CHAPTER XVII

That was a long and exciting ride for Sunny. Above the roar of the rushing train Katy shouted in her ear. Perfectly at home in the Subway, Katy did not let a little thing like mere noise deter the steady flow of her tongue. The gist of her remarks came always back to what Sunny was to do when they arrived at 27 Broadway; how she was to look; how speak. She was to bear in mind that she was going into the presence of American royalty, and she was to be neither too fresh nor yet too humble. Americans, high and low, so Katy averred, liked folks that had a kick to them, but not too much of a kick.

Sunny was to find out whether at some time or other in the past, Senator Wainwright had not put himself under deep obligations to some member of Sunny's family. Perhaps some of her relatives might have saved the life of this senator. Even Chinks were occasionally heroes, Katy had heard. It might be, on the other hand, said Katy, that Sunny's mother had something "on" the senator. So much the better. Katy had no objection, so she said, to the use of a bit of refined ladylike blackmail, for "the end justifies the means," said Katy, quoting, so she said, from Lincoln, the source of all her aphorisms. Anyway, the long and short of it was, said Katy, that Sunny was on no account to get cold feet. She was to enter the presence of the mighty man with dignity and coolness. "Keep your nerve whatever you do," urged Katy. Then once eye to eye with the man of power, she was to ask--it was possible, she might even be able to demand--certain favours.

"Ask and it shall be given to you. Shut your mouth and it'll be taken away. That's how things go in this old world," said Katy.

Sunny was to make application in both their names. If there were no vacancies in the senator's office, then she would delicately suggest that the senator could make such a vacancy. Such things were done within Katy's own experience.

Katy had no difficulty in locating the monstrous office building, and she led Sunny along to the elevator with the experienced air of one used to ascending skyward in the crowded cars. Sunny held tight to her arm as they made the breathless ascent. There was no need to ask direction on the 35th floor, since the Wainwright Structural Steel Company occupied the entire floor.

It was noon hour, and Katy and Sunny followed several girls returning from lunch through the main entrance of the offices.

A girl at a desk in the reception hall stopped them from penetrating farther into the offices by calling out:

"No admission there. Who do you want to see? Name, please."

Katy swung around on her heel, and recognising a kindred spirit in the girl at the desk, she favoured her with an equally haughty and glassy stare. Then in a very superior voice, Katy replied:

"We are friends of the Senator. Kindly announce us, if you please."

A grin slipped over the face of the maiden at the desk, and she shoved a pad of paper toward Katy.

Opposite the word "Name" on the pad, Katy wrote, "Miss Sindicutt." Opposite the word: "Business" she wrote "Private and personal and intimate."

The girl at the desk glanced amusedly at the pad, tore the first sheet off, pushed a button which summoned an office boy, to whom she handed the slip of paper. With one eye turned appraisingly upon the girls, he went off backwards, whistling, and disappeared through the little swinging gate that opened apparently into the great offices beyond.

"I beg your pardon?" said Katy to the girl at the desk.

"I didn't say nothing," returned the surprised maiden.

"I thought you said 'Be seated.' I will, thank you. Don't mention it," and Katy grinned with malicious politeness on the discomfited young person, who patted her coiffure with assumed disdain.

Katy meanwhile disposed herself on the long bench, drew Sunny down beside her, and proceeded to scrutinise and comment on all passers through the main reception hall into the offices within. Once in a while she resumed her injunctions to Sunny, as:

"Now don't be gettin' cold feet whatever you do. There ain't nothing to be afraid of. A cat may look at a king, him being the king and you the cat. No offence, dearie. Ha, ha, ha! That's just my way of speaking. Say, Sunny, would you look at her nibs at the desk there. Gee! ain't that a job? Some snap, I'll say. Nothin' to do, but give everyone the once over, push a button and send a boy to carry in your names. Say, if you're a true friend of mine, you'll land me that job. It'd suit me down to a double Tee."

"Katy, I goin' try get you bes' job ad these place. I am not so smart like you, Katy----"

"Oh, well, you can't help that, dearie, and you got the face all right."

"Face is no matter. My mother are tell me many time, it is those heart that matter."

"_Sounds_ all right, and I ain't questionin' your mother's opinion, Sunny, but you take it from me, you can go a darn sight further in this old world with a face than a heart."

A man had come into the reception room from the main entrance. He started to cross the room directly to the little swinging door, then stopped to speak to a clerk at a wicket window. Something about the sternness of his look, an air savouring almost of austerity aroused the imp in Katy.

"Well, look who's here," she whispered behind her hand to Sunny. "Now watch little K-k-katy."

As the man turned from the window, and proceeded toward the door, Katy shot out her foot, and the man abstractedly stumbled against it. He looked down at the girl, impudently staring him out of countenance, and frowned at her exaggerated:

"I _beg_ your pardon!"

Then his glance turning irritably from Katy, rested upon Sunny's slightly shocked face? He stopped abruptly, standing perfectly still for a moment, staring down at the girl. Then with a muttered apology, Senator Wainwright turned and went swiftly through the swinging door.

"Well, of _all_ the nerve!" said Katy. Then to the girl at the desk:

"Who was his nibs?"

"Why, your friend, of course. I'm surprised you didn't recognise him," returned the girl sweetly.

"Him--Senator Wainwright."

"The papers sometimes call him 'The Man of Steel,' but of course, intimate friends like you and your friend there probably call him by a nickname."

"Sure we do," returned Katy brazenly. "I call him 'Sen-Sen' for short. I'd a known him in an instant with his hat off."

"I want to know!" gibed the girl at the desk.

The boy had returned, and thrusting his head over the short gate sang out:

"This way, please, la-adies!"

Katy and Sunny followed the boy across an office where many girls and men were working at desks. The click of a hundred typewriters, and the voices dictating into dictagraphs and to books impressed Katy, but with her head up she swung along behind the boy. At a door marked "Miss Hollowell, Private," the boy knocked. A voice within bade him "Come," and the two girls were admitted.

Miss Hollowell, a clear-eyed young woman of the clean-cut modern type of the efficient woman executive, looked up from her work and favoured them with a pleasant smile.

"What can I do for you?" The question was directed at Katy, but her trained eye went from Katy to Sunny, and there remained in speculative inquiry.

"We have come to call upon the Senator," said Katy, "on important and private business."

Katy was gripping to that something she called her "nerve," but her manner to Miss Hollowell had lost the gibing patronising quality she had affected to the girl at the door. Acute street gamin, as was Katy, she had that unerring gift of sizing up human nature at a glance, a gift not unsimilar in fact to that possessed by the secretary of Senator Wainwright.

Miss Hollowell smiled indulgently at Katy's words.

"_I_ see. Well now, I'll speak for Mr. Wainwright. What can we do for you?"

"Nothing. _You_ can't do nothing," said Katy. She was not to be beguiled by the smile of this superior young person. "My friend here--meet Miss Sindicutt--has a personal letter for Senator Wainwright, and she's takin' my advice not to let it out of her hands into any but his."

"I'm awfully sorry, because Mr. Wainwright is very busy, and can't possibly see you. I believe I will answer the purpose as well. I'm Mr. Wainwright's secretary."

"We don't want to speak to no secretary," said Katy. "I always say: 'Go to the top. Slide down if you must. You can't slide up.'"

Miss Hollowell laughed.

"Oh, very well then. Perhaps some other time, but we're especially busy to-day, so I'm going to ask you to excuse us. _Good_-day."

She turned back to the papers on her desk, her pencil poised above a sheet of estimates.

Katy pushed Sunny forward, and in dumb show signified that she should speak. Miss Hollowell glanced up and regarded the girl with singular attention. Something in the expression, something in the back of the secretary's mind that concerned Japan, which this strange girl had now mentioned caused her to wait quietly for her to finish the sentence. Sunny held out the letter, and Miss Hollowell saw that fine script upon the envelope, with the Japanese letters down the side.

"This are a letter from Japan," said Sunny. "If you please I will lig' to give those to Sen--Thad is so big a name for me to say." The last was spoken apologetically and brought a sympathetic smile from Miss Hollowell.

"Can't I read it? I'm sure I can give you what information you want as well as Mr. Wainwright can."

"It are wrote in Japanese," said Sunny. "You cannot read that same. _Please_ you let me take it to thad gentleman."

Miss Hollowell, with a smile, arose at that plea. She crossed the room and tapped on the door bearing the Senator's name.

Even in a city where offices of the New York magnates are sometimes as sumptuously furnished as drawing rooms, the great room of Senator Wainwright was distinctive. The floor was strewn with priceless Persian and Chinese rugs, which harmonised with the remarkable walls, panelled half way up with mahogany, the upper part of which was hung with masterpieces of the American painters, whose work the steel magnate especially favoured. Stephen Wainwright was seated at a big mahogany desk table, that was at the far end of the room, between the great windows, which gave upon a magnificent view of the Hudson River and part of the Harbor. He was not working. His elbows on the desk, he seemed to be staring out before him in a mood of strange abstraction. His face, somewhat stony in expression, with straight grey eyes that had a curious trick when turned on one of seeming to pin themselves in an appraising stare, his iron grey hair and the grey suit which he invariably wore had given him the name of "The Man of Steel." Miss Hollowell, with her slightly professional smile, laid the slip of paper on the desk before him.

"A Miss Sindicutt. She has a letter for you--a letter from Japan she says. She wishes to deliver it in person."

At the word "Japan" he came slightly out of his abstraction, stared at the slip of paper, and shook his head.

"Don't know the name."

"Yes, I knew you didn't; but, still, I believe I'd see her if I were you."

"Very well. Send her in."

Miss Hollowell at the door nodded brightly to Sunny, but stayed Katy, who triumphantly was pushing forward.

"Sorry, but Mr. Wainwright will see just Miss Sindicutt."

Sunny went in alone. She crossed the room hesitantly and stood by the desk of the steel magnate, waiting for him to speak to her. He remained unmoving, half turned about in his seat, staring steadily at the girl before him. If a ghost had arisen suddenly in his path, Senator Wainwright could not have felt a greater agitation. After a long pause, he found his voice, murmuring:

"I beg your pardon. Be seated, please."

Sunny took the chair opposite him. Their glances met and remained for a long moment locked. Then the man tried to speak lightly:

"You wished to see me. What can I do for you?"

Sunny extended the letter. When he took it from her hand, his face came somewhat nearer to hers, and the closer he saw that young girl's face, the greater grew his agitation.

"What is your name?" he demanded abruptly.

"Sunny," said the girl simply, little dreaming that she was speaking the name that the man before her had himself invented for her seventeen and a half years before.

The word touched some electrical cord within him. He started violently forward in his seat, half arising, and the letter in his hand dropped on the table before him face up. A moment of gigantic self-control, and then with fingers that shook, Stephen Wainwright slipped the envelope open. The words swam before him, but not till they were indelibly printed upon the man's conscience-stricken heart. Through blurred vision he read the message from the dead to the living.

"On this sixth day of the Season of Little Plenty. A thousand years of joy. It is your honourable daughter, who knows not your name, who brings or sends to you this my letter. I go upon the long journey to the Meido. I send my child to him through whom she has her life. Sayonara. Haru-no."

For a long, long time the man sat with his two hands gripped before him on the desk, steadily looking at the girl before him, devouring every feature of the well-remembered face of the child he had always loved. It seemed to him that she had changed not at all. His little Sunny of those charming days of his youth had that same crystal look of supreme innocence, a quality of refinement, a fragrance of race that seemed to reach back to some old ancestry, and put its magic print upon the exquisite young face. He felt he must have been blind not to have recognised his own child the instant his eye had fallen upon her. He knew now what that warm rush of emotion had meant when he had looked at her in that outer office. It was the intuitive instinct that his own child was near--the only child he had ever had. By exercising all the self-control that he could command, he was at last able to speak her name, huskily.

"Sunny, don't you remember me?"

Like her father, Sunny was addicted to moments of abstraction. She had allowed her gaze to wander through the window to the harbour below, where she could see the great ships at their moorings. It made her think of the one she had come to America on, and the one on which Jerry had sailed away from Japan. Painfully, wistfully, she brought her gaze back to her father's face. At his question she essayed a little propitiating smile.

"Mebbe I are see you face on American ad-ver-tise-ment. I are hear you are very grade man ad these America," said the child of Stephen Wainwright.

He winced, and yet grew warm with pride and longing at the girl's delicious accent. He, too, tried to smile back at her, but something sharp bit at the man's eyelids.

"No, Sunny. Try and think. Throw your mind far back--back to your sixth year, if that may be."

Sunny's eyes, resting now in troubled question upon the face before her, grew slowly fixed and enlarged. Through the fogs of memory slowly, like a vision of the past, she seemed to see again a little child in a fragrant garden. She was standing by the rim of a pool, and the man opposite her now was at her side. He was dressed in Japanese kimona and hakama, and Sunny remembered that then he was always laughing at her, shaking the flower weighted trees above her, till the petals fell in a white and pink shower upon her little head and shoulders. She was stretching out her hands, catching the falling blossoms, and, delightedly exclaiming that the flying petals were tiny birds fluttering through the air. She was leaning over the edge of the pool, blowing the petals along the water, playing with her father that they were white prayer ships, carrying the petitions to the gods who waited on the other side. She remembered drowsing against the arm of the man; of being tossed aloft, her face cuddled against his neck; of passing under the great wistaria arbour. Ah, yes! how clearly she recalled it now! As her father transferred her to her mother's arms, he bent and drew that mother into his embrace also.

Two great tears welled up in the eyes of Sunny, but ere they could fall, the distance between her and her father had vanished. Stephen Wainwright, kneeling on the floor by his long-lost child, had drawn her hungrily into his arms.

"My own little girl!" said "The Man of Steel."