When she had done her work in the morning, Ellen slipped into the room which had been Jay's. No one noticed, she thought; but her mother had and, when Ellen remained, her mother entered and found her seated by a window (which had become "his window").
Ellen looked about. "I've made his bed, mother," she said.
"You wanted to, yourself."
"Yes. . . . Since, I've stayed to think about him."
Her mother approached her. "What about yourself, Ellen," she inquired gently, "yourself and him? He's the one you told your father of."
"He is."
"He's married, Ellen; you'd not told your father that of him."
"No. I didn't think it made any difference."
"That he's married, Ellen?"
"I didn't know he'd . . . come anywhere for me. But he came here," she whispered, so troubled within herself that her mother made no reproach of her.
"The night he came, Ellen, he was just a tired boy. And I'd have liked everything about him yesterday, weren't he married."
Married! thought Ellen; How much was he married, and why? Why was his wife away from him? She could not mention to her mother these things. Her mother was not "misdoubting" anything done; but "you love him, Ellen; you told your father so; you've told me he's the one, and I've seen you."
"I'm going to New York," Ellen suddenly said, startling her mother.
"To New York, Ellen? Why's that?"
"I've an offer. I had it weeks ago. He'll not be in New York, mother; so I'll go there!"
She stood, in her excitement, quiveting. She would go to New York away from him but in his service, for Lew Alban would be there. Ellen avoided her mother, for what she seemed to say was, "I'll leave even the city Jay Rountree's in, so as to be away from him," whereas what she meant was that, for him, she'd follow, to New York, Lew Alban.
None of this could she tell her mother, but it was then and there that Ellen made her decision.
She owned the rest of the week and, during it, she heard nothing from Jay nor of him. He was at Stanley, undoubtedly, with his father and Lew Alban. By Monday, they would return to Chicago, and on Monday morning, Ellen was in her place at the office, awaiting Mr. Rountree.
He came in, garbed in black. Jay accompanied him, so she kept her eyes, at first, upon Mr. Rountree, who scarcely spoke to her. Did he remember that she had been at home? she wondered. He was completely preoccupied with his own affairs and he sat down, solemnly, to deal with them.
Jay shook hands. In his fingers was there remembrance of their handclasp beside the northern road? Did he recollect his leap from the sloop to her little boat, when he had seen her? He inquired about her mother and about the rest, by name—of Ted and Ann, especially—and she replied to him steadily enough, almost as usual. He went out, leaving her to her work with his father.
Jay had heard from Lida. It was a note in pencil and so brief that he had memorized it.
"I'm all right. It's all right. The stars are not so stale, Jay. Do you ever look at them? Later, I'll send for you."
So Lida had not been among the dead who had danced in the sky of that northern night. Instead, the stars had become, for her, not stale! How and why? He thought of her often as he went about; and he returned to Ellen at the end of the day, as he used to do.
"Ken Howarth and I had lunch together," he related. "Lyman Howarth's gone back east. We talked race."
"What's Lew Alban doing?" Ellen asked.
"Staying in Stanley for a while. There's probate proceedings, of course, and a lot of legal stuff. Then he returns to New York. He's offered for sale everything he has in Stanley, except the factory; even the old house."
"His home," repeated Ellen, offended at the idea; and she asked: "Did you see Mr. Slengel there?"
"He was not at the funeral. That was rather a Rountree affair," said Jay wryly. "But he came down before we left; in fact, we left him with Lew."
He glanced at her smooth, brown throat and her brown little hands and her bare forearm; he dwelt, for the instant, in the delight of his day with her; he dwelt with the longing for her which had seized him under the stars—Lida's stars, not stale. Later, she'd send for him. He shook hands with Ellen, unnecessarily but briefly and with no such grasp from her as on the night in the north.
Ellen knew nothing of Lida, but Ellen felt him withdrawn again. She went home—home now being a room with Diana.
Di was very glad to see her. Di questioned her a little, not much, of Hoster. She wanted Ellen to confine herself to answers to questions and not volunteer more. Abruptly Di abandoned the subject of home.
"Send your sympathy down to Lew?" she inquired.
"No," said Ellen.
"He ain't the one that can use it," admitted Di. "He'll be free as air, now."
Did Di mean, in the disposition of his business favors? Ellen wondered. Di explained.
"He's known for months the old man couldn't move from his bed, still he's been crampin' Lew's style. Now Lew'll let out."
Ellen had opportunity, soon, to see this for herself. Lew appeared, wearing a new, light suit with a broad, black mourning band on the sleeve. He called ostensibly to pay personal respects to Mr. Rountree and to deliver a seal ring, a Bible and other effects found to have been bequeathed to John Rountree by his father. Ominously, Lew did not discuss business at all but was prodigal, beyond the provisions of the will, in bestowal of his father's keepsakes, especially those of small intrinsic value, ecclesiastical in character.
Ellen felt he was playing upon Mr. Rountree with a more pompous and more cruel deference than ever before; and he plied Jay, overpolitely, with small, worthless presents, impossible to refuse.
Yes; Lew was letting out. At the office, he was punctilious with her; no curve of her body escaped his scrutiny but he did not delay to be alone with her. He wanted to be off; off to New York, "free as air" (as Di had said), with no parent alive to learn, by any chance, reports of him.
Again and again his eyes came to Ellen, but each time her sensation was the same. He was postponing her; he had put off his patience and willingness to wait; he was off to New York free as air. Art Slengel accompanied him.
From New York, Ralph Armiston recorded Lew's arrival.
"I am not personally popular with him, as you know," Ellen read Ralph's frank admission, in a letter to Mr. Rountree. (She remembered Jay's statement that Ralph was to Lew, as was Lew to Ralph, a pot of poison.) "I have no negotiations with him at his office. We are supposed to assume that his business stays with us. He refuses my social invitations; he goes around with Slengel."
Di, a few evenings later, confirmed this. "Art's sticking in New York," she informed Ellen. "He's certainly on the job with Lew," and she vouchsafed details, which had reached her, that demonstrated that Mr. Slengel spent little of his time, on the job, in Lew's office. The method of procedure, which had proved itself by most practical and profitable results in the Metten case, was being extended and adapted to suit the pleasure of Lew.
It did not, to Di's disappointment, draw her to New York. "Art'd be a fool to pay cash fares from Chicago for girls for a party down there," Di admitted. "Broadway's lit for them that bought their own tickets, one way. Besides," considered Di, "I never went big with Lew. Art's had just one criticism of me; I ain't reluctant enough for some. The kick in a kiss to some is the girl's reluctance. Now if you worked for Art and he knew the flowers Lew sent you . . ."
Ellen prepared herself, on several successive days, to speak to Mr. Rountree, yet finally, when she did, she was almost incoherent and he misunderstood her.
"You want to leave my employ?" he asked, regarding, her as though she were deserting a sinking ship.
"I just want to go to your New York office, please," Ellen explained and spoke of never having seen New York and of wishing to work there.
Mr. Rountree never had a thought of relating it with Lew; he merely satisfied himself that she had come to a decision and, after questioning her, he made no objections. "I will transfer you immediately," he agreed.
Di was more inquisitive. "Whose idea?" she catechized. Ellen said it was her own.
"Lew in it?"
"I'm to be in charge, in New York, under Mr. Armiston," Ellen replied; and to this Di countered, "In charge of what?"
"The office," said Ellen.
"There won't be no office in New York nor anywhere else, when you lose Lew. You know that," returned Di, narrowing her eyes. "You know Lew liked you. What you doin', Ellen?"
"I'm going to take over the New York office, under Mr. Armiston," Ellen re-declared, too emphatically.
Jay heard of it, not from his father, but through Lowry, and interpreted it without reference to Lew. He remembered how he had, himself, delivered Ralph's original request for her and that he had urged her to accept the place, never wanting her to go. Since then, how affairs had flown for her and for him!
Within the Ellen of the office, who awaited him calmly (outwardly) at the end of the day, was the bare-armed, brown little girl who had bent, looking for him under the Arletta's sail, and had cried out in her relief at sight of him. Within, was she who had brought her boat close to let him leap aboard and had freed the sheet when he was beside her; she of the blue gingham and the big strawberry bowl, of the brown, smooth shoulders and brown, smooth legs and brown little feet, who had swum with him and climbed up on the little boat and dived; she of the afternoon talk under the trees and of the dance of the dead in the sky and of the dark by the road before the motor-car came.
To her, he could not cease to be the very tired boy who had jumped at sight of her and forgotten everything and everyone else but her; never, never could he cease to be (though this he could not suspect) the boy flung face down across the bed with his arms, like a child's, beside his head while she watched over him and dreamed.
Now, she was going away; and after he heard it, Jay avoided his father's office until the hour when he was sure to find her alone.
"You're going to New York," he said. "Did I have anything to do with it?"
She looked at him, thinking what to say. "It's better for me to be there," she told him, at last.
"Do you want to go to New York?"
"I want to go."
He seized both her hands, one hand to each of his, thrusting his fingers between hers, pressing his palms to hers. He drew her toward him, so. Then his hands would release her; his hands would slip over her shoulders and about her little body. He started to draw his hands away but hers clung to his; she fought more than his handclasp but she clung to his clasp; she clung to it, so!
"I don't want you to go!" he told her.
"I can't bear it! I can't bear it!"
"To go?"
"This!" she cried, and tore her hands from him. So he stood back from her, as he had by the northern road under the stars where the dead danced; under the stars not so stale now to Lida, who would soon send for him. There was Lida. He remembered Lida and turned away.
To leave the city, where she had dwelt for nearly three years, was less, far less to Ellen than to forsake the lake beside which she had been born and had lived all her life. She looked for the water and watched it at every eastward open space, as the train rushed into Indiana.
Now the lake lay to the north. Ellen gazed up the length of the great fresh sea toward her home, nearly four hundred miles away, where were her mother and sisters and brothers—and the room which, shared with her sister, was hers and the room with the bed upon which Jay had slept.
The lake, all the length of it, represented home and home people; for they sailed upon it, her father's ship traversed it all. The lake had brought her father to her and away from her and back to her again.
The porter, with Ethiopian sensitiveness to feelings, stepped to Ellen: "You'll be havin' your last look at the lake."
Ellen arose and gazed back, long after the water had vanished.
Mr. Armiston was very glad to have her, and he turned over the office to her with results which he signaled by reducing to nearly nothing his hours of attendance at his desk. In contrast to Mr. Rountree, he celebrated with compliments. "Satisfactory" was a weak and wobbling word to describe her, he declared. "Never saw a girl with as good a head."
But Ellen did not expect to accomplish, with her hands and head, her errand in New York.
When first she phoned Lew's office, on a matter of routine business, she imagined the possibility of reaching Lew and being recognized; but upon that occasion and subsequently, another answered and dealt with her. When she inscribed, at the bottom of Mr. Armiston's letters to Lew, the symbol RA/EP, she imagined Lew noticing it and recognizing her initials; but he gave no sign of knowledge of her presence.
Ellen had taken a room near Washington Square and she spent a glorious September Sunday about the docks of the Hudson, watching the ferries, the tugs and the great liners in the slips on both sides of the river. Ships! Deep, rumbling blasts of steam whistles, the swish of cutwaters, the beat of the engines, the tap of bells—one two, one two, one two.
It made her weak with homesickness, but it was at the waterfront that she planned her Monday call upon Lew.
Instead of sending, by messenger, a pattern which required his approval, she carried it to his office. "May I see Mr. Alban, please?" And she sent in her name.
He received her, seated and tilted back, slightly, in his dark-grained chair at his big, dark-grained table.—The girl who had ushered her slipped out and Ellen stood alone with him, his eyes roving over her.
"So it's you," he greeted her. "You decided to follow me."
"I'm in Mr. Armiston's office," Ellen said.
Lew nodded, with his eyes still roving, his lips slightly smiling. "When did you come down?"
"A couple of weeks ago."
"You're just letting me know," remarked Lew, watching her face and the increase of her discomfiture, as he put out his hand for the paper she held and, taking it from her, tossed it aside. "Is there any real hurry about that?"
"No," admitted Ellen.
"Sit down," bid Lew. "I'm not busy." He indicated a chair near him and she obeyed.
She had had time, now, to appreciate the change in him. His father, as long as he lived, must have been a check upon Lew and a check, certainly, for his own good. Lew was sallower, more nerveless, thinner and at the same time more coarsened than ever she had seen him. The deceptive, slightly ascetic look natural to him, and which might have been accentuated by his thinness, was instead sharpened away.
"Glad to see you," said Lew, his eyes lingering upon her. Of girls of the readily supplied sort, he had seen too much; of this sort, nothing; and she always attracted him. She had appeared, indeed, on a day when he would have said that no girl would have stirred him; but she did; and he liked it. Moreover, it flattered him that she had followed him of herself. He knew the Rountrees never had sent her after him.
"Like New York?" he asked her.
"Yes."
"Where you living?"
Ellen hesitated, and then told him.
He laughed at her but he liked her for her fear of him. The others had no fear!
"Know where I live?" he teased her.
"Yes."
"Where is it?"
She told him; and his street number, on her lips, was pleasantly titillating to him.
"How did you find out?"
"It's on file in the office."
He nodded, a trifle disappointed, but asked her: "Been by it, by any chance?"
"I've been by," admitted Ellen and more than repaid his momentary disappointment.
"Know the phone number, do you?"
"Yes."
Lew looked over her with half-shut, heavy-lidded eyes. "If you use it this week, you'll find me. Then I'm taking a little rest—France; Monte Carlo, maybe." He reached for the pattern she had brought and pulled it from the envelope. "That's all right," he said after a glance. "You knew it was, didn't you?"
"Yes. Do you mind telling me is it really any use our making up that pattern?"
"Our?" repeated Lew, mocking the tone of her word.
"Rountree, I mean."
"Oh, you can count on your job," assured Lew. "Rountree will keep open a while. I'm letting everybody ride till I get back; six weeks, I'd say."
Each evening of the week, Ellen struggled miserably with herself. She ought to phone him; she ought not; she ought; ought not. She never used the number or again saw him before he sailed.
She accused herself, as soon as he was safely away: she had dodged him; she had dodged Lew Alban. She had learned that she still possessed the power to attract him, only to sacrifice it, she thought, by having affronted him. Ellen did not know that, until he obtained her, she would always have that which a woman, ungained, maintains over a man who has long looked upon her with desire.
Ralph Armiston saluted Lew's departure with heartfelt Thank Gods, for it gave Ralph what he most required—time. "Howarths are warming to us, but we can't force the fire," he said to Ellen. "Mr. Lew Alban hasn't the least idea we've a chance to cook a cake with Howarths or he'd have cut our throats before sailing, weary as he was of welldoings. Now unless he's a thoroughly gratuitous liar, we have six weeks."
It was at the end of the fifth that he returned to the office, late in the day, and instructed Ellen:
"Wire, please, my brother-in-law to come on, and not to wire his partner at the pumps that he's coming. I want him to drop in on Lyman Howarth. Something is nearly ripe to pick."
Ellen wired and received the response: to-morrow he was coming. Lew Alban was on the sea, four days away, aboard a great French liner.
Ellen made no alteration of her dress for the meeting with Jay. In the morning, she arose earlier—she had awakened at dawn—and she had taken more time to her hair; more time to her hands, which were losing their summer brown in this New York November; time, also, to tiny, freshening trifles; but she slipped into the blue dress which she had bought, a month ago, for the office.
He might come to the office direct from the train; he might, she realized, go to Mrs. Lytle's. She had no idea what was his present relation with the Lytles and with his wife. She had no information, indeed, of himself except what crept into letters of his or his father's to Mr. Armiston, which it was her business to read. Ellen had not imagined how completely she was to be banished from him.
He came from the train, and, it being midmorning and New York, not Chicago, she was alone when the door opened and he was before her. He closed the door, quickly, and after they had spoken, he stood away from her. This was not, and could not be, resumption at the point of their parting; they had dropped from that, both of them, in externals; but what was within him? Anything of that which beat in her?
He asked her about her family and of Ann and Ted by name; she answered, noticing that his hair had become, again, darker than his skin. He was a bit older, a bit more than two months explained. Perhaps it was his new suit, cut differently. No; it was in his eyes and the slight set of his lips, after he smiled. He was taking more responsibility; he was less a boy. But if he flung himself, exhausted, across a best-room bed, he would sleep like a boy again! Looking at him, in this New York office, she saw him suddenly as he had slept in the shaft of light from the lamp in her hand.
"How has it been in Chicago?" she asked him.
"Rotten," he told her honestly.
"How is your father?"
Jay winced. "Spending his soul on economy. I'm glad you don't see him. He's—" Jay hesitated and made a clean breast of it—"he's lost his confidence, you see. He knows we're losing Alban so tries to scheme how we ⟨can⟩ run without it. No chance; we can't; we've got to have more business; Howarth, of course you know," and sat down beside her and talked with her about Howarth until Ralph arrived and took him away.
She had him for a few minutes at the end of the day, almost as in Chicago. "I dropped in on Lyman Howarth," he told her, "and couldn't pretend I just happened to be in town and didn't care about his business. I didn't tell him we had to have it, either; I stayed somewhere between. There's a chance for us to take that business away from Slengels but never if Lew leaves us to go to Slengels first."
Ellen walked to her room in a clear, November coolness, with gusts of breeze at her cheek, the harbinger stirrings of a storm.
By morning, a storm—that completely capricious and relentless dealer in destinies—was spread over land and sea. It howled out to the ocean to strike the greatest ships and to make seasick, in his de luxe stateroom, Lew Alban. This was one of its countless consequences. Upon the western plains and especially upon the roaring reaches of the Great Lakes—that region where the wind had the water at its mercy in the middle of a continent—it struck with a suddenness and fury not known to the seas and dashed, like the hand of God, at its victims.
Against the package freighter Gideon Gant, out of Duluth with a crew of twenty-two officers and men, the gale beat; and the Gant flashed over the raging waves of Lake Superior the alarm that she was sinking. Signals from her then ceased but watchers on the cliffs near the little Keweenaw settlement of Brebeuf saw a steamer, struggling with the storm, come within a mile of the cliffs before she foundered. They saw a lifeboat upturned and specks, which were men, tossed in the waves and disappear.
They saw a mast above the waves: a mast, from the sunken hull, stood; and on the mast clustered five specks. A good glass showed them plainly; they were men. They could not save themselves and no one could save them.
No boat could live in the gale-driven surf over the rocky reef between the mast and the shore; no coastguard cannon could carry a line that distance. The sole chance of success was from the lake and the freighter Gilbert Ramsay tried to approach the mast—and turned back. The Albert Loring got closer, before giving up; and the master of the coal-carrier Donagon put his ship nearly beside the wreck only to find, and to report, that the situation was hopeless because the Gant lay slightly on her side, tilting the mast toward the shore so that it was impossible to reach the men from another vessel.
So the ships could do nothing but stand by, a mile or so away in deep water, stand by and watch, helpless as the watchers on the shore.
On the first day, the newspapers printed only brief reports of the fact. Night passed, and in the morning the five specks were upon the mast; the glass showed that they moved their arms. The five men lived and looked at the ships and at the shore. And there they clung, in their lashings, and looked all day.
That night, in thousands and tens of thousands of homes, men, women and children on their knees prayed for the five men on the mast of the Gideon Gant, while the watchers on the shore stared out into the dark and the Albert Loring, standing in deep water, played its searchlight on the mast. It was all any one could do.
Ellen Powell, in her room near Washington Square, New York, was one of the many who prayed; for New York had heard of the men; all the continent heard of them. Their situation, continuing, caught at the minds and hearts of the millions, as nothing else that day; it became the poignant, frightful plight of human beings, doomed slowly and painfully to die in sight of their fellows, helpless to relieve or reach them, and upon their plight, the sensation and sympathy of the millions were spent.
From all the neighborhood of Brebeuf, thousands flocked to the shore to stand and look out. In every city and town with a newspaper, people telephoned, between editions, for news of the men on the mast of the ship sunken in Lake Superior. No tragedy, in months, had so stirred the public. They felt not only the plight of the five men; they felt the challenge to civilization in the helplessness of mankind to save or even to aid, in the slightest, the five men slowly dying in sight of all.
The prayers, which composed the sole possibly effective effort of man, pleaded for the gale to diminish, but the storm, instead, strengthened and worked around out of the north. Freezing weather was on the way. At dawn, again the glasses showed that the five men survived.