The talkers

The only sign to indicate the suite of offices was a bronze and marble tablet between elevators:

SUTTON AND SON
(INC. 1809)
LUMBER

According to custom, the senior Sutton always retired upon arriving at the age of sixty, and turned over the business to his sons.

Stuart was the only son of the present generation.

So his father, Charles Edward Stuart Sutton, conforming to the custom of methodical forebears, strolled out of the flower-bedecked private office on his sixtieth birthday, wearing a white rose in his buttonhole, and a bland expression on his handsome features.

Which troubled mightily his son and heir.

“For heaven’s sake, dad,” he remonstrated, “you’re not going to leave me flat like that, are you?”

“You bet,” returned Sutton senior; “I’ve had enough. So hoist your own flag, Stuart, and lay your own course. Your mother and I propose to saunter through the remainder of our lives.”

“But if I signal for a pilot——”

“Certainly. Set signals if you need me. But unless you’re really in a pickle, be a good sport, Stuart.”

They exchanged a handshake; Sutton senior strolled on; son, considerably sobered, stood motionless in the familiar private office, staring at the masses of flowers, feeling uncomfortably modest and slightly alarmed.

He had supposed that he had already discounted the inevitable retirement of his guide, prop, and mentor. He really had. This painful modesty was due to the sentimental shock that now stirred up his boyish emotions.

The normal boy experiences it at the moment his father leaves him at his first boarding school. All bumptiousness disappears. He needs his daddy.

The next day Sutton junior arrived alone at the office and was received respectfully as the head of the firm.

There were fresh flowers for him. The entire office force presented congratulations individually.

That ceremony over, Stuart closed the door, poked up the coal fire in the grate, went to his desk and laid violent hands on a formidable morning mail.

Until noon he dictated letters. He lunched at the Foresters Club—a luxurious place on top of the newest skyscraper.

All that rainy afternoon he remained busy with his secretary, Miss Tower, or with business callers, or with officers and clerks of his own entourage.

He left rather late, and was too late to dress for dinner, finding his father and mother already at table.

“Did you get along all right?” asked his father, carelessly.

“Well, yes, I think so. You know there’s one thing you inaugurated, about which I don’t know anything——”

“Our land reclamation policy?”

“That’s it. I’d better go up and look over the new pineries.”

“They’re mostly under snow, now. But I think you better go in the spring.”

His mother said: “It’s all like a dream. I can’t realize that your father has retired and that you are ‘Sutton and Son.’”

“Well, I realise it,” remarked the husband. “I’ve been trying to decide between California, the West Indies, and the Riviera. I can’t. Can you, Helen?”

The mother smiled and looked at the son. She was loath to put such distances between them.

“If Stuart would only learn to take care of himself——”

“For heaven’s sake, mother!”

“You won’t go to a doctor when you take cold!” retorted his mother. “You smoke too much, you don’t eat properly, you sit up too late. I shall worry if I go away.”

Her son had passed the resentful age; some glimmer of understanding mitigated masculine impatience under maternal solicitude.

“I haven’t had a cold this winter; or needed a pill, either. Go ahead and gallivant with dad.”

Sutton senior and his wife were going to the opera, and the car had already arrived.

They lingered over coffee in the library, listening to Stuart’s description of his first day down town as head of the firm.

Maternal pride struggled with eternal solicitude: “You’ll stand by him at first, won’t you, Charles? Stuart’s shoulders must be gradually accustomed to such a burden. Before arriving at any vital decision he ought always to consult you; etc., etc.”

Theirs was that solid respectability that maintains ancestral estates on the Hudson and a grim brownstone or brick foothold not too far from the Marble Arch.

That section of society known as the Zoo recognized them, mechanically; but there was no foregathering. Even the fat and formidable ring-mistress of the Zoo, now in her dotage, but still socially formidable—and whose only remaining pleasure was in making lists of people she did not want to know—had not cared to write off such folk as the Charles Edward Stuart Suttons.

The snob-sets were tolerantly aware of them; the intellectuals, the nomads, the scores of social whirlpools and puddles in which swam the contents of Blue Book and Register, all were politely conscious of that rather placid and dowdy circle born of the Hudson and rooted amid the rocks of old Manhattan since he of the wooden leg marched out and the red ensign shot up over old Fort George.

“They do anything they damn please, but ignore you if you do the same,” was a complaint not unknown in New York regarding such folk as foregathered with the Suttons.

This was true. They made no bones about doing as they pleased within their circle or outside it. But in one respect they were beyond reproach; they seldom made an undignified marriage. Where other sets had been diluted by frequent mésalliances, they married and propagated their own sort. No obscure beauty born in outer barbarism, no frail and lovely meteor from the Follies, no charming daughter of the nouveau riche, had penetrated, matrimonially, those dull and dowdy mansions which gazed complacently upon the Hudson—frequently through dirty windows.

A rather frowsy maid in limp black came to announce the family bus—a limousine of pre-war excellence and dignity, and not to be discarded in deference to fashion.

For six years it had rolled majestically over New York asphalt and the Boston Post Road, and had borne the Suttons between the town house on Ninth Street and Heron Nest, the ancestral Hudson home.

Now it was solidly ready to bear them unto the temple of music, and thence homeward ere it was solemnly put to bed.

Going, his mother fulfilled the ceremony of the family kiss:

“Good night, Stuart. Don’t sit up late; you won’t feel well in the morning.... I forgot to say there was a girl called you on the telephone about six o’clock—I should say a well-bred person from her voice. Her name was Greenway. But I don’t seem to remember any Greenways——”

“There were the Courtland Greenways——” remarked Sutton senior, giving his son the family handshake.

Descending the stairs, his wife reminded him that the Courtland Greenways were in London.

As the front door closed below, Stuart unhooked the telephone receiver and called Gilda Greenway’s number.

He waited a long while. He could hear the operator ringing.

At last came the final nasal verdict: “The party doesn’t answer.”

He hung up, drew the evening paper toward him, hesitated.

Gilda’s maid had gone home; Gilda had gone out.... He wondered where.... It was odd, but he hadn’t thought of her as having friends—going about in the evenings.... Still, he had first seen her at Derring’s.... Derring’s.... Was that the sort of thing she had gone to?... With whom?... With Sadoul?

He spread his newspaper with decision, read the headlines successively—read on for a while ... sat thinking with the paper across his knees.

That saturnine mountebank, Sadoul!... Clever, always; but always a charlatan.... Yet not entirely a fakir.... Derring had been clay in Sadoul’s hands that evening at the Fireside Club.... And as for the—whatever it was—vision, or image—the shape he saw—thought he saw.... Of course that was some sort of mental suggestion—hypnotic suggestion—something of that sort——

An impertinent thing for Sadoul to do.... Clever, of course—a trick.... But outrageous to evoke—project—materialise—or rather, mentally suggest, to him such an aspect of Gilda.... That sensual, wanton-eyed, languid girl with her heavier limbs and her thick red lips——

He picked up his newspaper, tried hard to read it, flung it onto the sofa, and went to the telephone.

Her number did not answer.