Not without reason did the late and great O. Henry refer to New York as Bagdad-on-the-Subway. Any kind of Arabian Nights' adventure can occur there, and very often does.
Indeed, considering the regrettable behaviour of Sir Henry Merrivale in that same subway...
But let us first indicate the paths of several lives which were converging, towards a point of irony, on that very hot afternoon of Monday, July 6th. Sir Henry Merrivale, himself, wearing a tweed cap and a suit of plus fours which would have inspired aesthetic agony even without his corporation or his countenance, arrived on the Mauretania.
The thermometer stood at ninety-eight. The skyline of lower Manhattan loomed in hard sparkle against a sky like milk on the boil. By the time the liner discharged her passengers, at half-past two in the afternoon, Sir Henry Merrivale had been almost too well photographed and interviewed. He held forth on the international situation with such fluency and lack of discretion that even ships' news reporters felt a qualm.
"Look, sir," interposed one of them. "You'll back this up, will you? If s not off the record?"
"Oh, my son!" said H.M., waving his hand in a disgruntled way. "I called a so-and-so a so-and-so, and he is. That's simple enough, ain't it?"
"Listen!" begged a photographer, who had been dodging back and forth behind his camera like a sniper in ambush. "You say you like this country, don't you?"
H.M. directed towards this man, through his big spectacles, a scowl of such horrible and terrifying malignancy that any such photograph ought to have borne the caption, "$5000 Reward." H.M. also removed his cap, so that the sun could heliograph more evil from his big bald head. The photographer pleaded again.
"Look! I want you to express pleasure!"
"I am expressin' pleasure, dammit!"
"What are your plans, Sir Henry?"
"Well... now," said the great man, "I got to visit a family in Washington."
"But aren't you staying any time in New York?"
"Y' know, I'd like to." Across H.M.'s unmentionable face crept an expression which Chief Inspector Masters, had he been there, would have recognized for wistfulness mixed with pure devilment "I'd like to visit a friend or two of mine. Or go out to the Polo Grounds, maybe."
"Polo Grounds?" yelped another voice. "But you're an Englishman, aren't you?"
‘Uh-huh."
"Do you know anything about baseball?"
H.M.'s mouth fell open, a wide cavern. It was as though you had asked the late Andrew Carnegie whether he ever heard of a free library.
"Do I know anything about baseball?" powerfully echoed H.M. "Do I know anything about baseball?" Hitching up his trousers, he opened and shut both hands to beckon his companions closer. "Looky here!" he said.
At about the same time the great man was being interviewed, one of the friends of whom he had spoken was no great distance away as the crow flies. Mr. Frederick Manning, of the Frederick Manning Foundation, entered the head office of the Token Bank and Trust Company, and went down to the safety-deposit vault
From there Mr. Manning emerged some twenty minutes later, with his brief case looking a good deal thicker than before. In lower Broadway the sun carved a glittering cleft, winking back at him from green and yellow taxies. Under the Corinthian pillars of the bank, Mr. Manning stood for a moment and swore mildly.
He did not like heat He was one of those men who merely turn lobster pink and peel. Frederick Manning, at fifty-one, was spare and lean, a little over middle height with silver grey hair and a pair of vivid blue eyes whose expression he tried to veil rather than to use. His reputation was that of a good businessman, although business he left to his lawyer. Frederick Manning was more man-of-the-world than businessman, and more scholar than either.
"Oh, well!" he said quietly. After this he apostrophized lower Broadway with a quotation from Milton which startled several passers-by. Then, unruffled, he hailed a taxi.
He was driven uptown to his club, where he had lunch alone. In connection with the whirl of ugly events which were to follow, it maybe mentioned that Mr. Gilbert Byles, the District Attorney of New York County, was a fellow member of the club. Mr. Byles, whom the press described as "our beat-dressed D. A.," several times glanced towards Manning across the dining room.
But Manning, evidently so preoccupied that he did not even notice an old acquaintance, hardly touched his food and never glanced up. He was doing sums in arithmetic on the back of an empty envelope. Finally, and with hesitation, he twice wrote the words "Los Angeles."
"Coffee, sir?" inquired the waiter.
"Not good enough!" muttered Manning, and scratched out the words.
"Then can I get you something else, sir?"
"Eh?" said Manning, and clearly wrote "Miami."
"If you don't want coffee..."
Frederick Manning woke up. The blue eyes, against lean pink face and silver grey hair, returned to the vividness of a strong and towering personality. He crumpled up the envelope and threw it aside.
"I beg your pardon," he said, with that engaging smile which had charmed so many. "Coffee, of course."
Shortly afterwards, under the hammering heat, he walked across to the Lubar Building at the corner of Fifty-first Street and Madison Avenue.
His suite of offices, on the twenty-second floor, had only one entrance. Its glass panel bore in small chaste gilt letters, The Frederick Manning Foundation. It brought to mind the Frederick Manning School at Albany, a school philanthropic and non-profit-making, which tried to teach the creative arts. Manning, they said, had only two passions in life, and one of them was this school. At the moment the air conditioning of the building soothed him, calmed him, quietened the emotion which few of his friends ever saw.
And yet trouble exploded as soon as he opened the door.
"Mr. Manning!" softly called the woman at the reception desk. She herself was middle-aged and looked rather like a schoolmistress.
"Yes, Miss Vincent?"
Miss Vincent was perturbed, which no receptionist should ever be. Yet her eyes rather than speech or gesture summoned him to the desk, where he punctiliously removed his loose-fitting Panama hat.
"I thought I'd better tell you," Miss Vincent added in a low voice, "that your daughter is waiting in your office."
"Which daughter?"
"Miss Jean, sir." There was a barely perceptible pause. "And Mr. Davis is with her." Manning, who had been leaning forward with both hands on the desk, straightened up. Miss Vincent felt rather than saw the blaze of anger which surrounded him as she said, "Mr. Davis," and she could guess why. But his eyes remained opaque, his voice steady.
"Is my secretary in?" he asked.
"Yes, Mr. Manning."
"Very well. Thank you."
At his left was a narrow soft-carpeted corridor -which ran past small offices like boxes with frosted-glass sides. It was all very cool, very modern, an incongruous background for Manning, who at the moment could have been called neither. At the end of the corridor was the door to his private office.
Manning, with a mouth of contempt, glanced down at the floor. Evidently to help the air conditioning, a marble bust of Robert Browning—the only ornament of its kind in Manning's office—had been used as a doorstop to keep the door part way open.
Manning, like one whose rage is shown only by murderous care, stepped softly over the bust as he opened the door, and closed the door on it with the same murderous care.
"Hello, Dad!" exclaimed the voice of his younger daughter—brightly and rather shakily.
"Good afternoon, sir," said the voice of Mr. Huntington Davis, Junior.
It was not Manning's arrival which caused tension there. Tension already existed. But it grew stronger each second afterwards.
Manning's office, large and square, was at a corner of the building; there were two windows in the wall on either side of him. But the Venetian blinds had their shutters more than half closed, turning the room dim. Its sombre grey furnishings, including a heavy sofa, were as uncompromising as the muffled carpet or the framed photographs of the Frederick Manning School and its achievements.
And still the silence lengthened, while Manning hung up his hat and sat down unhurriedly behind the big flat-topped desk in the angle of the window walls.
"Dad!" Jean Manning burst out uncontrollably.
"Yes, my dear?"
"I want to ask you a question," said the girl, "and you've got to answer me! Please!"
"Of course, my dear," assented her father. Not once did he glance in the direction of young Mr. Huntington Davis.
"Well..."
Jean braced herself.
She was just twenty-one, and badly upset. Wearing a white silk dress, she sat on the sofa with one leg tucked under her. Though Jean was very pretty, with her yellow hair worn in a long page-boy, she had not the stereotyped prettiness which makes so many girls nowadays look exactly alike: as though they had all stepped simultaneously from the same fashion magazine, and started to parade down Fifth Avenue.
Jean wore very little make-up, perhaps because of her very faint but healthy tan. Her blue eyes were direct and honest, if a trifle naive. When she flung out the question that had been torturing her, an older person might have found it something of an anticlimax.
"Is it true," she demanded, "that you've been running around with this dreadful woman? Just as they say you have?"
For a moment Frederick Manning did not reply.
A detached observer would have said this question, and this question alone, really startled him. For a moment there was a faint twinkle in his eye; then his jaw muscles tightened, and his nostrils distended.
"Aside," he said, "from the term 'running around,' which I hate, and the word 'dreadful, which is inaccurate..
"Oh, stop it!" pleaded Jean, and struck the arm of the sofa.
"Stop what?"
"You know what I mean!" Jean turned back again to the question of the woman. It was as though a spider had run up her bare arm "Are you—are you keeping her?"
"Certainly. I believe that's the correct procedure. It doesn't shock you, does it?"
"No, of course not!" Jean said instantly. She would have been outraged at the suggestion that anything could shock her, though in fact many things did. "It's just—I'm sorry, Dad!—that it seems indecent. For a man as old as you are!"
"Do you honestly think that, my dear?" smiled Manning.
"And that's not all. There's—well, there's mother."
For a moment Manning tapped his fingers on the desk.
"Your mother," he replied, "has been dead for eighteen years. Do you remember her at all?" "No, I don't! But..."
Jean, thoroughly miserable and almost in tears, lost in a romantic dream, did not notice that her father's face was almost as white as her own.
"But," Jean went on doggedly, "you've always told us how you idolized her. How you worshipped her. How you felt,"—Jean's eyes strayed towards the marble bust which served as a doorstop— "how you felt about her like Robert Browning felt about Elizabeth Barrett, even after she was dead?"
Manning closed his eyes..
"Jean," he said, "will you oblige me by not saying 'like' when you mean 'as?' Of all the detestable..."
"Dad! I don't understand you!" Jean cried helplessly. "What difference does it make how I say it?"
And now Manning's face flamed.
"Your speech, my dear, is the speech of Emerson and Lincoln, of Poe and Hawthorne." Manning spoke gently. "Don't debase it."
"Oh, Dad, you're a hundred years behind the times!"
"And yet far too modern, apparently, when I take up relations with Miss Stanley?"
"That woman..." Jean began vehemently. Then she stopped, attempting without great success to imitate the cynical and world-weary air of her twenty-four-year, elder sister, Crystal.
"Oh, I imagine people in the old days had their floozies too." Then her tone changed. "But you! And I still say, Dad, you're a hundred years behind the times! That's probably why your school..."
Again Jean paused, but this time with a different inflection.
"What about the school?" demanded Manning, with the blue veins showing at his temples.
He had seen his daughter's gaze stray towards the black brief case, obviously well filled, which lay on the desk at his right hand. Without haste Manning picked up the brief case, and, as though idly, shut it up in a drawer at the right of his desk.
"What about the school?" he repeated.
Jean looked round for help. "Dave!" she cried.
Mr. Huntington Davis, Junior, cleared his throat and got up from an easy chair at the far end of the room.
The office was so dark, with its sunblinds nearly drawn, that faces looked vague at a distance. Mr. Huntington Davis—the newest partner of his father's old-established brokerage firm of Davis, Wilmot & Davis—had more than the assurance of his thirty years. His black glossy hair, parted to a nicety, gleamed against the sunblinds as he strolled over to Manning's desk.
"May I say a word, sir?" Davis requested easily.
"By all means," agreed Manning. He looked the young man up and down without expression, as he might have looked at a canvas without any painting on it.
Davis smiled his pleasant, white, dental smile. He was of good height, a joy to his tailor, and with a passion for physical exercise which Manning (to say the least) deplored. Under Davis's black hair he was tanned to the colour of an Indian, his pale grey eyes showing light against it.
Negligently he leaned one fist on the desk.
"I'd like to ask you something, Mr. Manning," he said. "What are you really thinking about?"
"I was wondering," mused the other, putting his fingertips together, "why you and I dislike each other so much."
"Dad!" cried Jean.
Davis smiled, a white flash against the tan of the face.
"That's not true, Mr. Manning." he said earnestly. "I certainly don't dislike you. And you can't actually dislike me either."
"What makes you think so?"
Without taking his eyes from the lounging figure behind the desk, Davis extended his hand behind him and beckoned to Jean. Jean slipped off the sofa and hurried to take his hand, pressing it.
"Well!" smiled Davis, with humour wrinkling his forehead. "You don't object to my marrying' Jean, do you? You gave your consent without a murmur."
"I almost always consent," observed Manning, "to avoid fuss and bother. Jean's sister has been married three times."
"Look, sir!" said Davis. There was a note almost of desperation in his self-assured voice. "Jean and I are getting married in August. This is a family matter now. I want to help you! Look, don't you trust me?"
"Not one millionth of an inch."
"But why? Why do you dislike me so much?"
"I don't know, Mr. Davis. Call it instinct."
Davis made a slight gesture which sent Jean back to the sofa.
Then Davis, settling the shoulders of his well-tailored blue suit, drew himself up. He smiled. He was Young America Succeeding in Business.
"I'm afraid, Mr. Manning," he said in a stern yet kindly voice, as though addressing a child, "you don't appreciate what a bad position you're in. And I'd better tell you: you may get into serious trouble. What do you say to that?"
Manning raised his eyes briefly.
"Only, young man, that your effrontery would stagger an Egyptian mummy."
Davis lifted his shoulders carelessly.
"Have it your own way, then," he smiled. "But of course... you haven't heard the rumours that are going around."
"What rumours?"
Davis chose to ignore this.
"Mind you," he warned darkly, "I didn't have to tell you this. Maybe I can't help you, even as it is; probably not But I did want you to know I was a friend of yours, no matter how bad a jam you might get into."
"What rumours?" Now was the moment
"Well, sir, I'd better be frank with you. They say this Frederick Manning Foundation of yours"— Davis glanced round the room—"is in pretty bad shape financially. And that there's going to be a crash. And that you're in it up to your neck."
There was a silence. Manning slowly rose to his feet behind the desk. A stray gleam from the sunblinds caught his silver grey hair.
"You impertinent young swine,"he said.
Though Manning did no speak loudly, the last word had the thud of a thrown knife. In that moment he seemed to tower over Davis, to extinguish Davis into trumpery tailoring and paling suntan.
"It isn't true, is it?" cried Jean. "It isn't true, Dad? About the—business troubles?"
"Certainly not," Manning replied with dignity. Then he turned to Davis. "Get out!" he shouted. Get...
And then there passed over Manning's face one of those instantaneous changes which, to anyone who did not know his heart and his curious sense of humour, would have been inexplicable at the time. The look he directed at Davis was almost cordial. His bass voice sank to purring smoothness.
"Tell me, Mr. Davis," he pursued, "have you any engagement for tonight?"
Davis, by this time thunderstruck, could only stare back at him.
"If you haven't," said Manning, "could you come out to Maralarch and join us for dinner?"
"You couldn't keep me away," Davis said curtly.
"This morning I told Jean, as well as my daughter Crystal and my son Bob, that I had something very important to tell them at dinner tonight" Manning looked at Davis. "My lawyer will be there; and you will make a sixth. I also hope to have a rather distinguished seventh guest."
"Seventh guest?" repeated Davis. He was watching Manning as warily as Manning watched him. "Mind telling us who it is?"
"An old friend of mine from England. His name is Merrivale, Sir Henry Merrivale."
Jean, who was now standing in the middle of the room, made a gesture of dispair.
"Yes," she said in that same despairing tone. "And that's all we need now, isn't it?"
Her father frowned. "I don't quite follow you, Jean."
Jean's blue eyes looked at him steadily.
"You're going to tell up something horrible tonight, aren't you? Please don't deny it! I know you are! Dad, what are you going to tell us?"
Manning hesitated, an impressive figure even in his loose white alpaca suit.
"That can wait." He hesitated again. "But if you were shocked at anything I said this afternoon, Jean, you will be far more shocked tonight."
"Sir Henry Merrivale!" wailed Jean.
"Really, my dear, I still don't understand why..."
"Crystal," explained Jean, "is positively in raptures. She looked him up in Debrett. He's got a lineage as long as your arm, and a string of degrees after his name too. On top of everything, don't we just need an English baronet who’ll be so frozen and refined that we'll all be scared to talk to him?"
"Ah, I see," her father murmured. Then he glanced at his wrist watch, and got a real start. "Good God, that liner was supposed to dock at two-thirty! And it's three-thirty now! Just one moment."
Sitting down behind the desk again, Manning clicked the switch of the talk-back connected with his secretary's office in the next room.
"Miss Engels!"
The voice which answered sounded rather flustered. "Yes, Mr. Manning?"
"Miss Engels, you did send off that radiogram to the Mauretania early this morning?" "Yes, Mr. Manning."
"I sent Parker down there to meet the ship, and drag old H.M. here if he had to kidnap him. What's the matter? Isn't the ship in?"
"Yes, Mr. Manning. The ship's in. Mr. Parker - well, he called up about five minutes ago. But I—I didn't want to disturb you. As for Sir Henry, Mr. Parker couldn't get near him."
"What do you mean, couldn't get near him?"
"Well, it seems Sir Henry left the ship with a lot of reporters. They climbed into cabs and went over and started a poker game in the back room of a bar on Eighth Avenue. The bartender wouldn't let Mr. Parker in."
"A poker game?" echoed Jean Manning.
Whatever she may have said before, Jean's sympathies were quickly roused. She was passionately loyal to a friend, or even the friend of a friend.
"That poor, innocent Englishman!" she cried. "They trapped him into it! They won't leave him a cent to his name!"
"Be quiet, Jean!—Yes, Miss Engels?"
The talk-back switch kept on clicking, not always accurately.
"Mr. Parker waited in a drugstore, sir. In about three quarters of an hour," answered Miss Engels, "Sir Henry came out of the bar stuffing wads of money in his pockets. He said he had to go to Washington. He jumped into a cab and yelled, 'Grand Central Station.'"
Huntington Davis, who had regained all his self-assurance, intervened here.
"But he can't get to Washington from Grand Central! He's got to go to Penn Station! Didn't they tell him that?"
"Goon, Miss Engels!"
The secretary's voice grew apologetic.
"Mr. Parker says he's sorry, sir, but he can't go on with a chase like that While he was in the drugstore, Mr. Parker phoned a friend of his"— here Miss Engels obviously consulted notes—"a Mr. Cy Norton."
"Good!" beamed Manning. "Excellent!"
"Who's Cy Norton?" asked Jean.
"For eighteen years," retorted her father, "Cy Norton was London correspondent of the Echo. He knows Sir Henry far better than I do. I hadn't even heard he was back in New York." Manning turned to the talk-back. "Has Mr. Norton picked up the trail already?"
"Yes, sir. Hell phone you as soon as there's news."
"Thank you, Miss Engels. That's all."
Manning, in a kind of anticipatory fever, rubbed his hands together.
"But Grand Central..." Davis burst out.
"I have no doubt," Manning observed calmly, "that Sir Henry knew he was going to the wrong station."
"Is he crazy, sir?"
"Far from it. The best term to describe him is the good old American word ornery. He is ornery."
"But..."
"He must not get to Washington," Manning said fiercely. "He must be at Maralarch tonight and especially tomorrow morning. I swear it! But I wonder what he's doing now?"