
The work of Edward E. Allison was well nigh perfection. He stopped the
runabout exactly at the centre of the pathway, and was out and on Gail’s
side of the car with the agility of a youngster after a robin’s egg. He
helped her to alight, and would have helped her up the hill with great
pleasure, but she was too nimble and too eager for that, and was in the
lookout house several steps ahead of him.
“It’s glorious,” she said, and her low, melodious voice thrilled him
again with that strange quality he had noticed when she had first spoken
at the vestry meeting.
Below them lay a grey mist, dotted here and there with haloed lights,
which receded in the distance into tiny yellow blurs, while the nearer
lamps were swathed in swirling snowflakes. Nearby were ghosts of trees
projecting their tops from the misty lake, and out of what seemed a vast
eerie depth came the clang of street cars, and the rumble of the distant
elevated, and the honks of auto horns, and all the rattle and roar of
the great city, muffled and subdued.
“It’s like being out of the world.” He was astonished to find in himself
the sudden growth of a poetic spirit, and his voice had in it the
modulation which went with the sentiment.
“This was created,” mused Gail, as if answering an inner question. “Why
should the clumsy minds of men destroy the simplicity of anything so
vast, and good, and beautiful, as our instinctive belief in the
Creator?”
Finding no answer in his experience to this unfathomable mystery, Edward
E. Allison very wisely kept still and admired the scenery, which
consisted of one girl framed tastefully in a miscellaneous assortment of
snowflakes. When he tried to unravel the girl, he found her a still more
fathomless mystery, and gave up the task in a hurry. After all, she was
right there, and that was enough.
When she was quite finished with the view, she turned and went down the
hill, and Edward Allison nearly sprained his spinal column in getting
just ahead of her on the steepened narrow path. It was treacherous
walking just there, with the freshly fallen snow on the shale stones. He
was heartily glad that he had taken this precaution, for, near the
bottom of the hill, one of her tiny French heels slid, and she might
have fallen had it not been for the iron-like arm which he threw back to
support her. For just an instant she was thrown fairly in his embrace,
with his arm about her waist, and her weight upon his breast; and, in
that instant, the fire which had been smouldering in him all afternoon
burst into flame. With a mighty repression he resisted the impulse to
crush her to him, and handed her to the equilibrium which she
instinctively sought, though the arm trembled which had been pressed
about her. His heart sang, as he helped her into the machine, and sprang
in beside her. He felt a savage joy in his strength as he started the
car and felt the wheel under his hard grip. He was young, younger than
he had ever been in his boyhood; strong, stronger than he had ever been
in his youth. What worlds he might conquer now with this new blood
racing through his veins. It was as if he had been suddenly thrust into
the fires of eternal life, and endowed with all the vast, irresistible
force of creation!
Gail, too, was disturbed. While she had laughed to cover the
embarrassment of her mishap, she had been quite collected enough to
thank Allison for his ready aid; but she had felt the thrill of that
tensed arm, and it had awakened in her mind an entirely new vein of
puzzled conjecture. They were both silent, and busy with that new world
which opens up when any two congenial personalities meet, as they raced
out of the Park, and over One Hundred and Tenth Street, and up Riverside
Drive, and out Old Broadway. Occasionally they exchanged bits of
spineless repartee, and laughed at it, but this was only perfunctory,
for they had left the boy and girl back yonder in the park.
Gravity with a man invariably leads him back to the consideration of his
leading joy in life, business; and the first thing Allison knew he was
indulging in quite a unique weakness, for him; he was bragging! Not
exactly flat-footed; but, with tolerably strong insinuation, he gave her
to understand that the consolidation of the immense traction interests
of New York was about as tremendous an undertaking as she could
comprehend, and that, having attained so dizzy a summit, he felt
entitled to turn himself to lighter things, to enjoy life and gaiety and
frivolity, to rest, as it were, upon his laurels.
Gail was amused, as she always was when men of strong achievement
dropped into this weakness to interest girls. She did appreciate and
admire his no doubt tremendous accomplishment; it was only his naïvete
which amused her, and to save her she could not resist the wicked little
impulse to nettle him. To his suggestion that he could now lead a merry
life because he was entitled to rest upon his laurels, she had merely
answered “Why?”
He dropped into a silence so dense that the thump was almost audible,
and she was contrite. She had pricked him deeper than she knew, however.
She had not understood how gigantic the man’s ambitions had been, nor
how vain he was of his really marvellous progress. After all, why should
he pause, when he had such power in him? She did well to speak
slightingly of any achievement made by a man of such proved ability. New
ambitions sprang up in him. The next time he talked of business with her
he would have something startling under way; something to compel her
respect. The muscles of his jaws knotted. It was like being dared to
climb higher in a swaying tree.
“Oh, it’s dark!” suddenly discovered Gail. “Aunty will be frantic.”
“That’s so,” regretfully agreed Allison, who, having no Aunties of his
own, was prone to forget them. “We’ll stop up at this roadhouse, and you
can telephone her,” and he turned in at the drive where rose petalled
lights gleamed out from the latticed windows of a low-eaved building.
Dozens of autos, parked amid the snow-sheeted shrubbery, glared at them
with big yellow eyes, and, through the windows, were white cloths and
sparkling glassware, and laughing groups about the tables, and hurrying
waiters. There was music, too, slow, languorous music!
“Doesn’t it look inviting!” exclaimed Allison, becoming instantly aware
of the pangs of hunger.
“It’s an enchanting place!” agreed Gail enthusiastically.
Allison hesitated a moment.
“Tell your aunt we’re dining here,” he suggested.
She laughed aloud.
“Wouldn’t it be fun,” she speculated, and Allison led her in to the
phone. She turned to him with a snap in her eyes at the door of the
booth. “It depends on who answers.”