see what I can do,” she said anxiously. “But I don’t know—Henry’s difficult—very set in his ways.”
“You’ll think of something. You might—” He smiled grimly. “You might give him a few more bills to pay. Sometimes I think an extravagant wife’s the best inspiration a man can have. We need more pep down here. I’ve got to be the pep for two. I mean it, Stella, I can’t carry this thing alone.”
Stella left the office with her mind in a panic. All the fears and uncertainties of her childhood had been brought suddenly to the surface. She saw Henry cast off by Ted Drinkwater and trying unsuccessfully to run a business of his own. With his easy-going ways! They would slide down hill, giving up the servants one by one, the car, the house. Before she reached home her imagination had envisaged poverty, her children at work—starvation. Hadn’t Ted Drinkwater just told her that he himself was the life of the concern—that he kept things moving? What would Henry do alone?
For a week she brooded over the matter, guarding her secret but looking with a mixture of annoyance and compassion at Henry over the dinner table. Then she mustered up her resolution. She went to a real estate agent and handed over her entire bank account of nine thousand dollars as the first payment on a house they had fearfully coveted on Long Island…. That night she told Henry.
“Why, Stella, you must have gone crazy,” he cried aghast. “You must have gone crazy. Why didn’t you ask me?”
He wanted to take her by the shoulders and shake her.
“I was afraid, Henry,” she answered truthfully.
He thrust his hands despairingly through his yellow hair.
“Just at this time, Stella. I’ve just taken out an insurance policy that’s more than I can really afford—we haven’t paid for the new car—we’ve had a new front put on this house—last week your sable coat. I was going to devote tonight to figuring just how close we were running on money.”
“But can’t you—can’t you take something out of the business until things get better?” she demanded in alarm.
“That’s just what I can’t do. It’s impossible. I can’t explain because you don’t understand the situation down there. You see Ted and I—can’t agree on certain things—”
Suddenly a new light dawned on her and she felt her body flinch. Supposing that by bringing about this situation she had put her husband into his partner’s hands. Yet wasn’t that what she wanted—wasn’t it necessary for the present that Henry should conform to Drinkwater’s methods?
“Sixty thousand dollars,” repeated Henry in a frightened voice that made her want to cry. “I don’t know where I am going to get enough to buy it on mortgage.” He sank into a chair. “I might go and see the people you dealt with tomorrow and make a compromise—let some of your nine thousand go.”
“I don’t think they would,” she said, her face set. “They were awfully anxious to sell—the owner’s going away.”
She had acted on impulse, she said, thinking that in their increasing prosperity the money would be available. He had been so generous about the new car—she supposed that now at last they could afford what they wanted.
It was typical of McComas that after the first moment of surprise he wasted no energy in reproaches. But two days later he came home from work with such a heavy and dispirited look on his face that she could not help but guess that he and Ted Drinkwater had had it out—and that what she wanted had come true. That night in shame and pity she cried herself to sleep.
A new routine was inaugurated in Henry McComas’ life. Each morning Stella woke him at eight and he lay for fifteen minutes in an unwilling trance, as if his body were surprised at this departure from the custom of a decade. He reached the office at nine-thirty as promptly as he had once reached it at eleven—on the first morning his appearance caused a flutter of astonishment among the older employees—and he limited his lunch time to a conscientious hour. No longer could he be found asleep on his office couch between two and three o’clock on summer afternoons—the couch itself vanished into that limbo which held his leisurely periods of digestion and his cherished surfeit of sleep. These were his concessions to Drinkwater in exchange for the withdrawal of sufficient money to cover his immediate needs.
Drinkwater of course could have bought him out, but for various reasons the senior partner did not consider this advisable. One of them, though he didn’t admit it to himself, was his absolute reliance on McComas in all matters of initiative and decision. Another reason was the tumultuous condition of the market, for as 1916 boomed on with the tragic battle of the Somme the allied agents sailed once more to the city of plenty for the wherewithal of another year. Coincidently Drinkwater and McComas moved into a suite that was like a floor in a country club and there they sat all day while anxious and gesticulating strangers explained what they must have, helplessly pledging their peoples to thirty years of economic depression. Drinkwater and McComas farmed out a dozen contracts a week and started the movement of countless tons toward Europe. Their names were known up and down the Street now—they had forgotten what it was to be kept waiting on a telephone.
But though profits increased and Stella, settled in the Long Island house, seemed for the first time in years perfectly satisfied, Henry McComas found himself growing irritable and nervous. What he missed most was the sleep for which his body hungered and which seemed to descend upon him at its richest just as he was shocked back into the living world each morning. And in spite of all material gains he was always aware that he was walking in his own paths no longer.
Their interests broadened and Drinkwater was frequently away on trips to the industrial towns of New England or the South. In consequence the detail of the office fell upon McComas—and he took it hard. A man capable of enormous concentration, he had previously harvested his power for hours of importance. Now he was inclined to fritter it away upon things that in perspective often proved to be inessentials. Sometimes he was engaged in office routine until six, then at home working until midnight when he tumbled, worn out but often still wide-eyed, into his beleaguered bed.
The firm’s policy was to slight their smaller accounts in Cuba and the West Indies and concentrate upon the tempting business of the war, and all through the summer they were hurrying to clear the scenes for the arrival of a new purchasing commission in September. When it arrived it unexpectedly found Drinkwater in Pennsylvania, temporarily out of reach. Time was short and the orders were to be placed in bulk. After much anxious parley over the telephone McComas persuaded four members of the commission to meet him for an hour at his own house that night.
Thanks to his own foresight everything was in order. If he hadn’t been able to be specific over the phone the coup toward which he had been working would have ended in failure. When it was brought off he was due for a rest and he knew it acutely. He’d had sharp fierce headaches in the past few weeks—he had never known a headache before.
The commissioners had been indefinite as to what time he could expect them that night. They were engaged for dinner and would be free somewhere between nine and eleven. McComas reached home at six, rested for a half hour in a steaming bath and then stretched himself gratefully on his bed. Tomorrow he would join Stella and the children in the country. His week-ends had been too infrequent in this long summer of living alone in the Ninety-second Street house with a deaf housekeeper. Ted Drinkwater would have nothing to say now, for this deal, the most ambitious of all, was his own. He had originated and engineered it—it seemed as if fate had arranged Drinkwater’s absence in order to give him the opportunity of concluding it himself.
He was hungry. He considered
