Part 4

“For heaven’s sake, stop fussing. You’ll rub off the finish,” said a plump red-faced woman. She giggled in an uncontrolled staccato. “He’s always at things,” she apologized, shaking hands with Larry. “Mighty nice of you, Mr. Frank, to help our niece with her case. Isn’t this a nasty night? Would you like a cup of tea, or something stronger? Put the water on for tea, Ed,” she decided quickly.

Mr. Daugherty undid his apron and turned toward the kitchen. A polishing, not a talking man, Larry thought, until he later found it was Daugherty’s wife who often canceled out his conversation.

Larry turned with relief to Lucy McVail. After the meticulous uncle and the gushing aunt, it was like looking into a cool, still well. Listening might easily be Lucy’s most useful quality, Larry reflected, remembering that he had mentioned this trait of hers to Bemrose. It wasn’t easy to tell how much she understood, but she listened. He unzipped his briefcase and spread some legal papers for her to examine. Precisely he took up each point in the settlement that Bemrose had worked out with her brother.

When the farm in Iowa was sold, they would divide the proceeds equally, she and her brother. The bonds at the bank, however, belonged solely to her, and they constituted the larger part of the estate. Mr. Bemrose thought she might consider cashing the bonds since he had checked on their current market price and found it was favorable. She might invest the money in an insurance annuity if she wanted to provide for her future.

Miss McVail probably knew, Larry explained, that her brother had capitulated after Mr. Bemrose’s second letter, the blunt one, in which he reminded Mr. McVail of three bonds he had wheedled out of his grandmother the week she died. Mr. Bemrose threatened suit for undue influence, and her brother apparently had reason to keep out of court. Larry noted that Lucy McVail winced. Not that it mattered _why_ he had finally agreed, Larry hastened to explain. Here was his signature. Now if she would just sign-- The farm might bring fifteen hundred dollars. Adding the bonds, she would be able to realize around six thousand in cash. It wasn’t bad. Mr. Bemrose thought she had done all right.

While Lucy McVail read the papers, the Daughertys fussed with teapot, cups and saucers. She read the documents as slowly as she had listened to him, Larry decided. Quietly she studied the long legal sheets, tracing each line with a square-ended finger. Cool and slender. Quiet and slender. Gray-blonde and slender. Larry noted and enjoyed her pale, attenuated beauty.

“Where shall I sign?” she asked at last.

“You’re sure that you haven’t any questions? Mr. Bemrose wanted you to understand all the details.”

“As long as you and Mr. Bemrose think it’s all right--” She nodded. “I trust you.”

Larry handed her a fountain pen, and she wrote her name in thin, tall letters that were squared off in a heavy line at the bottom.

She handed the agreement back to him.

“That’s your copy. Keep it,” he said. “Now sign this one to send to your brother.”

She repeated her signature, obedient as a fourth-grader.

“We didn’t discuss the fee. Do you think Mr. Bemrose--” A shadow crossed the pale eyes. “Well, you know what I mean. He has such important clients.”

“Not you. He’ll be easy on you,” Larry reassured her. “It’s a peculiarity of his, but very often even with his rich clients, he keeps down the fee. I’ve heard him refuse to take a cent from men who would pay anything he asked.” Larry tapped his thigh sharply with a pack of cigarettes and shook one out.

“He must be well off, turning down fees from people who can afford to pay--” Marge Daugherty said. She dribbled a spoonful of tea into her full cup, cooling it. “He’s young to be so rich, isn’t he? Or did he come into the money? Tim Hoxter told us----”

Larry laughed. “All he ever inherited was a sister with t.b. He has a brother who never held a job in his life and a father in Albany who drives a truck when he can find some work. The mother keeps house for all of them on what Mr. Bemrose sends her.”

Larry got up and walked to the table where Ed Daugherty had gone back to the lamp. “That’s a nice job you’re doing,” he remarked.

Daugherty ran his fingers over the glowing wood, warming himself.

“I went home with him to Albany one Christmas vacation and met the family,” Larry explained to Mrs. Daugherty. “Bemrose has been supporting them since he was sixteen. He worked his way through college and law school besides. I don’t know how he ever did it. I couldn’t, but I have a brother who did just about the same--took care of my folks, sent me through school. Some people seem to have the capacity.”

“If he had such a struggle, I don’t see how he can turn down fees.” Marge Daugherty clamped her lips.

“He’s not married, Marge,” Lucy said, so quietly that even a preposterous suggestion would have sounded reasonable, coming from her. “A man who isn’t married----”

“I guess it’s fun for him to work on big cases,” Larry speculated. “Fun for almost any lawyer,” he added. “The money doesn’t matter too much. He has a taste for hobnobbing with big shots. He lived around them for years when he made his home with Judge Haynes. They hire him for their lawyer, and first thing you know he’s their pal. He hangs out with half the people in Washington who count.”

“That’s the trouble with the New Deal crowd,” Ed Daugherty snapped.

Larry looked up startled, as though a clump of quiet woodland fern had suddenly acquired powers of speech.

Ed pulled a pipe out of his back pocket and reamed it. “Maybe your friend Bemrose is after power, like all the rest of them.”

“No, he just likes to help people, like he helped Miss McVail.”

She blushed. “He certainly has been nice to me.” The moving gray-blonde lashes shadowed her cheeks. “The day I went to his office the phone hardly stopped ringing, but he found time for my case just the same.”

“When he helps people and they put their confidence in him, he feels good. That’s all there is to it. The money is secondary with him,” Larry explained, conscious of going into needless detail, yet wanting to clarify it for himself. “With taxes what they are, money isn’t as important as it used to be. A man has to find other reasons for working, and Bemrose enjoys feeling useful. He’s like a lot of other people that way, only he knows better than most how to make himself useful.”

“But if his clients _have_ the money and want to pay him, I still don’t see why--” Marge Daugherty laughed, eyeing Larry shrewdly.

“Oh, Marge, what difference does it make? That’s Mr. Bemrose’s business,” Lucy said. She got up and walked to the hall. “Phil said yesterday he would pick me up at eight-thirty. I wonder if he forgot about our date.”

“It’s all right with _me_.” Marge Daugherty brought her forefinger sharply against her bosom. “As long as he doesn’t charge _you_ a big fee.”

“He won’t,” Lucy whispered. “Didn’t you hear what Mr. Frank said?” Her eyes apologized to Larry.

He signaled for her not to worry, relieved that she knew when to stand up to them and wasn’t always a good little girl.

He made himself comfortable in a chair next to Ed. “I suppose you voted for Willkie,” he said, wondering about the Phil who was calling for her and still thinking that Bemrose might have tried inviting her to dinner. She had a nice simplicity that was lacking in so many of the hard, lacquered women Bemrose took out. The difference might appeal to him if he gave her a chance. Larry wondered if Bemrose had ever known a thoroughly nice, unselfish woman.

“Yes sir, Willkie should have won,” Ed said. “Now they’ve got him wasting his time going over there to see Churchill. If we don’t watch out, first thing you know----”

“Do you mean you’re against Lend-Lease?”

“Well, I don’t know. We’re supposed to be neutral.” Ed obstinately bit at his pipe.

“If England goes under, we’ll have a real fight on our hands. My friend, Bemrose, thinks there’s a chance she might.”

“There’s three thousand miles of ocean for the Nazis to cross, and we’ve got a big navy, haven’t we?” Ed asked.

“The Czechs thought they were okay, nothing could touch them, and so did the Poles. I’m not saying we should get into the War, but I’d like to see Congress stop stalling and pass Lend-Lease.”

“Hugh Johnson has the right idea. He calls this free handout lollipopping all over the world, and that’s what it is,” Ed maintained.

“Ed’s pretty conservative,” Marge observed.

“Is that the bell, Lucy?” Marge picked up the cat and slipped it behind the kitchen door. “You answer it, dear.”

But Lucy had already disappeared down the long, floral hall.

While she was out of the room, her aunt explained that Lucy McVail had studied nursing in Des Moines but left early in her training to take care of her grandmother who broke her hip and was alone on the farm. When her grandmother died after months and months in bed, the Daughertys wrote Lucy to come to New York. They couldn’t afford to send her through nursing school, but they paid for her course at a business college, and she found a job in a few weeks.

“She’s a nice girl, not like girls in New York, but a sweet disposition,” her aunt volunteered. “Ed and I never had children, and it’s a change for us to have someone young around. I get a kick out of her boy friends.”

Ed pursed his lips, and his wife added hastily, “Oh, she’s a good girl.”

“I think she should be a nurse, now she has the money for it,” Ed interjected. “Those stenographers where she works are a hard-boiled, Broadway bunch. She should be in a more refined atmosphere. She don’t know how to act sophisticated. She don’t know how to talk fast. Have you noticed how she takes her time with every word? It’s all right on a farm where there’s no hurry, but in a big office----”

“When they have a figure like that, they don’t waste it in a hospital emptying bedpans, do they, Mr. Frank?” Mrs. Daugherty winked suggestively. “At least in business she has a chance to meet someone. The fellow who’s taking her out is a salesman from her office. How come that friend of yours never married? Mr. Bemrose. He can’t be any youngster.”

“Marge!” Her husband sh-shed her.

Lucy McVail was following a sleekly combed man into the room, her blonde head showing above his. He was around thirty, and Larry was surprised to see that he had a small black mustache which could have been plagiarized from Arthur H. Bemrose except that it was a neater, better barbered edition.

“Mr. Kenyon, Mr. Frank,” Lucy introduced them.

Phillip Kenyon’s wide, warm grin was a handshake. “We better push along, Lucy,” he said. “They say the line goes around the block.”

“What are you seeing?” Marge wrinkled her nostrils inquisitively.

“_Philadelphia Story._ At the Music Hall.”

“Oh, I hear it’s swell.” Marge reproached her husband with a sigh. “You two better run along.”

“I’ll walk to the subway with you,” Larry offered.

“Don’t rush.” Ed folded his polishing rag: “I’m finished with this job. In a little while we can listen to the news.”

“Thanks, but I think I’d better go.”

Lucy brought Larry his coat, and Phil Kenyon held hers as if it were sable instead of tweed, looking compliments in five figures. Crossing Ninety-first Street, they drew away from Larry into an invisible circle. She clung to Phil’s arm, letting him screen her from the storm, and he tucked her hand inside the wool lining of his glove.

“I looked for you tonight at five,” he said.

“I know.” She sounded regretful. “Mr. Anderson started to dictate, and I didn’t get away until six-thirty. I tried your extension----”

“Mr. Kenyon works at the Green Network, too,” she explained to Larry.

They had things to talk about.

Larry decided abruptly that he needed cigarettes from the stand next to the subway. A masculine wind and Phil Kenyon swept her down the stairs, and she turned and fluttered a mitten at him.

Larry felt as if he had seen a clean family movie. It seemed right, sharply right, for those two. Happily ever after. He wished Arthur Bemrose had something as good. He wished Bemrose knew just one wholesome, unscheming woman who would be more interested in making a home for him than what she would get out of it in security or social position.

Arriving winded on the subway platform from a senseless habit of always running down the steps, Larry waited to make sure that Lucy McVail and her friend were on the train ahead.

_Chapter 4_

Larry shifted on the stiff sofa outside the dining room of the Downtown Law Club, and shivering, slipped his hands under his pocket flaps. He hated this morgue and remembered that Bemrose had joined because Judge Haynes used to like the codfish cakes they served on Friday.

A burdened coat rack which crowded the small entrance hall hung over Larry. He walked to the window, watching the wet March snow take on the gray of the skyscrapers as it flurried ineffectually and blew to the ground. The tail end of March, and time for Arthur Bemrose to terminate his winter’s hibernation. Larry knew that he couldn’t have been solidly busy for two months, but he was too busy to see anyone. Always just leaving when Larry offered to drop around at the office. Too busy to play poker with the gang. Over the phone he had grown sharper, shorter. Before Larry could invite him to lunch the other day, Bemrose snapped him off. If that’s how it was, if he thought he could get away from whatever was bothering him by isolating himself-- It didn’t make sense. When a man was miserable and had a friend he could talk to----

Larry paced the hall to the gilded iron door of the elevator. The old car crept inch by inch up the shaft as though conquering an Alp. Watching it, Larry wondered why Bemrose had phoned him this morning after all the weeks of silence. “Have lunch with me at the Downtown Club, I’m bringing a girl.” That’s all he had said.

Larry never could stand waiting. Especially here. Not just because many of the lawyers who belonged to the club had more clients than he did. It was the stuffiness. He took a breath, but didn’t get any air in his lungs. It must feel like that in a submarine.

The elevator door creaked open, and Janice Baldwin stepped out with Bemrose. Her sharply tailored suit of gray wool, the gray cap that hugged her head and hemmed her straight hair, produced a trimness Larry wouldn’t have associated with the rounded evening Janice. Only the generous mouth linked daytime and evening editions, the widely spread mouth and shiny black chips of eyes. They brightened the dim hall.

Shifting a bulky pouch bag to the other arm, she thrust her hand toward him. It was a sharp, compact weapon. “You must be Larry Frank.”

Arthur grunted a greeting and handed his coat to the check girl. Larry asked Miss Baldwin if she would like to leave her overshoes, and as she bent down to tug at the zippers, she seemed suspicious of his solicitude.

Bemrose’s tweedy heft preceded them to the dining room, and Larry began to be glad he was along, deciding her trim five feet three inches needed support if Bemrose began to throw his weight around.

At the table Larry waited for him to help Miss Baldwin out of her coat, but he searched the menu and let her struggle alone. Self-consciously Larry picked up his napkin and examined the dingy silver. At last he leaned over and helped her free the sleeves of her suitcoat from her snug woolen blouse.

“Your public,” Bemrose said irritably.

“Nice public.” She grinned at Larry and rattled the shiny amethyst links on her arm. The pert head, angled in his direction, excluded Bemrose.

Shifting his chair slightly, Larry disengaged her attention. He looked beyond the row of tables that hugged the wall. The snow, now turned to sleet, slapped peevishly against the glass. March was laughing up its sleeve in a last spurt of vengeance before the soft arrival of spring. Larry looked at Janice Baldwin, and her sense of being superlatively, glowingly alive retrieved him from the dirty dullness outdoors.

When Bemrose shoved the menu toward her, she passed it on to Larry. “You order for me,” she said sweetly.

Uneasily he turned to Bemrose. “You know what’s good here on Friday,” he said. “Scallops? Bluefish? How about some codfish cakes?”

Janice Baldwin was a study of contrived blankness, and Arthur said gruffly, “I’m having the fishcakes.”

“Is that all right with you?” Larry realized that she had succeeded in making him responsible for her. The two of them against Bemrose. That seemed to be the way she wanted them teamed up.

“Does he always decide what people should eat?” she wanted to know.

“Now----”

“He’s your friend. Ask him what I’ve done,” she said. “He nearly bit my head off when I met him downstairs a few minutes ago. And I didn’t keep him waiting, I was there right on time.”

The garrulous ears darkened. “It’s not your fault,” Bemrose admitted. “I should know better than to make a lunch date. All morning I’ve been in a jam, the usual jam. This time it’s the bill I drafted for Newton. The House Committee doesn’t seem to want it, and Newton insists that I come down to Washington and meet with them. I know they’re making a mistake. They should let it go to the Senate as is, then make their changes when it comes back to them, but they’re not going to listen to me. People only listen when it costs them more than they can afford.”

The statement contradicted Bemrose’s recent policy of not charging his clients, but Larry let it ride. He turned to Miss Baldwin. “Arthur likes things to go right the first time. Usually he doesn’t need more than one try.”

“And he sulks when they don’t go right.”

“Do you remember in our second year at school you got mad because the _Law Review_ turned down an article you wrote?” Larry asked Bemrose. “I can still remember the subject. It was ‘Decisions.’ You were so put out when the article was returned that you quit studying for about two weeks. For you, that was like going on a hunger strike. We went to the movies every night. We saw about fourteen B pictures.” Larry’s chuckle came out easily from the bottom of his vest.

“Twenty-eight, you mean. Every show was a double feature.”

“That was when you almost decided to give up the law, wasn’t it?” Larry asked.

Bemrose bungled a smile. “Too bad I didn’t before my emotions were involved. Sometimes I envy the fellows who hate their jobs, the clock watchers. They don’t care whether things go right or wrong. They go home and forget about it, and they never get ulcers.”

“Like me. I’ll never have ulcers, or any of the other tension diseases people get from worrying,” Larry said. He turned to Miss Baldwin. “I like what you’ve been writing about England. I get a lot out of the way you say it. Over here, people like me still have no idea----”

Her hair fell forward, screening her face. She stroked the cabochons of her bracelet and talked down at the tablecloth. “I feel it. All my friends over there have been bombed out. It’s the only thing I seem to want to write about. I’d like to make everyone feel it. We’re sitting on dynamite over here, but we don’t know enough to get off. If there were only some way, short of bombing, that would make us feel the urgency-- If a writer had the power and could show us that it’s close to our last chance----”

“You’ll be going back, I suppose,” Larry said. It was inconceivable that Janice Baldwin would sit out the War comfortably in New York.

“The British Consulate has promised to arrange transportation for me in a month. They phoned yesterday.” Without turning her head, the eyes moved sideways toward Bemrose.

His knife dropped and hit the table. “I thought you told me----”

“I said _if_ I could do it without upsetting _Everett’s_ schedule. You know I promised Pat. You were right there.”

“Naturally she wants you to go. That’s how an agent collects ten percent. Miss Baldwin is always letting her agent railroad her into jobs she doesn’t want,” Bemrose complained to Larry.

“If you wanted me to stay here, you should have said so the other night.” Janice’s eyes were bright and bitter, like a quinine-loaded wine.

“I heard you tell Pat there wasn’t any new material over there. You had already covered the story, and five hundred other reporters were hanging around the British Isles for a news break. I thought you asked her to get you out of it,” Bemrose said.

“The other night I may have felt that way.”

“You’d think she would be satisfied to stay in this country and pay attention to her job. She’s always going places,” he grumbled.

“But it _is_ my job,” Janice Baldwin objected. “He doesn’t understand that I’d like to sit home and do it, but I have to look at what’s going on, not just read about it. That’s my particular gix. It’s the only way I can work, being there on the spot and seeing things happen.” She appealed to Larry. “Maybe other people can absorb it from the newspapers, but I have to be on hand and see it myself. I was trained that way. I’m an old time reporter. I always will be----”

“On the fly, going somewhere every minute. I don’t see how she accomplishes anything. A person ought to have a base.” Bemrose’s mustache jerked in a light staccato.

“For a man who thinks he’s anchored, you seem to spend most of your time on trains,” she said crossly.

“I wanted to get back in time to go with you Wednesday night. At the last minute Newton asked me to meet him on the hill. That’s practically a command. I had every intention----”

They had been over it before. Her pat on his hand said skip it.

She left Bemrose alone with the back of her head and turned toward Larry. “Tell me more about him at law school.” In a voice that dripped apple blossoms.

Larry tried to warn her. This was no time. Not when Bemrose was strung up like a radio aerial.

The waiter arrived with their order, and the thick dishes clattering on his aluminum tray drowned out Janice Baldwin. They settled down to the fishcakes, Arthur jabbing his angrily.

“At law school did you all know he would be good?” she asked after a few minutes.

Larry tucked his left hand into his trouser pocket while he ate with the right. “Sure. We tried to tell him so, but he kept on working. The way he worked, you’d think he was going to flunk out. Night after night he’d grind, except the one time he got upset about the _Law Review_ turning down his article.”

“What did you think he should be doing?”

“Playing poker with us. What do you think?” Larry laughed. “You see law school wasn’t enough. Not for Arthur. He got himself a job after class clerking in a law office downtown.”

Silently Bemrose remashed his potatoes.

“Didn’t you try to talk him out of working like that? It couldn’t have been good for him.”

Larry put both hands in his pockets and moved his chair back from the table. “We were scared of him. He was better than we were, and we all knew it. I guess we resented him, but we didn’t dare interfere. It would have been like trying to stop a tornado. You know it’s going to change the shape of almost everything that is in its path, but the force is too great. You don’t dare try and stop it.”

She nodded, letting her food turn cold.

Her tense listening acted like caffeine. Not that Larry needed any special stimulant to talk about Arthur H. Bemrose. What he was saying seemed to make sense, although it had taken time and perspective to understand. It was strange lately--Tim Hoxter, the Daughertys, other people pumping him about Bemrose--a sign, maybe, that Arthur was becoming famous.

“So he scared you and the rest of the boys. You didn’t know what he was about, but you respected it. Or is respect the word?” She searched Larry’s face. “You were afraid of it. It was stronger than you. You didn’t know whether it was good or destructive, but you felt its strength.”

“Why not hold it until the morning they print my obituary? Then you can do a real job,” Bemrose interrupted. “Let’s order some dessert and get out of here.”