Hot and Cold Blood
I
One day when the young Mathers had been married for about a year, Jaqueline walked into the rooms of the hardware brokerage which her husband carried on with more than average success. At the open door of the inner office she stopped and said: “Oh, excuse me—” She had interrupted an apparently trivial yet somehow intriguing scene. A young man named Bronson whom she knew slightly was standing with her husband; the latter had risen from his desk. Bronson seized her husband’s hand and shook it earnestly—something more than earnestly. When they heard Jaqueline’s step in the doorway both men turned and Jaqueline saw that Bronson’s eyes were red.
A moment later he came out, passing her with a somewhat embarrassed “How do you do?” She walked into her husband’s office.
“What was Ed Bronson doing here?” she demanded curiously, and at once.
Jim Mather smiled at her, half shutting his gray eyes, and drew her quietly to a sitting position on his desk.
“He just dropped in for a minute,” he answered easily. “How’s everything at home?”
“All right.” She looked at him with curiosity. “What did he want?” she insisted.
“Oh, he just wanted to see me about something.”
“What?”
“Oh, just something. Business.”
“Why were his eyes red?”
“Were they?” He looked at her innocently, and then suddenly they both began to laugh. Jaqueline rose and walked around the desk and plumped down into his swivel chair.
“You might as well tell me,” she announced cheerfully, “because I’m going to stay right here till you do.”
“Well—” he hesitated, frowning. “He wanted me to do him a little favor.”
Then Jaqueline understood, or rather her mind leaped half accidentally to the truth.
“Oh.” Her voice tightened a little. “You’ve been lending him some money.”
“Only a little.”
“How much?”
“Only three hundred.”
“Only three hundred.” The voice was of the texture of Bessemer cooled. “How much do we spend a month, Jim?”
“Why—why, about five or six hundred, I guess.” He shifted uneasily. “Listen, Jack. Bronson’ll pay that back. He’s in a little trouble. He’s made a mistake about a girl out in Woodmere—”
“And he knows you’re famous for being an easy mark, so he comes to you,” interrupted Jaqueline.
“No.” He denied this formally.
“Don’t you suppose I could use that three hundred dollars?” she demanded. “How about that trip to New York we couldn’t afford last November?”
The lingering smile faded from Mather’s face. He went over and shut the door to the outer office.
“Listen, Jack,” he began, “you don’t understand this. Bronson’s one of the men I eat lunch with almost every day. We used to play together when we were kids, we went to school together. Don’t you see that I’m just the person he’d be right to come to in trouble? And that’s just why I couldn’t refuse.”
Jaqueline gave her shoulders a twist as if to shake off this reasoning.
“Well,” she answered decidedly, “all I know is that he’s no good. He’s always lit and if he doesn’t choose to work he has no business living off the work you do.”
They were sitting now on either side of the desk, each having adopted the attitude of one talking to a child. They began their sentences with “Listen!” and their faces wore expressions of rather tried patience.
“If you can’t understand, I can’t tell you,” Mather concluded, at the end of fifteen minutes, on what was, for him, an irritated key. “Such obligations do happen to exist sometimes among men and they have to be met. It’s more complicated than just refusing to lend money, especially in a business like mine where so much depends on the goodwill of men downtown.”
Mather was putting on his coat as he said this. He was going home with her on the streetcar to lunch. They were between automobiles—they had sold their old one and were going to get a new one in the spring.
Now the streetcar, on this particular day, was distinctly unfortunate. The argument in the office might have been forgotten under other circumstances, but what followed irritated the scratch until it became a serious temperamental infection.
They found a seat near the front of the car. It was late February and an eager, unpunctilious sun was turning the scrawny street snow into dirty, cheerful rivulets that echoed in the gutters. Because of this the car was less full than usual—there was no one standing. The motorman had even opened his window and a yellow breeze was blowing the late breath of winter from the car.
It occurred pleasurably to Jaqueline that her husband sitting beside her was handsome and kind above other men. It was silly to try to change him. Perhaps Bronson might return the money after all, and anyhow three hundred dollars wasn’t a fortune. Of course he had no business doing it—but then—
Her musings were interrupted as an eddy of passengers pushed up the aisle. Jaqueline wished they’d put their hands over their mouths when they coughed, and she hoped that Jim would get a new machine pretty soon. You couldn’t tell what disease you’d run into in these trolleys.
She turned to Jim to discuss the subject—but Jim had stood up and was offering his seat to a woman who had been standing beside him in the aisle. The woman, without so much as a grunt, sat down. Jaqueline frowned.
The woman was about fifty and enormous. When she first sat down she was content merely to fill the unoccupied part of the seat, but after a moment she began to expand and to spread her great rolls of fat over a larger and larger area until the process took on the aspect of violent trespassing. When the car rocked in Jaqueline’s direction the woman slid with it, but when it rocked back she
