PAUL ROGER COPELAND, THE owner of Transfa Air Industries, threw up his head and listened. He struck, suddenly, an attitude of sharp attention. His hands dropped the papers they had been holding and left the desk to rest, to perch, birdlike, on the shining brown leather armrests of his swivel chair. For the moment he became a distracted man; his thoughts had been wrenched from his desk, his business, his dictation, by a sound in the night. He was all attention. His rather small brown eyes were wide, his long face alert; breathing, under the bamboo-tan terry robe, was for an instant suspended. The fluorescent light from the desk lamp, rich in daylight qualities, accentuated the reddish shading in his hair. His long, narrow feet, encased in rich Morocco slippers, were planted flat on the floor. He was at fifty a handsome man, with good coloring, a fine skin, and being underweight gave him a thin, whiplike quality which he wore well as the nervous tension of a man whose health was not supposed to be too good.
The sound he had heard came again. It was a steamship whistle in the night. Somewhere off Lloyds Neck, in Long Island Sound, he decided, and probably from a New York-bound vessel. He had become an expert on the unimportant matter of craft traveling the part of the sound which his Huntington estate overlooked. These last weeks—more than usually beset by boredom, ennui, dark worries—he had spent much time watching the vessels pass. It was true that craft on the sound were fewer in the wintertime, but the ships that did pass seemed to have more purpose; they were working vessels, tramp steamers, tugs with barges, hard-looking gray Navy and Coast Guard craft; there were very few pleasure yachts this time of the year. He got, watching them, a feeling of purpose which his own life lacked, and, too, a spirit of far adventure, a taste secondhand, which had been denied him. These things threw him back to his youth when, watching the ships from this same vast old mansion, he had pictured himself as a swashbuckling, throat-slitting, dominating corsair, a leader of pirates, a fellow who seized his chances as they came.
Copelands had been pirates long ago. Two brothers, Ezra and Jento Copeland, it was said, had founded the family fortune on the Spanish Main. The strain had cropped out in later Copelands, one could say; in some cases it had paid off, in others it hadn’t. There had always been, people claimed, a wild, unpredictable thread in the family—if true, this had gone underground for two generations. Grandfather Prentice T. Copeland had been a pillar of Wall Street and the church, and Gannet Roger Copeland—Paul Roger was his sole scion—had been, if not a pillar, a solid rock. The family coffers had not shrunk a penny under his guidance, although they had not fattened either. He had handled his son, Paul Roger, with strictness, and the tyranny had made its cut on the boy, a fierce slash of rebellion, discontent, dissatisfaction.
Paul Roger Copeland sighed and swung back to his desk. He smiled at the woman. “Where was I, Martha?”
The flame-haired woman flashed back his smile.
“I was reading you a letter from Sisson, of CAA, about Type Certificate 0093, for the K-22-R controllable pitch prop,” she said.
Copeland nodded. She sat at the end of the desk, a tall girl with round curves, an inviting figure.
“The CAA turned us down, eh?” he said.
“Yes sir.”
He frowned. “The stinkers!” He threw his smile at her, asked, “You don’t mind if I say what I think, do you, Martha?”
“Not at all.”
“What will that piece of stubbornness cost us? Have you any idea?” he asked.
She said, “We have ninety-six K-22-R props on inventory. With CAA approval, they would sell for around eleven hundred dollars each. Without—well, they’ll fetch hardly more than junk price.”
His face fell, petulantly, into lines of discouragement. “They were good enough for the Army,” he complained. “But that old mother hen, the CAA, has its own damned ideas about what civilian aircraft can use. Who the hell would have thought the CAA would turn down something the Army considered safe?” He shook his head angrily.
“It’s going to be very expensive,” she agreed. “This wouldn’t have happened, would it, if Transfa had obtained a Type Certificate, or reasonable assurances that one would be granted, when the propellers were in the design stage?”
“Good God, we couldn’t wait to get approvals. There was a war going on!”
She nodded. “But it would have been a good idea—and might have been done.”
“Maybe.” Copeland threw himself back in the chair, and his eyes, studying her, lost their peevish anger. His smile came back. He said, “Baby, you’re much too pretty to have a head full of prop type designations and inventory figures.”
She lowered her gaze. “Shall I write Mr. Nesbitt to accept the best offer?”
Copeland turned his hands up and dropped his shoulders.
“The hell with it!” he said. “We’ve done enough work for tonight.” He consulted the desk clock. “Say, it is late. Later than I thought.”
“Yes sir.”
She arranged the papers she was holding, squaring them together by dropping them on her knee.
“We can get the rest tomorrow,” she added.
He watched her below lowered lids. The sensuous appeal of the woman engulfed him. He swung his chair a bit farther around and came to his feet so that he stood before and quite near her.
“How about a drink?” he suggested.
She turned her face up to him lazily and gave him a look that was maddeningly indifferent.
“Why not?” she said.
They went into the south library, he walking a half pace behind, his eyes on her hungrily, his breathing disturbed. He took, unnecessarily, her arm and led her to the bar. He stepped around behind the bar, lifted his eyebrows questioningly.
She shrugged. “Anything.”
“Scotch?”
“That sounds good.”
He got liquor, glasses, soda, ice cubes from the built-in freezer. When he turned she had slid upon a bar stool and regarding him thoughtfully. “Want to mix your own?” he asked.
“You do it.” She laid a hand, palm up, on the bar top. “How about a cigarette?”
“There’s some around—I’ll find them.” He spoke nervously, over a mounting excitement he could not control very well.
When he held the match his hand trembled.
“You’re nervous.” She blew smoke downward casually so that some of it touched his chest, rebounded. “Your hand is shaking.”
“Is it?” He grinned at the hand, shook out the match.
She turned her head, removed a fleck of tobacco from her lower lip with a finger tip.
“You have a nice place here,” she said. “I haven’t told you that before, have I? Well, it’s swell.”
“Like it?” he asked eagerly.
“Oh, a lot.” She threw up her arms and then leaned back luxuriously against the bar. “To live like this—golly, wouldn’t that be something!”
He turned, reluctantly, to pick up an ice cube and drop it in a glass. “It isn’t so hot,” he said.
Her laugh, pleasantly laden with sarcasm, came at him.
“No, really!” he insisted.
“You—”
“No, actually—Well, perhaps you’re right. It may be just—well, I’m not happy.”
She turned, twisting her body with a rich animal vitality, so that her dress was pulled and outlined the fullness of her contours. “What’s the matter with you?” she demanded.
“Me?”
“Sure. You’re ... like you say, not happy. I don’t get it. A guy like you”—her upthrown hand indicated their surroundings—“with all this ... it just doesn’t make sense.”
He grinned—had the feeling he was grinning foolishly, and suggested, “Business worries, maybe.”
“Nah, not you!” She refuted this instantly. “You go through the motions of being a serious business tycoon, but it doesn’t ring. I don’t think you mean it. What’s really wrong—no play.”
“No play.” He nodded.
She lifted her drink, looked across it at him. “Then—to play,” she said.
He put his glass down and circled the bar. He stood close to her and slid his arm around her waist. His pulse was pounding and there was a surging eagerness all through him. He said, “Do you mind?” and then kissed her. Her lips were hot but not particularly yielding, nor was there much response, and when she broke away he let her, did not press. He had the feeling of something missing; that, perhaps, he had moved too rapidly.
She added a bit more whisky to her glass, a piece of ice, but no soda. She said, “Why did you ask me first?”
He grunted. He was sulking. He went around to the other side of the bar and downed his drink and made another immediately.
He said, changing the subject, “It was nice of you to give up your apartment temporarily.”
“That? It wasn’t much of a sacrifice. My apartment is a genteel, middle-class dump.”
“That bad?”
“Oh, just at times. I think our friend—who is staying there now—will like it.”
He nodded. “You’re a good judge of character. Our friend is exactly like that.”
She said, “I’ve always lived in genteel, middle-class dumps, it seems to me.” She threw back her head, sent her red hair flying. “Are all places like that?”
“I don’t know.”
“I’ll bet this one isn’t,” she said.
This was, he knew, an interval that was nothing more than mere delay. A bit of retiring, on both their parts, after the first skirmish. He was sulking—he was about over that now. She was showing him that she had definite ideas and likes and dislikes.
“This house”—he gestured idly with his glass—“is a damn museum. It’s full, chock to the gills, with stuff my family called tradition.”
Her laugh drove smoke out toward him, and his nostrils got the body of it, the heady perfume of her. “I heard your family was pretty strait-laced,” she said.
“Stuffy,” he corrected. “God, how stuffy. You’ve no idea.” He puts his second drink down. He considered going around the bar again but decided against it just yet. “What about you?” he said. “I’m more interested in you.”
“I’m not a very exciting subject,” she said.
The hell you aren’t, he thought. He said, “You know what I’ll bet? I’ll bet you had a lot of fun as a kid—and not in a gilded trap like this.”
Her mouth warped in bitter disgust.
“Hah—that’s what you think.” She was vehement; the cigarette, as she punched it at him for emphasis, tossed off little commas of smoke that lifted. “Listen, I was small-town. In—in Missouri. Place called Kirksville.” She shuddered. “Gilded—it wasn’t a gilded trap—that’s the only difference.”
“I always thought small towns were friendly places.”
“You can”—she finished her drink; she fell to coughing, and quieted herself—“take them.”
“No friends, eh?”
She hesitated a moment, wariness gliding into her eyes. “Oh, one. One good one,” she said.
“This—what’s her name—who’s coming to visit you?”
“Julie Edwards.” She nodded. “Yes, Julie’s a nice kid.”
“Is she like you?”
“Julie! Me? Heaven forbid. Julie is—you can’t tell what she’ll do.” She turned her glass thoughtfully in her fingers. She added, “You know, Julie might not even show up in New York. She might not get this far. She might stop in Chicago.”
He asked, “You say Julie is going to be met by—our friend.”
“Yes. To show appreciation for being allowed to use my apartment.”
Copeland scowled. “I’m glad our friend is good for something.” He reached for her glass.
Pouring, stirring ice with soda, he was again intensely aware of Martha. He pushed the glass across to her slowly and asked, “You don’t mind camping out here for the time being?”
She reached over and lifted his cigarettes out of his robe pocket. “I haven’t regretted it yet,” she said.
He moved around the bar. She slid off the bar stool and carried her drink to the other end of the room, where there was a large stone fireplace, and, looking at the fireplace, she said, “Out in Colorado where I grew—lived for a while, they had fireplaces like this.” She trailed her fingers over the rough stones languidly, spun, and, skirts aswirl with action, flopped down on a divan. She straightened her skirt, holding the drink well away from her in case it spilled. She added, “You know, you don’t seem like a damned millionaire.”
Copeland laughed. “I’m not a damned millionaire.”
She threw back her head. “Oh-ho-ho—I know better.”
“Do you, Martha?”
“Uh-huh.”
He said, chuckling, “I’ll give you a trade last. You don’t seem like the fiercely efficient Martha I’ve always heard about from the West Coast plant.”
She lowered her head, touched the glass to her lips, said into it, “Don’t I? Hold on now! Let’s not start talking about me again.” He thought that, speaking into the glass that way, her voice had an enticing muffled quality. He was grinning down at her when she lifted her head again, to ask, “Don’t you have any music down here?”
“Ummmmm,” he said. “Want to dance?”
“Why not?”
He went over and fiddled with the record player. She came and stood by him, peering over his shoulder, giving advice about what records. She gestured as she spoke, and once she spilled some whisky on the instrument. She did not notice, and he did not seem to. The record changer would hold ten records—it was a part of a radio combination—but they put on only five. He set the thing in operation, and when he turned, she was ready for his arms.
He said, near the middle of the second record, “I’m going to be trite and say it this way: I’m crazy about you, baby.”
She said, “What’s trite about it?”
He danced stiffly. There was throughout him an erratic feeling, as if he were not very well controlled, which he wasn’t. His emotions had always been difficult to manage; they could throw themselves against the barriers with more force than he could cope with.
His arms tightened around her, and presently he said, “You’re irresistible, baby.”
Her laugh mocked him. “That is trite,” she said.