Part 41 (1/2)
I was very grateful to the McCall estimate of Appleboro's future, for the long stretch shadowed by their overgrown shrubbery brought us to the door leading to the upstair offices, without any possible danger of detection.
The bank had been a stately old home before business seized upon it, tore out its whole lower floors, and converted it into a strong and commodious bank. It is the one building in all Appleboro that keeps a light burning all night, a proceeding some citizens regard as unnecessary and extravagant; for is not Old Man Jackson there employed as night watchman? Old Man Jackson lost a finger and a piece of an ear before Appomattox, and the surrender deprived him of all opportunity to repay in kind. It was his cherished hope that ”some smartybus crooks 'd try to git in my bank some uh these hyuh nights--an' I cert'nly hope to G.o.d they'll be Yankees, that's all.”
Somehow, they hadn't tried. Perhaps they had heard of Old Man Jackson's watchful waiting and knew he wasn't at all too proud to fight. His quarters was a small room in the rear of the building, which he shared with a huge gray tomcat named Mosby. With those two on guard, Appleboro knew its bank was as impregnable as Gibraltar. But as n.o.body could possibly gain entrance to the vaults from above, the upper portion of the building, given over to offices, was of course quite unguarded.
One reached these upper offices by a long walled pa.s.sageway to the left, where the sidewall of the bank adjoins the McCall garden. The door leading to this stairway is not flush with the street, but is set back some feet; this forms a small alcove, which the light flickering through the bank's barred windows does not quite reach.
John Flint stepped into this small cavern and I after him. As if by magic the locked door opened, and we moved noiselessly up the narrow stairs with tin signs tacked on them. At the head of the flight we paused while the flashlight gave us our bearings. Here a short pa.s.sage opens into the wide central hall. Inglesby's offices are to the left, with the windows opening upon the tangled wilderness of the McCall place.
Right in front of us half a dozen sets of false teeth, arranged in a horrid circle around a cigar-box full of extracted molars such as made one cringe, grinned bitingly out of a gla.s.s case before the dentist's office door. The effect was of a lipless and ghastly laugh.
Before the next door a fatuously smiling pink-and-white bust simpered out of the Beauty Parlor's display-case, a bust elaborately coiffured with pounds of yellow hair in which glittered rhinestone buckles. Hair of every sort and shade and length was cl.u.s.tered about her, as if she were the presiding genius of some barbarian scalping-cult. Seen at that hour, in the pale l.u.s.ter of the flashlight, this sorry plunder of lost teeth and dead hair made upon one a melancholy impression, disparaging to humanity. I had scant time to moralize on hair and teeth, however, for Flint was stopping before a door the neat bra.s.s plate of which bore upon it:
_Mr. Inglesby_.
Mr. Inglesby had a desk downstairs in the bank, in the little pompous room marked ”President's Office,” where at stated hours and times he presided grandly; just as he had a big bare office at the mills, where he was rather easy of access, willing to receive any one who might chance to catch him in. But these rooms we were entering without permission were the sanctum sanctorum, the center of that wide web whose filaments embraced and ensnared the state. It would be about as easy to stroll casually into the Vatican for an informal chat with the Holy Father, to walk unannounced into the presence of the Dalai Lama, or to drop in neighborly on the Tsar of all the Russias, as to penetrate unasked into these offices during the day.
We stepped upon the velvet square of carpet covering the floor of what must have once been a very handsome guest chamber and was now a very handsome private office. One had to respect the simple and solid magnificence of the mahogany furnis.h.i.+ngs, the leather-covered chairs, the big purposeful desk. Above the old-fas.h.i.+oned marble mantel hung a life-sized portrait in oils of Inglesby himself. The artist had done his sitter stern justice--one might call the result retribution; and one wondered if Inglesby realized how immensely revealing it was.
There he sat, solid, successful, informed with a sort of brutal egotism that never gives quarter. In despite of a malevolent determination to look pleasant, his smile was so much more of a threat than a promise that one could wish for his own sake he had scowled instead. He is a throaty man, is Inglesby; and this, with an uncompromising squareness of forehead, a stiffness of hair, and a hard hint of white in the eyes, lent him a lowering likeness to an unpedigreed bull.
John Flint cast upon this charming likeness one brief and pregnant glance.
”Regular old Durham shorthorn, isn't he?” he commented in a low voice.
”Wants to charge right out of his frame and trample. Take a look at that nose, parson--like a double-barreled shotgun, for all the world!
Beautiful brute, Inglesby. Makes you think of that minotaur sideshow they used to put over on the Greeks.”
In view of Laurence and of Mary Virginia, I saw the resemblance.
Mr. Hunter's office was less formal than Mr. Inglesby's, and furnished with an exact and critical taste alien to Appleboro, where many a worthy citizen's office trappings consist of an alpaca coat, a chair and a pine table, three or four fly-specked calendars and shabby ledgers, and a box of sawdust. To these may sometimes be added a pot of paste with a dead c.o.c.kroach in it, or a hound dog either scratching fleas or snapping at flies.
Here the square of carpet was brown as fallen pine-needles in October, the walls were a soft tan, the ceiling and woodwork ivory-toned. One saw between the windows a bookcase filled with handsomely bound books, and on top of it a few pieces of such old china as would enrapture my mother. The white marble mantel held one or two signed photographs in silver frames, a pair of old candlesticks of quaint and pleasing design, and a dull red pottery vase full of j.a.panese quince. There were a few good pictures on the walls--a gay impudent Detaille Lancer whose hardy face of a fighting Frenchman warmed one's heart; some sketches signed with notable American names; and above the mantel a female form clothed only in the ambient air, her long hair swept back from her shoulders, and a pearl-colored dove alighting upon her outstretched finger.
I suppose one might call the whole room beautiful, for even the desk was of that perfection of simplicity whose cost is as rubies. It was not, however, a womanish room; there was no slightest hint of femininity in its uncluttered, sane, forceful orderliness. It was rather like Hunter himself--polished, perfect, with a note of finality and of fitness upon it like a hall-mark. Nothing out of keeping, nothing overdone. Even the red petal fallen from the pottery vase on the white marble mantel was a last note of perfection.
Flint glanced about him with the falcon-glance that nothing escapes.
For a moment the light stayed upon the nude figure over the mantel--the one real nude in all Appleboro, which cherishes family portraits of rakeh.e.l.ly old colonials in wigs, chokers, and tight-fitting smalls, and lolloping ladies with very low necks and sixteen petticoats, but where scandalized church-goers have been known to truss up a little plaster copy of the inane Greek Slave in a pocket-handkerchief, by way of needful drapery.
”What I want to know is, _why_ a lady should have to strip to the buff just to play with a pigeon?” breathed John Flint, and his tone was captious.
It did not strike me as being to the last degree whimsical, improbable, altogether absurd, that such a man should pause at such a time to comment upon art as he thinks it isn't. On the contrary it was a consistent and coherent feature of that astounding nightmare in which we figured. The absurd and the impossible always happen in dreams. I am sure that if the dove on the woman's finger had opened its painted bill and spoken, say about the binomial theorem, or the Effect of Too Much Culture upon Women's Clubs, I should have listened with equal gravity and the same abysmal absence of surprise. I pattered plat.i.tudinously:
”The greatest of the Greeks considered the body divine in itself, my son, and so their n.o.blest art was nude. Some moderns have thought there is no real art that is not nude. Truth itself is naked.”
”Aha!” said my son, darkly. ”I see! You take off your pants when you go out to feed your chickens, say, and you're not bughouse. You're art. Well, if Truth is naked, thank G.o.d the rest of us are liars!”
What I have here set down was but the matter of a moment. Flint brushed it aside like a cobweb and set briskly about his real business. Over in the recess next to the fireplace was the safe, and before this he knelt.
”Hold the light!” he ordered in a curt whisper. ”There--like that.
Steady now.” My hand closed as well upon the rosary I carried, and I clung to the beads as the s.h.i.+pwrecked cling to a spar. The familiar feel of them comforted me.