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The Titan

by Theodore Dreiser · English · Gutenberg #3629 · 1,140,721 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Titan

Author: Theodore Dreiser


        
Release date: January 1, 2003 [eBook #3629]
                Most recently updated: January 8, 2021

Language: English

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Produced by Kirk Pearson <kpearson@nyx.net> and the Online
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The Titan


by

Theodore Dreiser




CONTENTS

       I  The New City
      II  A Reconnoiter
     III  A Chicago Evening
      IV  Peter Laughlin & Co.
       V  Concerning A Wife And Family
      VI  The New Queen of the Home
     VII  Chicago Gas
    VIII  Now This is Fighting
      IX  In Search of Victory
       X  A Test
      XI  The Fruits of Daring
     XII  A New Retainer
    XIII  The Die is Cast
     XIV  Undercurrents
      XV  A New Affection
     XVI  A Fateful Interlude
    XVII  An Overture to Conflict
   XVIII  The Clash
     XIX  "Hell Hath No Fury--"
      XX  "Man and Superman"
     XXI  A Matter of Tunnels
    XXII  Street-railways at Last
   XXIII  The Power of the Press
    XXIV  The Coming of Stephanie Platow
     XXV  Airs from the Orient
    XXVI  Love and War
   XXVII  A Financier Bewitched
  XXVIII  The Exposure of Stephanie
    XXIX  A Family Quarrel
     XXX  Obstacles
    XXXI  Untoward Disclosures
   XXXII  A Supper Party
  XXXIII  Mr. Lynde to the Rescue
   XXXIV  Enter Hosmer Hand
    XXXV  A Political Agreement
   XXXVI  An Election Draws Near
  XXXVII  Aileen's Revenge
 XXXVIII  An Hour of Defeat
   XXXIX  The New Administration
      XL  A Trip to Louisville
     XLI  The Daughter of Mrs. Fleming
    XLII  F. A. Cowperwood, Guardian
   XLIII  The Planet Mars
    XLIV  A Franchise Obtained
     XLV  Changing Horizons
    XLVI  Depths and Heights
   XLVII  American Match
  XLVIII  Panic
    XLIX  Mount Olympus
       L  A New York Mansion
      LI  The Revival of Hattie Starr
     LII  Behind the Arras
    LIII  A Declaration of Love
     LIV  Wanted--Fifty-year Franchises
      LV  Cowperwood and the Governor
     LVI  The Ordeal of Berenice
    LVII  Aileen's Last Card
   LVIII  A Marauder Upon the Commonwealth
     LIX  Capital and Public Rights
      LX  The Net
     LXI  The Cataclysm
    LXII  The Recompense




Chapter I

The New City


When Frank Algernon Cowperwood emerged from the Eastern District
Penitentiary in Philadelphia he realized that the old life he had lived
in that city since boyhood was ended.  His youth was gone, and with it
had been lost the great business prospects of his earlier manhood.  He
must begin again.

It would be useless to repeat how a second panic following upon a
tremendous failure--that of Jay Cooke & Co.--had placed a second
fortune in his hands.  This restored wealth softened him in some
degree.  Fate seemed to have his personal welfare in charge.  He was
sick of the stock-exchange, anyhow, as a means of livelihood, and now
decided that he would leave it once and for all.  He would get in
something else--street-railways, land deals, some of the boundless
opportunities of the far West.  Philadelphia was no longer pleasing to
him.  Though now free and rich, he was still a scandal to the
pretenders, and the financial and social world was not prepared to
accept him.  He must go his way alone, unaided, or only secretly so,
while his quondam friends watched his career from afar.  So, thinking
of this, he took the train one day, his charming mistress, now only
twenty-six, coming to the station to see him off.  He looked at her
quite tenderly, for she was the quintessence of a certain type of
feminine beauty.

"By-by, dearie," he smiled, as the train-bell signaled the approaching
departure.  "You and I will get out of this shortly.  Don't grieve.
I'll be back in two or three weeks, or I'll send for you.  I'd take you
now, only I don't know how that country is out there. We'll fix on some
place, and then you watch me settle this fortune question.  We'll not
live under a cloud always.  I'll get a divorce, and we'll marry, and
things will come right with a bang.  Money will do that."

He looked at her with his large, cool, penetrating eyes, and she
clasped his cheeks between her hands.

"Oh, Frank," she exclaimed, "I'll miss you so! You're all I have."

"In two weeks," he smiled, as the train began to move, "I'll wire or be
back.  Be good, sweet."

She followed him with adoring eyes--a fool of love, a spoiled child, a
family pet, amorous, eager, affectionate, the type so strong a man
would naturally like--she tossed her pretty red gold head and waved him
a kiss.  Then she walked away with rich, sinuous, healthy strides--the
type that men turn to look after.

"That's her--that's that Butler girl," observed one railroad clerk to
another.  "Gee! a man wouldn't want anything better than that, would
he?"

It was the spontaneous tribute that passion and envy invariably pay to
health and beauty.  On that pivot swings the world.

Never in all his life until this trip had Cowperwood been farther west
than Pittsburg.  His amazing commercial adventures, brilliant as they
were, had been almost exclusively confined to the dull, staid world of
Philadelphia, with its sweet refinement in sections, its pretensions to
American social supremacy, its cool arrogation of traditional
leadership in commercial life, its history, conservative wealth,
unctuous respectability, and all the tastes and avocations which these
imply.  He had, as he recalled, almost mastered that pretty world and
made its sacred precincts his own when the crash came.  Practically he
had been admitted.  Now he was an Ishmael, an ex-convict, albeit a
millionaire.  But wait! The race is to the swift, he said to himself
over and over.  Yes, and the battle is to the strong.  He would test
whether the world would trample him under foot or no.

Chicago, when it finally dawned on him, came with a rush on the second
morning.  He had spent two nights in the gaudy Pullman then provided--a
car intended to make up for some of the inconveniences of its
arrangements by an over-elaboration of plush and tortured glass--when
the first lone outposts of the prairie metropolis began to appear.  The
side-tracks along the road-bed over which he was speeding became more
and more numerous, the telegraph-poles more and more hung with arms and
strung smoky-thick with wires.  In the far distance, cityward, was,
here and there, a lone working-man's cottage, the home of some
adventurous soul who had planted his bare hut thus far out in order to
reap the small but certain advantage which the growth of the city would
bring.

The land was flat--as flat as a table--with a waning growth of brown
grass left over from the previous year, and stirring faintly in the
morning breeze.  Underneath were signs of the new green--the New Year's
flag of its disposition.  For some reason a crystalline atmosphere
enfolded the distant hazy outlines of the city, holding the latter like
a fly in amber and giving it an artistic subtlety which touched him.
Already a devotee of art, ambitious for connoisseurship, who had had
his joy, training, and sorrow out of the collection he had made and
lost in Philadelphia, he appreciated almost every suggestion of a
delightful picture in nature.

The tracks, side by side, were becoming more and more numerous.
Freight-cars were assembled here by thousands from all parts of the
country--yellow, red, blue, green, white.  (Chicago, he recalled,
already had thirty railroads terminating here, as though it were the
end of the world.) The little low one and two story houses, quite new
as to wood, were frequently unpainted and already smoky--in places
grimy.  At grade-crossings, where ambling street-cars and wagons and
muddy-wheeled buggies waited, he noted how flat the streets were, how
unpaved, how sidewalks went up and down rhythmically--here a flight of
steps, a veritable platform before a house, there a long stretch of
boards laid flat on the mud of the prairie itself.  What a city!
Presently a branch of the filthy, arrogant, self-sufficient little
Chicago River came into view, with its mass of sputtering tugs, its
black, oily water, its tall, red, brown, and green grain-elevators, its
immense black coal-pockets and yellowish-brown lumber-yards.

Here was life; he saw it at a flash.  Here was a seething city in the
making.  There was something dynamic in the very air which appealed to
his fancy.  How different, for some reason, from Philadelphia! That was
a stirring city, too.  He had thought it wonderful at one time, quite a
world; but this thing, while obviously infinitely worse, was better.
It was more youthful, more hopeful. In a flare of morning sunlight
pouring between two coal-pockets, and because the train had stopped to
let a bridge swing and half a dozen great grain and lumber boats go
by--a half-dozen in either direction--he saw a group of Irish
stevedores idling on the bank of a lumber-yard whose wall skirted the
water.  Healthy men they were, in blue or red shirt-sleeves, stout
straps about their waists, short pipes in their mouths, fine, hardy,
nutty-brown specimens of humanity.  Why were they so appealing, he
asked himself.  This raw, dirty town seemed naturally to compose itself
into stirring artistic pictures.  Why, it fairly sang! The world was
young here. Life was doing something new.  Perhaps he had better not go
on to the Northwest at all; he would decide that question later.

In the mean time he had letters of introduction to distinguished
Chicagoans, and these he would present.  He wanted to talk to some
bankers and grain and commission men.  The stock-exchange of Chicago
interested him, for the intricacies of that business he knew backward
and forward, and some great grain transactions had been made here.

The train finally rolled past the shabby backs of houses into a long,
shabbily covered series of platforms--sheds having only roofs--and
amidst a clatter of trucks hauling trunks, and engines belching steam,
and passengers hurrying to and fro he made his way out into Canal
Street and hailed a waiting cab--one of a long line of vehicles that
bespoke a metropolitan spirit.  He had fixed on the Grand Pacific as
the most important hotel--the one with the most social
significance--and thither he asked to be driven.  On the way he studied
these streets as in the matter of art he would have studied a picture.
The little yellow, blue, green, white, and brown street-cars which he
saw trundling here and there, the tired, bony horses, jingling bells at
their throats, touched him. They were flimsy affairs, these cars,
merely highly varnished kindling-wood with bits of polished brass and
glass stuck about them, but he realized what fortunes they portended if
the city grew.  Street-cars, he knew, were his natural vocation.  Even
more than stock-brokerage, even more than banking, even more than
stock-organization he loved the thought of street-cars and the vast
manipulative life it suggested.




Chapter II

A Reconnoiter


The city of Chicago, with whose development the personality of Frank
Algernon Cowperwood was soon to be definitely linked! To whom may the
laurels as laureate of this Florence of the West yet fall? This singing
flame of a city, this all America, this poet in chaps and buckskin,
this rude, raw Titan, this Burns of a city! By its shimmering lake it
lay, a king of shreds and patches, a maundering yokel with an epic in
its mouth, a tramp, a hobo among cities, with the grip of Caesar in its
mind, the dramatic force of Euripides in its soul.  A very bard of a
city this, singing of high deeds and high hopes, its heavy brogans
buried deep in the mire of circumstance.  Take Athens, oh, Greece!
Italy, do you keep Rome! This was the Babylon, the Troy, the Nineveh of
a younger day.  Here came the gaping West and the hopeful East to see.
Here hungry men, raw from the shops and fields, idyls and romances in
their minds, builded them an empire crying glory in the mud.

From New York, Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine had come a strange
company, earnest, patient, determined, unschooled in even the primer of
refinement, hungry for something the significance of which, when they
had it, they could not even guess, anxious to be called great,
determined so to be without ever knowing how.  Here came the dreamy
gentleman of the South, robbed of his patrimony; the hopeful student of
Yale and Harvard and Princeton; the enfranchised miner of California
and the Rockies, his bags of gold and silver in his hands.  Here was
already the bewildered foreigner, an alien speech confounding him--the
Hun, the Pole, the Swede, the German, the Russian--seeking his homely
colonies, fearing his neighbor of another race.

Here was the negro, the prostitute, the blackleg, the gambler, the
romantic adventurer par excellence.  A city with but a handful of the
native-born; a city packed to the doors with all the riffraff of a
thousand towns.  Flaring were the lights of the bagnio; tinkling the
banjos, zithers, mandolins of the so-called gin-mill; all the dreams
and the brutality of the day seemed gathered to rejoice (and rejoice
they did) in this new-found wonder of a metropolitan life in the West.

The first prominent Chicagoan whom Cowperwood sought out was the
president of the Lake City National Bank, the largest financial
organization in the city, with deposits of over fourteen million
dollars.  It was located in Dearborn Street, at Munroe, but a block or
two from his hotel.

"Find out who that man is," ordered Mr. Judah Addison, the president of
the bank, on seeing him enter the president's private waiting-room.

Mr. Addison's office was so arranged with glass windows that he could,
by craning his neck, see all who entered his reception-room before they
saw him, and he had been struck by Cowperwood's face and force.  Long
familiarity with the banking world and with great affairs generally had
given a rich finish to the ease and force which the latter naturally
possessed.  He looked strangely replete for a man of thirty-six--suave,
steady, incisive, with eyes as fine as those of a Newfoundland or a
Collie and as innocent and winsome.  They were wonderful eyes, soft and
spring-like at times, glowing with a rich, human understanding which on
the instant could harden and flash lightning.  Deceptive eyes,
unreadable, but alluring alike to men and to women in all walks and
conditions of life.

The secretary addressed came back with Cowperwood's letter of
introduction, and immediately Cowperwood followed.

Mr. Addison instinctively arose--a thing he did not always do. "I'm
pleased to meet you, Mr. Cowperwood," he said, politely.  "I saw you
come in just now.  You see how I keep my windows here, so as to spy out
the country.  Sit down.  You wouldn't like an apple, would you?" He
opened a left-hand drawer, producing several polished red winesaps, one
of which he held out.  "I always eat one about this time in the
morning."

"Thank you, no," replied Cowperwood, pleasantly, estimating as he did
so his host's temperament and mental caliber.  "I never eat between
meals, but I appreciate your kindness.  I am just passing through
Chicago, and I thought I would present this letter now rather than
later.  I thought you might tell me a little about the city from an
investment point of view."

As Cowperwood talked, Addison, a short, heavy, rubicund man with
grayish-brown sideburns extending to his ear-lobes and hard, bright,
twinkling gray eyes--a proud, happy, self-sufficient man--munched his
apple and contemplated Cowperwood.  As is so often the case in life, he
frequently liked or disliked people on sight, and he prided himself on
his judgment of men.  Almost foolishly, for one so conservative, he was
taken with Cowperwood--a man immensely his superior--not because of the
Drexel letter, which spoke of the latter's "undoubted financial genius"
and the advantage it would be to Chicago to have him settle there, but
because of the swimming wonder of his eyes.  Cowperwood's personality,
while maintaining an unbroken outward reserve, breathed a tremendous
humanness which touched his fellow-banker.  Both men were in their way
walking enigmas, the Philadelphian far the subtler of the two.  Addison
was ostensibly a church-member, a model citizen; he represented a point
of view to which Cowperwood would never have stooped.  Both men were
ruthless after their fashion, avid of a physical life; but Addison was
the weaker in that he was still afraid--very much afraid--of what life
might do to him.  The man before him had no sense of fear.  Addison
contributed judiciously to charity, subscribed outwardly to a dull
social routine, pretended to love his wife, of whom he was weary, and
took his human pleasure secretly. The man before him subscribed to
nothing, refused to talk save to intimates, whom he controlled
spiritually, and did as he pleased.

"Why, I'll tell you, Mr. Cowperwood," Addison replied.  "We people out
here in Chicago think so well of ourselves that sometimes we're afraid
to say all we think for fear of appearing a little extravagant. We're
like the youngest son in the family that knows he can lick all the
others, but doesn't want to do it--not just yet.  We're not as handsome
as we might be--did you ever see a growing boy that was?--but we're
absolutely sure that we're going to be.  Our pants and shoes and coat
and hat get too small for us every six months, and so we don't look
very fashionable, but there are big, strong, hard muscles and bones
underneath, Mr. Cowperwood, as you'll discover when you get to looking
around.  Then you won't mind the clothes so much."

Mr. Addison's round, frank eyes narrowed and hardened for a moment. A
kind of metallic hardness came into his voice.  Cowperwood could see
that he was honestly enamoured of his adopted city.  Chicago was his
most beloved mistress.  A moment later the flesh about his eyes
crinkled, his mouth softened, and he smiled.  "I'll be glad to tell you
anything I can," he went on.  "There are a lot of interesting things to
tell."

Cowperwood beamed back on him encouragingly.  He inquired after the
condition of one industry and another, one trade or profession and
another.  This was somewhat different from the atmosphere which
prevailed in Philadelphia--more breezy and generous.  The tendency to
expatiate and make much of local advantages was Western.  He liked it,
however, as one aspect of life, whether he chose to share in it or not.
It was favorable to his own future.  He had a prison record to live
down; a wife and two children to get rid of--in the legal sense, at
least (he had no desire to rid himself of financial obligation toward
them).  It would take some such loose, enthusiastic Western attitude to
forgive in him the strength and freedom with which he ignored and
refused to accept for himself current convention. "I satisfy myself"
was his private law, but so to do he must assuage and control the
prejudices of other men.  He felt that this banker, while not putty in
his hands, was inclined to a strong and useful friendship.

"My impressions of the city are entirely favorable, Mr. Addison," he
said, after a time, though he inwardly admitted to himself that this
was not entirely true; he was not sure whether he could bring himself
ultimately to live in so excavated and scaffolded a world as this or
not.  "I only saw a portion of it coming in on the train. I like the
snap of things.  I believe Chicago has a future."

"You came over the Fort Wayne, I presume," replied Addison, loftily.
"You saw the worst section.  You must let me show you some of the best
parts.  By the way, where are you staying?"

"At the Grand Pacific."

"How long will you be here?"

"Not more than a day or two."

"Let me see," and Mr. Addison drew out his watch.  "I suppose you
wouldn't mind meeting a few of our leading men--and we have a little
luncheon-room over at the Union League Club where we drop in now and
then.  If you'd care to do so, I'd like to have you come along with me
at one.  We're sure to find a few of them--some of our lawyers,
business men, and judges."

"That will be fine," said the Philadelphian, simply.  "You're more than
generous.  There are one or two other people I want to meet in between,
and"--he arose and looked at his own watch--"I'll find the Union Club.
Where is the office of Arneel & Co.?"

At the mention of the great beef-packer, who was one of the bank's
heaviest depositors, Addison stirred slightly with approval.  This
young man, at least eight years his junior, looked to him like a future
grand seigneur of finance.

At the Union Club, at this noontime luncheon, after talking with the
portly, conservative, aggressive Arneel and the shrewd director of the
stock-exchange, Cowperwood met a varied company of men ranging in age
from thirty-five to sixty-five gathered about the board in a private
dining-room of heavily carved black walnut, with pictures of elder
citizens of Chicago on the walls and an attempt at artistry in stained
glass in the windows.  There were short and long men, lean and stout,
dark and blond men, with eyes and jaws which varied from those of the
tiger, lynx, and bear to those of the fox, the tolerant mastiff, and
the surly bulldog. There were no weaklings in this selected company.

Mr. Arneel and Mr. Addison Cowperwood approved of highly as shrewd,
concentrated men.  Another who interested him was Anson Merrill, a
small, polite, recherche soul, suggesting mansions and footmen and
remote luxury generally, who was pointed out by Addison as the famous
dry-goods prince of that name, quite the leading merchant, in the
retail and wholesale sense, in Chicago.

Still another was a Mr. Rambaud, pioneer railroad man, to whom Addison,
smiling jocosely, observed: "Mr. Cowperwood is on from Philadelphia,
Mr. Rambaud, trying to find out whether he wants to lose any money out
here.  Can't you sell him some of that bad land you have up in the
Northwest?"

Rambaud--a spare, pale, black-bearded man of much force and exactness,
dressed, as Cowperwood observed, in much better taste than some of the
others--looked at Cowperwood shrewdly but in a gentlemanly, retiring
way, with a gracious, enigmatic smile.  He caught a glance in return
which he could not possibly forget.  The eyes of Cowperwood said more
than any words ever could.  Instead of jesting faintly Mr. Rambaud
decided to explain some things about the Northwest.  Perhaps this
Philadelphian might be interested.

To a man who has gone through a great life struggle in one metropolis
and tested all the phases of human duplicity, decency, sympathy, and
chicanery in the controlling group of men that one invariably finds in
every American city at least, the temperament and significance of
another group in another city is not so much, and yet it is.  Long
since Cowperwood had parted company with the idea that humanity at any
angle or under any circumstances, climatic or otherwise, is in any way
different.  To him the most noteworthy characteristic of the human race
was that it was strangely chemic, being anything or nothing, as the
hour and the condition afforded. In his leisure moments--those free
from practical calculation, which were not many--he often speculated as
to what life really was.  If he had not been a great financier and,
above all, a marvelous organizer he might have become a highly
individualistic philosopher--a calling which, if he had thought
anything about it at all at this time, would have seemed rather
trivial.  His business as he saw it was with the material facts of
life, or, rather, with those third and fourth degree theorems and
syllogisms which control material things and so represent wealth.  He
was here to deal with the great general needs of the Middle West--to
seize upon, if he might, certain well-springs of wealth and power and
rise to recognized authority.  In his morning talks he had learned of
the extent and character of the stock-yards' enterprises, of the great
railroad and ship interests, of the tremendous rising importance of
real estate, grain speculation, the hotel business, the hardware
business.  He had learned of universal manufacturing companies--one
that made cars, another elevators, another binders, another windmills,
another engines.  Apparently, any new industry seemed to do well in
Chicago.  In his talk with the one director of the Board of Trade to
whom he had a letter he had learned that few, if any, local stocks were
dealt in on 'change.  Wheat, corn, and grains of all kinds were
principally speculated in.  The big stocks of the East were gambled in
by way of leased wires on the New York Stock Exchange--not otherwise.

As he looked at these men, all pleasantly civil, all general in their
remarks, each safely keeping his vast plans under his vest, Cowperwood
wondered how he would fare in this community.  There were such
difficult things ahead of him to do.  No one of these men, all of whom
were in their commercial-social way agreeable, knew that he had only
recently been in the penitentiary.  How much difference would that make
in their attitude? No one of them knew that, although he was married
and had two children, he was planning to divorce his wife and marry the
girl who had appropriated to herself the role which his wife had once
played.

"Are you seriously contemplating looking into the Northwest?" asked Mr.
Rambaud, interestedly, toward the close of the luncheon.

"That is my present plan after I finish here.  I thought I'd take a
short run up there."

"Let me put you in touch with an interesting party that is going as far
as Fargo and Duluth.  There is a private car leaving Thursday, most of
them citizens of Chicago, but some Easterners.  I would be glad to have
you join us.  I am going as far as Minneapolis."

Cowperwood thanked him and accepted.  A long conversation followed
about the Northwest, its timber, wheat, land sales, cattle, and
possible manufacturing plants.

What Fargo, Minneapolis, and Duluth were to be civically and
financially were the chief topics of conversation.  Naturally, Mr.
Rambaud, having under his direction vast railroad lines which
penetrated this region, was confident of the future of it. Cowperwood
gathered it all, almost by instinct.  Gas, street-railways, land
speculations, banks, wherever located, were his chief thoughts.

Finally he left the club to keep his other appointments, but something
of his personality remained behind him.  Mr. Addison and Mr. Rambaud,
among others, were sincerely convinced that he was one of the most
interesting men they had met in years.  And he scarcely had said
anything at all--just listened.




Chapter III

A Chicago Evening


After his first visit to the bank over which Addison presided, and an
informal dinner at the latter's home, Cowperwood had decided that he
did not care to sail under any false colors so far as Addison was
concerned.  He was too influential and well connected. Besides,
Cowperwood liked him too much.  Seeing that the man's leaning toward
him was strong, in reality a fascination, he made an early morning call
a day or two after he had returned from Fargo, whither he had gone at
Mr. Rambaud's suggestion, on his way back to Philadelphia, determined
to volunteer a smooth presentation of his earlier misfortunes, and
trust to Addison's interest to make him view the matter in a kindly
light.  He told him the whole story of how he had been convicted of
technical embezzlement in Philadelphia and had served out his term in
the Eastern Penitentiary. He also mentioned his divorce and his
intention of marrying again.

Addison, who was the weaker man of the two and yet forceful in his own
way, admired this courageous stand on Cowperwood's part.  It was a
braver thing than he himself could or would have achieved. It appealed
to his sense of the dramatic.  Here was a man who apparently had been
dragged down to the very bottom of things, his face forced in the mire,
and now he was coming up again strong, hopeful, urgent.  The banker
knew many highly respected men in Chicago whose early careers, as he
was well aware, would not bear too close an inspection, but nothing was
thought of that.  Some of them were in society, some not, but all of
them were powerful. Why should not Cowperwood be allowed to begin all
over? He looked at him steadily, at his eyes, at his stocky body, at
his smooth, handsome, mustached face.  Then he held out his hand.

"Mr. Cowperwood," he said, finally, trying to shape his words
appropriately, "I needn't say that I am pleased with this interesting
confession.  It appeals to me.  I'm glad you have made it to me. You
needn't say any more at any time.  I decided the day I saw you walking
into that vestibule that you were an exceptional man; now I know it.
You needn't apologize to me.  I haven't lived in this world fifty years
and more without having my eye-teeth cut.  You're welcome to the
courtesies of this bank and of my house as long as you care to avail
yourself of them.  We'll cut our cloth as circumstances dictate in the
future.  I'd like to see you come to Chicago, solely because I like you
personally.  If you decide to settle here I'm sure I can be of service
to you and you to me. Don't think anything more about it; I sha'n't
ever say anything one way or another.  You have your own battle to
fight, and I wish you luck.  You'll get all the aid from me I can
honestly give you. Just forget that you told me, and when you get your
matrimonial affairs straightened out bring your wife out to see us."

With these things completed Cowperwood took the train back to
Philadelphia.

"Aileen," he said, when these two met again--she had come to the train
to meet him--"I think the West is the answer for us.  I went up to
Fargo and looked around up there, but I don't believe we want to go
that far.  There's nothing but prairie-grass and Indians out in that
country.  How'd you like to live in a board shanty, Aileen," he asked,
banteringly, "with nothing but fried rattlesnakes and prairie-dogs for
breakfast? Do you think you could stand that?"

"Yes," she replied, gaily, hugging his arm, for they had entered a
closed carriage; "I could stand it if you could.  I'd go anywhere with
you, Frank.  I'd get me a nice Indian dress with leather and beads all
over it and a feather hat like they wear, and--"

"There you go! Certainly! Pretty clothes first of all in a miner's
shack.  That's the way."

"You wouldn't love me long if I didn't put pretty clothes first," she
replied, spiritedly.  "Oh, I'm so glad to get you back!"

"The trouble is," he went on, "that that country up there isn't as
promising as Chicago.  I think we're destined to live in Chicago. I
made an investment in Fargo, and we'll have to go up there from time to
time, but we'll eventually locate in Chicago.  I don't want to go out
there alone again.  It isn't pleasant for me." He squeezed her hand.
"If we can't arrange this thing at once I'll just have to introduce you
as my wife for the present."

"You haven't heard anything more from Mr. Steger?" she put in. She was
thinking of Steger's efforts to get Mrs. Cowperwood to grant him a
divorce.

"Not a word."

"Isn't it too bad?" she sighed.

"Well, don't grieve.  Things might be worse."

He was thinking of his days in the penitentiary, and so was she. After
commenting on the character of Chicago he decided with her that so soon
as conditions permitted they would remove themselves to the Western
city.

It would be pointless to do more than roughly sketch the period of
three years during which the various changes which saw the complete
elimination of Cowperwood from Philadelphia and his introduction into
Chicago took place.  For a time there were merely journeys to and fro,
at first more especially to Chicago, then to Fargo, where his
transported secretary, Walter Whelpley, was managing under his
direction the construction of Fargo business blocks, a short street-car
line, and a fair-ground.  This interesting venture bore the title of
the Fargo Construction and Transportation Company, of which Frank A.
Cowperwood was president.  His Philadelphia lawyer, Mr. Harper Steger,
was for the time being general master of contracts.

For another short period he might have been found living at the Tremont
in Chicago, avoiding for the time being, because of Aileen's company,
anything more than a nodding contact with the important men he had
first met, while he looked quietly into the matter of a Chicago
brokerage arrangement--a partnership with some established broker who,
without too much personal ambition, would bring him a knowledge of
Chicago Stock Exchange affairs, personages, and Chicago ventures.  On
one occasion he took Aileen with him to Fargo, where with a haughty,
bored insouciance she surveyed the state of the growing city.

"Oh, Frank!" she exclaimed, when she saw the plain, wooden, four-story
hotel, the long, unpleasing business street, with its motley collection
of frame and brick stores, the gaping stretches of houses, facing in
most directions unpaved streets.  Aileen in her tailored
spick-and-spanness, her self-conscious vigor, vanity, and tendency to
over-ornament, was a strange contrast to the rugged self-effacement and
indifference to personal charm which characterized most of the men and
women of this new metropolis.  "You didn't seriously think of coming
out here to live, did you?"

She was wondering where her chance for social exchange would come
in--her opportunity to shine.  Suppose her Frank were to be very rich;
suppose he did make very much money--much more than he had ever had
even in the past--what good would it do her here? In Philadelphia,
before his failure, before she had been suspected of the secret liaison
with him, he had been beginning (at least) to entertain in a very
pretentious way.  If she had been his wife then she might have stepped
smartly into Philadelphia society. Out here, good gracious! She turned
up her pretty nose in disgust. "What an awful place!" was her one
comment at this most stirring of Western boom towns.

When it came to Chicago, however, and its swirling, increasing life,
Aileen was much interested.  Between attending to many financial
matters Cowperwood saw to it that she was not left alone. He asked her
to shop in the local stores and tell him about them; and this she did,
driving around in an open carriage, attractively arrayed, a great brown
hat emphasizing her pink-and-white complexion and red-gold hair.  On
different afternoons of their stay he took her to drive over the
principal streets.  When Aileen was permitted for the first time to see
the spacious beauty and richness of Prairie Avenue, the North Shore
Drive, Michigan Avenue, and the new mansions on Ashland Boulevard, set
in their grassy spaces, the spirit, aspirations, hope, tang of the
future Chicago began to work in her blood as it had in Cowperwood's.
All of these rich homes were so very new.  The great people of Chicago
were all newly rich like themselves.  She forgot that as yet she was
not Cowperwood's wife; she felt herself truly to be so.  The streets,
set in most instances with a pleasing creamish-brown flagging, lined
with young, newly planted trees, the lawns sown to smooth green grass,
the windows of the houses trimmed with bright awnings and hung with
intricate lace, blowing in a June breeze, the roadways a gray, gritty
macadam--all these things touched her fancy.  On one drive they skirted
the lake on the North Shore, and Aileen, contemplating the chalky,
bluish-green waters, the distant sails, the gulls, and then the new
bright homes, reflected that in all certitude she would some day be the
mistress of one of these splendid mansions. How haughtily she would
carry herself; how she would dress! They would have a splendid house,
much finer, no doubt, than Frank's old one in Philadelphia, with a
great ball-room and dining-room where she could give dances and
dinners, and where Frank and she would receive as the peers of these
Chicago rich people.

"Do you suppose we will ever have a house as fine as one of these,
Frank?" she asked him, longingly.

"I'll tell you what my plan is," he said.  "If you like this Michigan
Avenue section we'll buy a piece of property out here now and hold it.
Just as soon as I make the right connections here and see what I am
going to do we'll build a house--something really nice--don't worry.  I
want to get this divorce matter settled, and then we'll begin.
Meanwhile, if we have to come here, we'd better live rather quietly.
Don't you think so?"

It was now between five and six, that richest portion of a summer day.
It had been very warm, but was now cooling, the shade of the western
building-line shadowing the roadway, a moted, wine-like air filling the
street.  As far as the eye could see were carriages, the one great
social diversion of Chicago, because there was otherwise so little
opportunity for many to show that they had means.  The social forces
were not as yet clear or harmonious. Jingling harnesses of nickel,
silver, and even plated gold were the sign manual of social hope, if
not of achievement.  Here sped homeward from the city--from office and
manufactory--along this one exceptional southern highway, the Via Appia
of the South Side, all the urgent aspirants to notable fortunes.  Men
of wealth who had met only casually in trade here nodded to each other.
Smart daughters, society-bred sons, handsome wives came down-town in
traps, Victorias, carriages, and vehicles of the latest design to drive
home their trade-weary fathers or brothers, relatives or friends.  The
air was gay with a social hope, a promise of youth and affection, and
that fine flush of material life that recreates itself in delight.
Lithe, handsome, well-bred animals, singly and in jingling pairs, paced
each other down the long, wide, grass-lined street, its fine homes
agleam with a rich, complaisant materiality.

"Oh!" exclaimed Aileen, all at once, seeing the vigorous, forceful men,
the handsome matrons, and young women and boys, the nodding and the
bowing, feeling a touch of the romance and wonder of it all.  "I should
like to live in Chicago.  I believe it's nicer than Philadelphia."

Cowperwood, who had fallen so low there, despite his immense capacity,
set his teeth in two even rows.  His handsome mustache seemed at this
moment to have an especially defiant curl.  The pair he was driving was
physically perfect, lean and nervous, with spoiled, petted faces.  He
could not endure poor horse-flesh.  He drove as only a horse-lover can,
his body bolt upright, his own energy and temperament animating his
animals.  Aileen sat beside him, very proud, consciously erect.

"Isn't she beautiful?" some of the women observed, as they passed,
going north.  "What a stunning young woman!" thought or said the men.

"Did you see her?" asked a young brother of his sister.  "Never mind,
Aileen," commented Cowperwood, with that iron determination that brooks
no defeat.  "We will be a part of this.  Don't fret. You will have
everything you want in Chicago, and more besides."

There was tingling over his fingers, into the reins, into the horses, a
mysterious vibrating current that was his chemical product, the
off-giving of his spirit battery that made his hired horses prance like
children.  They chafed and tossed their heads and snorted.  Aileen was
fairly bursting with hope and vanity and longing.  Oh, to be Mrs. Frank
Algernon Cowperwood here in Chicago, to have a splendid mansion, to
have her cards of invitation practically commands which might not be
ignored!

"Oh, dear!" she sighed to herself, mentally.  "If only it were all
true--now."

It is thus that life at its topmost toss irks and pains.  Beyond is
ever the unattainable, the lure of the infinite with its infinite ache.

"Oh, life! oh, youth! oh, hope! oh, years! Oh pain-winged fancy,
beating forth with fears."




Chapter IV

Peter Laughlin & Co.


The partnership which Cowperwood eventually made with an old-time Board
of Trade operator, Peter Laughlin, was eminently to his satisfaction.
Laughlin was a tall, gaunt speculator who had spent most of his living
days in Chicago, having come there as a boy from western Missouri.  He
was a typical Chicago Board of Trade operator of the old school, having
an Andrew Jacksonish countenance, and a Henry Clay--Davy
Crockett--"Long John" Wentworth build of body.

Cowperwood from his youth up had had a curious interest in quaint
characters, and he was interesting to them; they "took" to him. He
could, if he chose to take the trouble, fit himself in with the odd
psychology of almost any individual.  In his early peregrinations in La
Salle Street he inquired after clever traders on 'change, and then gave
them one small commission after another in order to get acquainted.
Thus he stumbled one morning on old Peter Laughlin, wheat and corn
trader, who had an office in La Salle Street near Madison, and who did
a modest business gambling for himself and others in grain and Eastern
railway shares.  Laughlin was a shrewd, canny American, originally,
perhaps, of Scotch extraction, who had all the traditional American
blemishes of uncouthness, tobacco-chewing, profanity, and other small
vices.  Cowperwood could tell from looking at him that he must have a
fund of information concerning every current Chicagoan of importance,
and this fact alone was certain to be of value.  Then the old man was
direct, plain-spoken, simple-appearing, and wholly
unpretentious--qualities which Cowperwood deemed invaluable.

Once or twice in the last three years Laughlin had lost heavily on
private "corners" that he had attempted to engineer, and the general
feeling was that he was now becoming cautious, or, in other words,
afraid.  "Just the man," Cowperwood thought.  So one morning he called
upon Laughlin, intending to open a small account with him.

"Henry," he heard the old man say, as he entered Laughlin's fair-sized
but rather dusty office, to a young, preternaturally solemn-looking
clerk, a fit assistant for Peter Laughlin, "git me them there Pittsburg
and Lake Erie sheers, will you?" Seeing Cowperwood waiting, he added,
"What kin I do for ye?"

Cowperwood smiled.  "So he calls them 'sheers,' does he?" he thought.
"Good! I think I'll like him."

He introduced himself as coming from Philadelphia, and went on to say
that he was interested in various Chicago ventures, inclined to invest
in any good stock which would rise, and particularly desirous to buy
into some corporation--public utility preferred--which would be certain
to grow with the expansion of the city.

Old Laughlin, who was now all of sixty years of age, owned a seat on
the Board, and was worth in the neighborhood of two hundred thousand
dollars, looked at Cowperwood quizzically.

"Well, now, if you'd 'a' come along here ten or fifteen years ago you
might 'a' got in on the ground floor of a lot of things," he observed.
"There was these here gas companies, now, that them Otway and Apperson
boys got in on, and then all these here street-railways.  Why, I'm the
feller that told Eddie Parkinson what a fine thing he could make out of
it if he would go and organize that North State Street line.  He
promised me a bunch of sheers if he ever worked it out, but he never
give 'em to me.  I didn't expect him to, though," he added, wisely, and
with a glint. "I'm too old a trader for that.  He's out of it now,
anyway.  That Michaels-Kennelly crowd skinned him.  Yep, if you'd 'a'
been here ten or fifteen years ago you might 'a' got in on that.
'Tain't no use a-thinkin' about that, though, any more.  Them sheers is
sellin' fer clost onto a hundred and sixty."

Cowperwood smiled.  "Well, Mr. Laughlin," he observed, "you must have
been on 'change a long time here.  You seem to know a good deal of what
has gone on in the past."

"Yep, ever since 1852," replied the old man.  He had a thick growth of
upstanding hair looking not unlike a rooster's comb, a long and what
threatened eventually to become a Punch-and-Judy chin, a slightly
aquiline nose, high cheek-bones, and hollow, brown-skinned cheeks.  His
eyes were as clear and sharp as those of a lynx.

"To tell you the truth, Mr. Laughlin," went on Cowperwood, "what I'm
really out here in Chicago for is to find a man with whom I can go into
partnership in the brokerage business.  Now I'm in the banking and
brokerage business myself in the East.  I have a firm in Philadelphia
and a seat on both the New York and Philadelphia exchanges.  I have
some affairs in Fargo also.  Any trade agency can tell you about me.
You have a Board of Trade seat here, and no doubt you do some New York
and Philadelphia exchange business. The new firm, if you would go in
with me, could handle it all direct.  I'm a rather strong outside man
myself.  I'm thinking of locating permanently in Chicago.  What would
you say now to going into business with me? Do you think we could get
along in the same office space?"

Cowperwood had a way, when he wanted to be pleasant, of beating the
fingers of his two hands together, finger for finger, tip for tip.  He
also smiled at the same time--or, rather, beamed--his eyes glowing with
a warm, magnetic, seemingly affectionate light.

As it happened, old Peter Laughlin had arrived at that psychological
moment when he was wishing that some such opportunity as this might
appear and be available.  He was a lonely man, never having been able
to bring himself to trust his peculiar temperament in the hands of any
woman.  As a matter of fact, he had never understood women at all, his
relations being confined to those sad immoralities of the cheapest
character which only money--grudgingly given, at that--could buy.  He
lived in three small rooms in West Harrison Street, near Throup, where
he cooked his own meals at times.  His one companion was a small
spaniel, simple and affectionate, a she dog, Jennie by name, with whom
he slept.  Jennie was a docile, loving companion, waiting for him
patiently by day in his office until he was ready to go home at night.
He talked to this spaniel quite as he would to a human being (even more
intimately, perhaps), taking the dog's glances, tail-waggings, and
general movements for answer.  In the morning when he arose, which was
often as early as half past four, or even four--he was a brief
sleeper--he would begin by pulling on his trousers (he seldom bathed
any more except at a down-town barber shop) and talking to Jennie.

"Git up, now, Jinnie," he would say.  "It's time to git up.  We've got
to make our coffee now and git some breakfast.  I can see yuh, lyin'
there, pertendin' to be asleep.  Come on, now! You've had sleep enough.
You've been sleepin' as long as I have."

Jennie would be watching him out of the corner of one loving eye, her
tail tap-tapping on the bed, her free ear going up and down.

When he was fully dressed, his face and hands washed, his old string
tie pulled around into a loose and convenient knot, his hair brushed
upward, Jennie would get up and jump demonstratively about, as much as
to say, "You see how prompt I am."

"That's the way," old Laughlin would comment.  "Allers last.  Yuh never
git up first, do yuh, Jinnie? Allers let yer old man do that, don't
you?"

On bitter days, when the car-wheels squeaked and one's ears and fingers
seemed to be in danger of freezing, old Laughlin, arrayed in a heavy,
dusty greatcoat of ancient vintage and a square hat, would carry Jennie
down-town in a greenish-black bag along with some of his beloved
"sheers" which he was meditating on.  Only then could he take Jennie in
the cars.  On other days they would walk, for he liked exercise.  He
would get to his office as early as seven-thirty or eight, though
business did not usually begin until after nine, and remain until
four-thirty or five, reading the papers or calculating during the hours
when there were no customers.  Then he would take Jennie and go for a
walk or to call on some business acquaintance.  His home room, the
newspapers, the floor of the exchange, his offices, and the streets
were his only resources.  He cared nothing for plays, books, pictures,
music--and for women only in his one-angled, mentally impoverished way.
His limitations were so marked that to a lover of character like
Cowperwood he was fascinating--but Cowperwood only used character. He
never idled over it long artistically.

As Cowperwood suspected, what old Laughlin did not know about Chicago
financial conditions, deals, opportunities, and individuals was
scarcely worth knowing.  Being only a trader by instinct, neither an
organizer nor an executive, he had never been able to make any great
constructive use of his knowledge.  His gains and his losses he took
with reasonable equanimity, exclaiming over and over, when he lost:
"Shucks! I hadn't orter have done that," and snapping his fingers.
When he won heavily or was winning he munched tobacco with a seraphic
smile and occasionally in the midst of trading would exclaim: "You
fellers better come in.  It's a-gonta rain some more." He was not easy
to trap in any small gambling game, and only lost or won when there was
a free, open struggle in the market, or when he was engineering some
little scheme of his own.

The matter of this partnership was not arranged at once, although it
did not take long.  Old Peter Laughlin wanted to think it over,
although he had immediately developed a personal fancy for Cowperwood.
In a way he was the latter's victim and servant from the start. They
met day after day to discuss various details and terms; finally, true
to his instincts, old Peter demanded a full half interest.

"Now, you don't want that much, Laughlin," Cowperwood suggested, quite
blandly.  They were sitting in Laughlin's private office between four
and five in the afternoon, and Laughlin was chewing tobacco with the
sense of having a fine, interesting problem before him.  "I have a seat
on the New York Stock Exchange," he went on, "and that's worth forty
thousand dollars.  My seat on the Philadelphia exchange is worth more
than yours here.  They will naturally figure as the principal assets of
the firm.  It's to be in your name. I'll be liberal with you, though.
Instead of a third, which would be fair, I'll make it forty-nine per
cent., and we'll call the firm Peter Laughlin & Co.  I like you, and I
think you can be of a lot of use to me.  I know you will make more
money through me than you have alone.  I could go in with a lot of
these silk-stocking fellows around here, but I don't want to.  You'd
better decide right now, and let's get to work."

Old Laughlin was pleased beyond measure that young Cowperwood should
want to go in with him.  He had become aware of late that all of the
young, smug newcomers on 'change considered him an old fogy.  Here was
a strong, brave young Easterner, twenty years his junior, evidently as
shrewd as himself--more so, he feared--who actually proposed a business
alliance.  Besides, Cowperwood, in his young, healthy, aggressive way,
was like a breath of spring.

"I ain't keerin' so much about the name," rejoined Laughlin.  "You can
fix it that-a-way if you want to.  Givin' you fifty-one per cent. gives
you charge of this here shebang.  All right, though; I ain't a-kickin'.
I guess I can manage allus to git what's a-comin' to me.

"It's a bargain, then," said Cowperwood.  "We'll want new offices,
Laughlin, don't you think? This one's a little dark."

"Fix it up any way you like, Mr. Cowperwood.  It's all the same to me.
I'll be glad to see how yer do it."

In a week the details were completed, and two weeks later the sign of
Peter Laughlin & Co., grain and commission merchants, appeared over the
door of a handsome suite of rooms on the ground floor of a corner at La
Salle and Madison, in the heart of the Chicago financial district.

"Get onto old Laughlin, will you?" one broker observed to another, as
they passed the new, pretentious commission-house with its splendid
plate-glass windows, and observed the heavy, ornate bronze sign placed
on either side of the door, which was located exactly on the corner.
"What's struck him? I thought he was almost all through.  Who's the
Company?"

"I don't know.  Some fellow from the East, I think."

"Well, he's certainly moving up.  Look at the plate glass, will you?"

It was thus that Frank Algernon Cowperwood's Chicago financial career
was definitely launched.




Chapter V

Concerning A Wife And Family


If any one fancies for a moment that this commercial move on the part
of Cowperwood was either hasty or ill-considered they but little
appreciate the incisive, apprehensive psychology of the man.  His
thoughts as to life and control (tempered and hardened by thirteen
months of reflection in the Eastern District Penitentiary) had given
him a fixed policy.  He could, should, and would rule alone.  No man
must ever again have the least claim on him save that of a suppliant.
He wanted no more dangerous combinations such as he had had with
Stener, the man through whom he had lost so much in Philadelphia, and
others.  By right of financial intellect and courage he was first, and
would so prove it.  Men must swing around him as planets around the sun.

Moreover, since his fall from grace in Philadelphia he had come to
think that never again, perhaps, could he hope to become socially
acceptable in the sense in which the so-called best society of a city
interprets the phrase; and pondering over this at odd moments, he
realized that his future allies in all probability would not be among
the rich and socially important--the clannish, snobbish elements of
society--but among the beginners and financially strong men who had
come or were coming up from the bottom, and who had no social hopes
whatsoever.  There were many such.  If through luck and effort he
became sufficiently powerful financially he might then hope to dictate
to society.  Individualistic and even anarchistic in character, and
without a shred of true democracy, yet temperamentally he was in
sympathy with the mass more than he was with the class, and he
understood the mass better.  Perhaps this, in a way, will explain his
desire to connect himself with a personality so naive and strange as
Peter Laughlin.  He had annexed him as a surgeon selects a special
knife or instrument for an operation, and, shrewd as old Laughlin was,
he was destined to be no more than a tool in Cowperwood's strong hands,
a mere hustling messenger, content to take orders from this swiftest of
moving brains.  For the present Cowperwood was satisfied to do business
under the firm name of Peter Laughlin & Co.--as a matter of fact, he
preferred it; for he could thus keep himself sufficiently inconspicuous
to avoid undue attention, and gradually work out one or two coups by
which he hoped to firmly fix himself in the financial future of Chicago.

As the most essential preliminary to the social as well as the
financial establishment of himself and Aileen in Chicago, Harper
Steger, Cowperwood's lawyer, was doing his best all this while to
ingratiate himself in the confidence of Mrs. Cowperwood, who had no
faith in lawyers any more than she had in her recalcitrant husband.
She was now a tall, severe, and rather plain woman, but still bearing
the marks of the former passive charm that had once interested
Cowperwood.  Notable crows'-feet had come about the corners of her
nose, mouth, and eyes.  She had a remote, censorious, subdued,
self-righteous, and even injured air.

The cat-like Steger, who had all the graceful contemplative air of a
prowling Tom, was just the person to deal with her.  A more suavely
cunning and opportunistic soul never was.  His motto might well have
been, speak softly and step lightly.

"My dear Mrs. Cowperwood," he argued, seated in her modest West
Philadelphia parlor one spring afternoon, "I need not tell you what a
remarkable man your husband is, nor how useless it is to combat him.
Admitting all his faults--and we can agree, if you please, that they
are many"--Mrs. Cowperwood stirred with irritation--"still it is not
worth while to attempt to hold him to a strict account.  You know"--and
Mr. Steger opened his thin, artistic hands in a deprecatory way--"what
sort of a man Mr. Cowperwood is, and whether he can be coerced or not.
He is not an ordinary man, Mrs. Cowperwood.  No man could have gone
through what he has and be where he is to-day, and be an average man.
If you take my advice you will let him go his way.  Grant him a
divorce.  He is willing, even anxious to make a definite provision for
you and your children.  He will, I am sure, look liberally after their
future.  But he is becoming very irritable over your unwillingness to
give him a legal separation, and unless you do I am very much afraid
that the whole matter will be thrown into the courts.  If, before it
comes to that, I could effect an arrangement agreeable to you, I would
be much pleased.   As you know, I have been greatly grieved by the
whole course of your recent affairs.  I am intensely sorry that things
are as they are."

Mr. Steger lifted his eyes in a very pained, deprecatory way.  He
regretted deeply the shifty currents of this troubled world.

Mrs. Cowperwood for perhaps the fifteenth or twentieth time heard him
to the end in patience.  Cowperwood would not return.  Steger was as
much her friend as any other lawyer would be.  Besides, he was socially
agreeable to her.  Despite his Machiavellian profession, she half
believed him.  He went over, tactfully, a score of additional points.
Finally, on the twenty-first visit, and with seemingly great distress,
he told her that her husband had decided to break with her financially,
to pay no more bills, and do nothing until his responsibility had been
fixed by the courts, and that he, Steger, was about to retire from the
case.  Mrs. Cowperwood felt that she must yield; she named her
ultimatum.  If he would fix two hundred thousand dollars on her and the
children (this was Cowperwood's own suggestion) and later on do
something commercially for their only son, Frank, junior, she would let
him go.  She disliked to do it.  She knew that it meant the triumph of
Aileen Butler, such as it was.  But, after all, that wretched creature
had been properly disgraced in Philadelphia.  It was not likely she
could ever raise her head socially anywhere any more.  She agreed to
file a plea which Steger would draw up for her, and by that oily
gentleman's machinations it was finally wormed through the local court
in the most secret manner imaginable.  The merest item in three of the
Philadelphia papers some six weeks later reported that a divorce had
been granted.  When Mrs. Cowperwood read it she wondered greatly that
so little attention had been attracted by it.  She had feared a much
more extended comment. She little knew the cat-like prowlings, legal
and journalistic, of her husband's interesting counsel.  When
Cowperwood read it on one of his visits to Chicago he heaved a sigh of
relief.  At last it was really true.  Now he could make Aileen his
wife.  He telegraphed her an enigmatic message of congratulation.  When
Aileen read it she thrilled from head to foot.  Now, shortly, she would
become the legal bride of Frank Algernon Cowperwood, the newly
enfranchised Chicago financier, and then--

"Oh," she said, in her Philadelphia home, when she read it, "isn't that
splendid! Now I'll be Mrs. Cowperwood.  Oh, dear!"

Mrs. Frank Algernon Cowperwood number one, thinking over her husband's
liaison, failure, imprisonment, pyrotechnic operations at the time of
the Jay Cooke failure, and his present financial ascendancy, wondered
at the mystery of life.  There must be a God. The Bible said so.  Her
husband, evil though he was, could not be utterly bad, for he had made
ample provision for her, and the children liked him.  Certainly, at the
time of the criminal prosecution he was no worse than some others who
had gone free. Yet he had been convicted, and she was sorry for that
and had always been.  He was an able and ruthless man.  She hardly knew
what to think.  The one person she really did blame was the wretched,
vain, empty-headed, ungodly Aileen Butler, who had been his seductress
and was probably now to be his wife.  God would punish her, no doubt.
He must.  So she went to church on Sundays and tried to believe, come
what might, that all was for the best.




Chapter VI

The New Queen of the Home


The day Cowperwood and Aileen were married--it was in an obscure
village called Dalston, near Pittsburg, in western Pennsylvania, where
they had stopped off to manage this matter--he had said to her: "I want
to tell you, dear, that you and I are really beginning life all over.
Now it depends on how well we play this game as to how well we succeed.
If you will listen to me we won't try to do anything much socially in
Chicago for the present.  Of course we'll have to meet a few people.
That can't be avoided.  Mr. and Mrs. Addison are anxious to meet you,
and I've delayed too long in that matter as it is.  But what I mean is
that I don't believe it's advisable to push this social exchange too
far.  People are sure to begin to make inquiries if we do.  My plan is
to wait a little while and then build a really fine house so that we
won't need to rebuild.  We're going to go to Europe next spring, if
things go right, and we may get some ideas over there.  I'm going to
put in a good big gallery," he concluded.  "While we're traveling we
might as well see what we can find in the way of pictures and so on."

Aileen was thrilling with anticipation.  "Oh, Frank," she said to him,
quite ecstatically, "you're so wonderful! You do everything you want,
don't you?"

"Not quite," he said, deprecatingly; "but it isn't for not wanting to.
Chance has a little to say about some of these chings, Aileen."

She stood in front of him, as she often did, her plump, ringed hands on
his shoulders, and looked into those steady, lucid pools--his eyes.
Another man, less leonine, and with all his shifting thoughts, might
have had to contend with the handicap of a shifty gaze; he fronted the
queries and suspicions of the world with a seeming candor that was as
disarming as that of a child. The truth was he believed in himself, and
himself only, and thence sprang his courage to think as he pleased.
Aileen wondered, but could get no answer.

"Oh, you big tiger!" she said.  "You great, big lion! Boo!"

He pinched her cheek and smiled.  "Poor Aileen!" he thought.  She
little knew the unsolvable mystery that he was even to himself--to
himself most of all.

Immediately after their marriage Cowperwood and Aileen journeyed to
Chicago direct, and took the best rooms that the Tremont provided, for
the time being.  A little later they heard of a comparatively small
furnished house at Twenty-third and Michigan Avenue, which, with horses
and carriages thrown in, was to be had for a season or two on lease.
They contracted for it at once, installing a butler, servants, and the
general service of a well-appointed home. Here, because he thought it
was only courteous, and not because he thought it was essential or wise
at this time to attempt a social onslaught, he invited the Addisons and
one or two others whom he felt sure would come--Alexander Rambaud,
president of the Chicago & Northwestern, and his wife, and Taylor Lord,
an architect whom he had recently called into consultation and whom he
found socially acceptable.  Lord, like the Addisons, was in society,
but only as a minor figure.

Trust Cowperwood to do the thing as it should be done.  The place they
had leased was a charming little gray-stone house, with a neat flight
of granite, balustraded steps leading up to its wide-arched door, and a
judicious use of stained glass to give its interior an artistically
subdued atmosphere.  Fortunately, it was furnished in good taste.
Cowperwood turned over the matter of the dinner to a caterer and
decorator.  Aileen had nothing to do but dress, and wait, and look her
best.

"I needn't tell you," he said, in the morning, on leaving, "that I want
you to look nice to-night, pet.  I want the Addisons and Mr. Rambaud to
like you."

A hint was more than sufficient for Aileen, though really it was not
needed.  On arriving at Chicago she had sought and discovered a French
maid.  Although she had brought plenty of dresses from Philadelphia,
she had been having additional winter costumes prepared by the best and
most expensive mistress of the art in Chicago--Theresa Donovan.  Only
the day before she had welcomed home a golden-yellow silk under heavy
green lace, which, with her reddish-gold hair and her white arms and
neck, seemed to constitute an unusual harmony.  Her boudoir on the
night of the dinner presented a veritable riot of silks, satins, laces,
lingerie, hair ornaments, perfumes, jewels--anything and everything
which might contribute to the feminine art of being beautiful.  Once in
the throes of a toilet composition, Aileen invariably became restless
and energetic, almost fidgety, and her maid, Fadette, was compelled to
move quickly. Fresh from her bath, a smooth, ivory Venus, she worked
quickly through silken lingerie, stockings and shoes, to her hair.
Fadette had an idea to suggest for the hair.  Would Madame let her try
a new swirl she had seen? Madame would--yes.  So there were movings of
her mass of rich glinting tresses this way and that.  Somehow it would
not do.  A braided effect was then tried, and instantly discarded;
finally a double looping, without braids, low over the forehead, caught
back with two dark-green bands, crossing like an X above the center of
her forehead and fastened with a diamond sunburst, served admirably.
In her filmy, lacy boudoir costume of pink silk Aileen stood up and
surveyed herself in the full-length mirror.

"Yes," she said, turning her head this way and that.

Then came the dress from Donovan's, rustling and crisping.  She slipped
into it wonderingly, critically, while Fadette worked at the back, the
arms, about her knees, doing one little essential thing after another.

"Oh, Madame!" she exclaimed.  "Oh, charmant! Ze hair, it go weeth it
perfect.  It ees so full, so beyutiful here"--she pointed to the hips,
where the lace formed a clinging basque.  "Oh, tees varee, varee nize."

Aileen glowed, but with scarcely a smile.  She was concerned.  It
wasn't so much her toilet, which must be everything that it should
be--but this Mr. Addison, who was so rich and in society, and Mr.
Rambaud, who was very powerful, Frank said, must like her.  It was the
necessity to put her best foot forward now that was really troubling
her.  She must interest these men mentally, perhaps, as well as
physically, and with social graces, and that was not so easy.  For all
her money and comfort in Philadelphia she had never been in society in
its best aspects, had never done social entertaining of any real
importance.  Frank was the most important man who had ever crossed her
path.  No doubt Mr. Rambaud had a severe, old-fashioned wife.  How
would she talk to her? And Mrs. Addison! She would know and see
everything.  Aileen almost talked out loud to herself in a consoling
way as she dressed, so strenuous were her thoughts; but she went on,
adding the last touches to her physical graces.

When she finally went down-stairs to see how the dining and reception
rooms looked, and Fadette began putting away the welter of discarded
garments--she was a radiant vision--a splendid greenish-gold figure,
with gorgeous hair, smooth, soft, shapely ivory arms, a splendid neck
and bust, and a swelling form.  She felt beautiful, and yet she was a
little nervous--truly.  Frank himself would be critical. She went about
looking into the dining-room, which, by the caterer's art, had been
transformed into a kind of jewel-box glowing with flowers, silver,
gold, tinted glass, and the snowy whiteness of linen.  It reminded her
of an opal flashing all its soft fires. She went into the general
reception-room, where was a grand piano finished in pink and gold, upon
which, with due thought to her one accomplishment--her playing--she had
arranged the songs and instrumental pieces she did best.  Aileen was
really not a brilliant musician.  For the first time in her life she
felt matronly--as if now she were not a girl any more, but a woman
grown, with some serious responsibilities, and yet she was not really
suited to the role.  As a matter of fact, her thoughts were always
fixed on the artistic, social, and dramatic aspects of life, with
unfortunately a kind of nebulosity of conception which permitted no
condensation into anything definite or concrete.  She could only be
wildly and feverishly interested.  Just then the door clicked to
Frank's key--it was nearing six--and in he came, smiling, confident, a
perfect atmosphere of assurance.

"Well!" he observed, surveying her in the soft glow of the
reception-room lighted by wall candles judiciously arranged. "Who's the
vision floating around here? I'm almost afraid to touch you.  Much
powder on those arms?"

He drew her into his arms, and she put up her mouth with a sense of
relief.  Obviously, he must think that she looked charming.

"I am chalky, I guess.  You'll just have to stand it, though. You're
going to dress, anyhow."

She put her smooth, plump arms about his neck, and he felt pleased.
This was the kind of a woman to have--a beauty.  Her neck was
resplendent with a string of turquoise, her fingers too heavily
jeweled, but still beautiful.  She was faintly redolent of hyacinth or
lavender.  Her hair appealed to him, and, above all, the rich yellow
silk of her dress, flashing fulgurously through the closely netted
green.

"Charming, girlie.  You've outdone yourself.  I haven't seen this dress
before.  Where did you get it?"

"Here in Chicago."

He lifted her warm fingers, surveying her train, and turned her about.

"You don't need any advice.  You ought to start a school."

"Am I all right?" she queried, smartly, but with a sense of
self-distrust for the moment, and all because of him.

"You're perfect.  Couldn't be nicer.  Splendid!"

She took heart.

"I wish your friends would think so.  You'd better hurry."

He went up-stairs, and she followed, looking first into the dining-room
again.  At least that was right.  Surely Frank was a master.

At seven the plop of the feet of carriage-horses was heard, and a
moment later Louis, the butler, was opening the door.  Aileen went
down, a little nervous, a little frigid, trying to think of many
pleasant things, and wondering whether she would really succeed in
being entertaining.  Cowperwood accompanied her, a very different
person in so far as mood and self-poise were concerned.  To himself his
own future was always secure, and that of Aileen's if he wished to make
it so.  The arduous, upward-ascending rungs of the social ladder that
were troubling her had no such significance to him.

The dinner, as such simple things go, was a success from what might be
called a managerial and pictorial point of view.  Cowperwood, because
of his varied tastes and interests, could discuss railroading with Mr.
Rambaud in a very definite and illuminating way; could talk
architecture with Mr. Lord as a student, for instance, of rare promise
would talk with a master; and with a woman like Mrs. Addison or Mrs.
Rambaud he could suggest or follow appropriate leads.  Aileen,
unfortunately, was not so much at home, for her natural state and mood
were remote not so much from a serious as from an accurate conception
of life.  So many things, except in a very nebulous and suggestive way,
were sealed books to Aileen--merely faint, distant tinklings.  She knew
nothing of literature except certain authors who to the truly cultured
might seem banal.  As for art, it was merely a jingle of names gathered
from Cowperwood's private comments.  Her one redeeming feature was that
she was truly beautiful herself--a radiant, vibrating objet d'art.  A
man like Rambaud, remote, conservative, constructive, saw the place of
a woman like Aileen in the life of a man like Cowperwood on the
instant.  She was such a woman as he would have prized himself in a
certain capacity.

Sex interest in all strong men usually endures unto the end, governed
sometimes by a stoic resignation.  The experiment of such attraction
can, as they well know, be made over and over, but to what end? For
many it becomes too troublesome.  Yet the presence of so glittering a
spectacle as Aileen on this night touched Mr. Rambaud with an ancient
ambition.  He looked at her almost sadly. Once he was much younger.
But alas, he had never attracted the flaming interest of any such
woman.  As he studied her now he wished that he might have enjoyed such
good fortune.

In contrast with Aileen's orchid glow and tinted richness Mrs.
Rambaud's simple gray silk, the collar of which came almost to her
ears, was disturbing--almost reproving--but Mrs. Rambaud's ladylike
courtesy and generosity made everything all right.  She came out of
intellectual New England--the Emerson-Thoreau-Channing Phillips school
of philosophy--and was broadly tolerant.  As a matter of fact, she
liked Aileen and all the Orient richness she represented. "Such a sweet
little house this is," she said, smilingly.  "We've noticed it often.
We're not so far removed from you but what we might be called
neighbors."

Aileen's eyes spoke appreciation.  Although she could not fully grasp
Mrs. Rambaud, she understood her, in a way, and liked her. She was
probably something like her own mother would have been if the latter
had been highly educated.  While they were moving into the
reception-room Taylor Lord was announced.  Cowperwood took his hand and
brought him forward to the others.

"Mrs. Cowperwood," said Lord, admiringly--a tall, rugged, thoughtful
person--"let me be one of many to welcome you to Chicago.  After
Philadelphia you will find some things to desire at first, but we all
come to like it eventually."

"Oh, I'm sure I shall," smiled Aileen.

"I lived in Philadelphia years ago, but only for a little while," added
Lord.  "I left there to come here."

The observation gave Aileen the least pause, but she passed it over
lightly.  This sort of accidental reference she must learn to expect;
there might be much worse bridges to cross.

"I find Chicago all right," she replied, briskly.  "There's nothing the
matter with it.  It has more snap than Philadelphia ever had."

"I'm glad to hear you say that.  I like it so much.  Perhaps it's
because I find such interesting things to do here."

He was admiring the splendor of her arms and hair.  What need had
beautiful woman to be intellectual, anyhow, he was saying to himself,
sensing that Aileen might be deficient in ultimate refinement.

Once more an announcement from the butler, and now Mr. and Mrs. Addison
entered.  Addison was not at all concerned over coming here--liked the
idea of it; his own position and that of his wife in Chicago was
secure.  "How are you, Cowperwood?" he beamed, laying one hand on the
latter's shoulder.  "This is fine of you to have us in to-night.  Mrs.
Cowperwood, I've been telling your husband for nearly a year now that
he should bring you out here. Did he tell you?" (Addison had not as yet
confided to his wife the true history of Cowperwood and Aileen.)

"Yes, indeed," replied Aileen, gaily, feeling that Addison was charmed
by her beauty.  "I've been wanting to come, too.  It's his fault that I
wasn't here sooner."

Addison, looking circumspectly at Aileen, said to himself that she was
certainly a stunning-looking woman.  So she was the cause of the first
wife's suit.  No wonder.  What a splendid creature! He contrasted her
with Mrs. Addison, and to his wife's disadvantage. She had never been
as striking, as stand-upish as Aileen, though possibly she might have
more sense.  Jove! if he could find a woman like Aileen to-day.  Life
would take on a new luster.  And yet he had women--very carefully, very
subterraneously.  But he had them.

"It's such a pleasure to meet you," Mrs. Addison, a corpulent,
bejeweled lady, was saying to Aileen.  "My husband and yours have
become the best of friends, apparently.  We must see more of each
other."

She babbled on in a puffy social way, and Aileen felt as though she
were getting along swiftly.  The butler brought in a great tray of
appetizers and cordials, and put them softly on a remote table.  Dinner
was served, and the talk flowed on; they discussed the growth of the
city, a new church that Lord was building ten blocks farther out;
Rambaud told about some humorous land swindles. It was quite gay.
Meanwhile Aileen did her best to become interested in Mrs. Rambaud and
Mrs. Addison.  She liked the latter somewhat better, solely because it
was a little easier to talk to her.  Mrs. Rambaud Aileen knew to be the
wiser and more charitable woman, but she frightened her a little;
presently she had to fall back on Mr. Lord's help.  He came to her
rescue gallantly, talking of everything that came into his mind.  All
the men outside of Cowperwood were thinking how splendid Aileen was
physically, how white were her arms, how rounded her neck and
shoulders, how rich her hair.




Chapter VII

Chicago Gas


Old Peter Laughlin, rejuvenated by Cowperwood's electric ideas, was
making money for the house.  He brought many bits of interesting gossip
from the floor, and such shrewd guesses as to what certain groups and
individuals were up to, that Cowperwood was able to make some very
brilliant deductions.

"By Gosh! Frank, I think I know exactly what them fellers are trying to
do," Laughlin would frequently remark of a morning, after he had lain
in his lonely Harrison Street bed meditating the major portion of the
night.  "That there Stock Yards gang" (and by gang he meant most of the
great manipulators, like Arneel, Hand, Schryhart and others) "are after
corn again.  We want to git long o' that now, or I miss my guess.  What
do you think, huh?"

Cowperwood, schooled by now in many Western subtleties which he had not
previously known, and daily becoming wiser, would as a rule give an
instantaneous decision.

"You're right.  Risk a hundred thousand bushels.  I think New York
Central is going to drop a point or two in a few days.  We'd better go
short a point."

Laughlin could never figure out quite how it was that Cowperwood always
seemed to know and was ready to act quite as quickly in local matters
as he was himself.  He understood his wisdom concerning Eastern shares
and things dealt in on the Eastern exchange, but these Chicago matters?

"Whut makes you think that?" he asked Cowperwood, one day, quite
curiously.

"Why, Peter," Cowperwood replied, quite simply, "Anton Videra" (one of
the directors of the Wheat and Corn Bank) "was in here yesterday while
you were on 'change, and he was telling me." He described a situation
which Videra had outlined.

Laughlin knew Videra as a strong, wealthy Pole who had come up in the
last few years.  It was strange how Cowperwood naturally got in with
these wealthy men and won their confidence so quickly. Videra would
never have become so confidential with him.

"Huh!" he exclaimed.  "Well, if he says it it's more'n likely so."

So Laughlin bought, and Peter Laughlin & Co. won.

But this grain and commission business, while it was yielding a profit
which would average about twenty thousand a year to each partner, was
nothing more to Cowperwood than a source of information.

He wanted to "get in" on something that was sure to bring very great
returns within a reasonable time and that would not leave him in any
such desperate situation as he was at the time of the Chicago
fire--spread out very thin, as he put it.  He had interested in his
ventures a small group of Chicago men who were watching him--Judah
Addison, Alexander Rambaud, Millard Bailey, Anton Videra--men who,
although not supreme figures by any means, had free capital.  He knew
that he could go to them with any truly sound proposition.  The one
thing that most attracted his attention was the Chicago gas situation,
because there was a chance to step in almost unheralded in an as yet
unoccupied territory; with franchises once secured--the reader can
quite imagine how--he could present himself, like a Hamilcar Barca in
the heart of Spain or a Hannibal at the gates of Rome, with a demand
for surrender and a division of spoils.

There were at this time three gas companies operating in the three
different divisions of the city--the three sections, or "sides," as
they were called--South, West, and North, and of these the Chicago Gas,
Light, and Coke Company, organized in 1848 to do business on the South
Side, was the most flourishing and important. The People's Gas, Light,
and Coke Company, doing business on the West Side, was a few years
younger than the South Chicago company, and had been allowed to spring
into existence through the foolish self-confidence of the organizer and
directors of the South Side company, who had fancied that neither the
West Side nor the North Side was going to develop very rapidly for a
number of years to come, and had counted on the city council's allowing
them to extend their mains at any time to these other portions of the
city.  A third company, the North Chicago Gas Illuminating Company, had
been organized almost simultaneously with the West Side company by the
same process through which the other companies had been brought into
life--their avowed intention, like that of the West Side company, being
to confine their activities to the sections from which the organizers
presumably came.

Cowperwood's first project was to buy out and combine the three old
city companies.  With this in view he looked up the holders in all
three corporations--their financial and social status. It was his idea
that by offering them three for one, or even four for one, for every
dollar represented by the market value of their stock he might buy in
and capitalize the three companies as one. Then, by issuing sufficient
stock to cover all his obligations, he would reap a rich harvest and at
the same time leave himself in charge.  He approached Judah Addison
first as the most available man to help float a scheme of this kind.
He did not want him as a partner so much as he wanted him as an
investor.

"Well, I'll tell you how I feel about this," said Addison, finally.
"You've hit on a great idea here.  It's a wonder it hasn't occurred to
some one else before.  And you'll want to keep rather quiet about it,
or some one else will rush in and do it.  We have a lot of venturesome
men out here.  But I like you, and I'm with you. Now it wouldn't be
advisable for me to go in on this personally--not openly, anyhow--but
I'll promise to see that you get some of the money you want.  I like
your idea of a central holding company, or pool, with you in charge as
trustee, and I'm perfectly willing that you should manage it, for I
think you can do it. Anyhow, that leaves me out, apparently, except as
an Investor. But you will have to get two or three others to help carry
this guarantee with me.  Have you any one in mind?"

"Oh yes," replied Cowperwood.  "Certainly.  I merely came to you
first." He mentioned Rambaud, Videra, Bailey, and others.

"They're all right," said Addison, "if you can get them.  But I'm not
sure, even then, that you can induce these other fellows to sell out.
They're not investors in the ordinary sense.  They're people who look
on this gas business as their private business. They started it.  They
like it.  They built the gas-tanks and laid the mains.  It won't be
easy."

Cowperwood found, as Addison predicted, that it was not such an easy
matter to induce the various stock-holders and directors in the old
companies to come in on any such scheme of reorganization. A closer,
more unresponsive set of men he was satisfied he had never met.  His
offer to buy outright at three or four for one they refused absolutely.
The stock in each case was selling from one hundred and seventy to two
hundred and ten, and intrinsically was worth more every year, as the
city was growing larger and its need of gas greater.  At the same time
they were suspicious--one and all--of any combination scheme by an
outsider.  Who was he? Whom did he represent? He could make it clear
that he had ample capital, but not who his backers were.  The old
officers and directors fancied that it was a scheme on the part of some
of the officers and directors of one of the other companies to get
control and oust them.  Why should they sell? Why be tempted by greater
profits from their stock when they were doing very well as it was?
Because of his newness to Chicago and his lack of connection as yet
with large affairs Cowperwood was eventually compelled to turn to
another scheme--that of organizing new companies in the suburbs as an
entering-wedge of attack upon the city proper.  Suburbs such as Lake
View and Hyde Park, having town or village councils of their own, were
permitted to grant franchises to water, gas, and street-railway
companies duly incorporated under the laws of the state.  Cowperwood
calculated that if he could form separate and seemingly distinct
companies for each of the villages and towns, and one general company
for the city later, he would be in a position to dictate terms to the
older organizations.  It was simply a question of obtaining his
charters and franchises before his rivals had awakened to the situation.

The one difficulty was that he knew absolutely nothing of the business
of gas--its practical manufacture and distribution--and had never been
particularly interested init.  Street-railroading, his favorite form of
municipal profit-seeking, and one upon which he had acquired an almost
endless fund of specialized information, offered no present practical
opportunity for him here in Chicago. He meditated on the situation, did
some reading on the manufacture of gas, and then suddenly, as was his
luck, found an implement ready to his hand.

It appeared that in the course of the life and growth of the South Side
company there had once been a smaller organization founded by a man by
the name of Sippens--Henry De Soto Sippens--who had entered and
actually secured, by some hocus-pocus, a franchise to manufacture and
sell gas in the down-town districts, but who had been annoyed by all
sorts of legal processes until he had finally been driven out or
persuaded to get out.  He was now in the real-estate business in Lake
View.  Old Peter Laughlin knew him.

"He's a smart little cuss," Laughlin told Cowperwood.  "I thort onct
he'd make a go of it, but they ketched him where his hair was short,
and he had to let go.  There was an explosion in his tank over here
near the river onct, an I think he thort them fellers blew him up.
Anyhow, he got out.  I ain't seen ner heard sight of him fer years."

Cowperwood sent old Peter to look up Mr. Sippens and find out what he
was really doing, and whether he would be interested to get back in the
gas business.  Enter, then, a few days later into the office of Peter
Laughlin & Co. Henry De Soto Sippens.  He was a very little man, about
fifty years of age; he wore a high, four-cornered, stiff felt hat, with
a short brown business coat (which in summer became seersucker) and
square-toed shoes; he looked for all the world like a country drug or
book store owner, with perhaps the air of a country doctor or lawyer
superadded. His cuffs protruded too far from his coat-sleeves, his
necktie bulged too far out of his vest, and his high hat was set a
little too far back on his forehead; otherwise he was acceptable,
pleasant, and interesting.  He had short side-burns--reddish
brown--which stuck out quite defiantly, and his eyebrows were heavy.

"Mr. Sippens," said Cowperwood, blandly, "you were once in the gas
manufacturing and distributing business here in Chicago, weren't you?"

"I think I know as much about the manufacture of gas as any one,"
replied Sippens, almost contentiously.  "I worked at it for a number of
years."

"Well, now, Mr. Sippens, I was thinking that it might be interesting to
start a little gas company in one of these outlying villages that are
growing so fast and see if we couldn't make some money out of it.  I'm
not a practical gas man myself, but I thought I might interest some one
who was." He looked at Sippens in a friendly, estimating way.  "I have
heard of you as some one who has had considerable experience in this
field here in Chicago.  If I should get up a company of this kind, with
considerable backing, do you think you might be willing to take the
management of it?"

"Oh, I know all about this gas field," Mr. Sippens was about to say.
"It can't be done." But he changed his mind before opening his lips.
"If I were paid enough," he said, cautiously.  "I suppose you know what
you have to contend with?"

"Oh yes," Cowperwood replied, smiling.  "What would you consider 'paid
enough' to mean?"

"Oh, if I were given six thousand a year and a sufficient interest in
the company--say, a half, or something like that--I might consider it,"
replied Sippens, determined, as he thought, to frighten Cowperwood off
by his exorbitant demands.  He was making almost six thousand dollars a
year out of his present business.

"You wouldn't think that four thousand in several companies--say up to
fifteen thousand dollars--and an interest of about a tenth in each
would be better?"

Mr. Sippens meditated carefully on this.  Plainly, the man before him
was no trifling beginner.  He looked at Cowperwood shrewdly and saw at
once, without any additional explanation of any kind, that the latter
was preparing a big fight of some sort.  Ten years before Sippens had
sensed the immense possibilities of the gas business.  He had tried to
"get in on it," but had been sued, waylaid, enjoined, financially
blockaded, and finally blown up. He had always resented the treatment
he had received, and he had bitterly regretted his inability to
retaliate.  He had thought his days of financial effort were over, but
here was a man who was subtly suggesting a stirring fight, and who was
calling him, like a hunter with horn, to the chase.

"Well, Mr. Cowperwood," he replied, with less defiance and more
camaraderie, "if you could show me that you have a legitimate
proposition in hand I am a practical gas man.  I know all about mains,
franchise contracts, and gas-machinery.  I organized and installed the
plant at Dayton, Ohio, and Rochester, New York.  I would have been rich
if I had got here a little earlier." The echo of regret was in his
voice.

"Well, now, here's your chance, Mr. Sippens," urged Cowperwood, subtly.
"Between you and me there's going to be a big new gas company in the
field.  We'll make these old fellows step up and see us quickly.
Doesn't that interest you? There'll be plenty of money.  It isn't that
that's wanting--it's an organizer, a fighter, a practical gas man to
build the plant, lay the mains, and so on." Cowperwood rose suddenly,
straight and determined--a trick with him when he wanted to really
impress any one.  He seemed to radiate force, conquest, victory.  "Do
you want to come in?"

"Yes, I do, Mr. Cowperwood!" exclaimed Sippens, jumping to his feet,
putting on his hat and shoving it far back on his head.  He looked like
a chest-swollen bantam rooster.

Cowperwood took his extended hand.

"Get your real-estate affairs in order.  I'll want you to get me a
franchise in Lake View shortly and build me a plant.  I'll give you all
the help you need.  I'll arrange everything to your satisfaction within
a week or so.  We will want a good lawyer or two."

Sippens smiled ecstatically as he left the office.  Oh, the wonder of
this, and after ten years! Now he would show those crooks.  Now he had
a real fighter behind him--a man like himself.  Now, by George, the fur
would begin to fly! Who was this man, anyhow? What a wonder! He would
look him up.  He knew that from now on he would do almost anything
Cowperwood wanted him to do.




Chapter VIII

Now This is Fighting


When Cowperwood, after failing in his overtures to the three city gas
companies, confided to Addison his plan of organizing rival companies
in the suburbs, the banker glared at him appreciatively. "You're a
smart one!" he finally exclaimed.  "You'll do! I back you to win!" He
went on to advise Cowperwood that he would need the assistance of some
of the strong men on the various village councils.  "They're all as
crooked as eels' teeth," he went on. "But there are one or two that are
more crooked than others and safer--bell-wethers.  Have you got your
lawyer?"

"I haven't picked one yet, but I will.  I'm looking around for the
right man now.

"Well, of course, I needn't tell you how important that is.  There is
one man, old General Van Sickle, who has had considerable training in
these matters.  He's fairly reliable."

The entrance of Gen. Judson P. Van Sickle threw at the very outset a
suggestive light on the whole situation.  The old soldier, over fifty,
had been a general of division during the Civil War, and had got his
real start in life by filing false titles to property in southern
Illinois, and then bringing suits to substantiate his fraudulent claims
before friendly associates.  He was now a prosperous go-between,
requiring heavy retainers, and yet not over-prosperous. There was only
one kind of business that came to the General--this kind; and one
instinctively compared him to that decoy sheep at the stock-yards that
had been trained to go forth into nervous, frightened flocks of its
fellow-sheep, balking at being driven into the slaughtering-pens, and
lead them peacefully into the shambles, knowing enough always to make
his own way quietly to the rear during the onward progress and thus
escape.  A dusty old lawyer, this, with Heaven knows what welter of
altered wills, broken promises, suborned juries, influenced judges,
bribed councilmen and legislators, double-intentioned agreements and
contracts, and a whole world of shifty legal calculations and false
pretenses floating around in his brain.  Among the politicians, judges,
and lawyers generally, by reason of past useful services, he was
supposed to have some powerful connections.  He liked to be called into
any case largely because it meant something to do and kept him from
being bored.  When compelled to keep an appointment in winter, he would
slip on an old greatcoat of gray twill that he had worn until it was
shabby, then, taking down a soft felt hat, twisted and pulled out of
shape by use, he would pull it low over his dull gray eyes and amble
forth.  In summer his clothes looked as crinkled as though he had slept
in them for weeks.  He smoked. In cast of countenance he was not wholly
unlike General Grant, with a short gray beard and mustache which always
seemed more or less unkempt and hair that hung down over his forehead
in a gray mass.  The poor General! He was neither very happy nor very
unhappy--a doubting Thomas without faith or hope in humanity and
without any particular affection for anybody.

"I'll tell you how it is with these small councils, Mr. Cowperwood,"
observed Van Sickle, sagely, after the preliminaries of the first
interview had been dispensed with.

"They're worse than the city council almost, and that's about as bad as
it can be.  You can't do anything without money where these little
fellows are concerned.  I don't like to be too hard on men, but these
fellows--" He shook his head.

"I understand," commented Cowperwood.  "They're not very pleasing, even
after you make all allowances."

"Most of them," went on the General, "won't stay put when you think you
have them.  They sell out.  They're just as apt as not to run to this
North Side Gas Company and tell them all about the whole thing before
you get well under way.  Then you have to pay them more money, rival
bills will be introduced, and all that." The old General pulled a long
face.  "Still, there are one or two of them that are all right," he
added, "if you can once get them interested--Mr. Duniway and Mr.
Gerecht."

"I'm not so much concerned with how it has to be done, General,"
suggested Cowperwood, amiably, "but I want to be sure that it will be
done quickly and quietly.  I don't want to be bothered with details.
Can it be done without too much publicity, and about what do you think
it is going to cost?"

"Well, that's pretty hard to say until I look into the matter," said
the General, thoughtfully.  "It might cost only four and it might cost
all of forty thousand dollars--even more.  I can't tell. I'd like to
take a little time and look into it." The old gentleman was wondering
how much Cowperwood was prepared to spend.

"Well, we won't bother about that now.  I'm willing to be as liberal as
necessary.  I've sent for Mr. Sippens, the president of the Lake View
Gas and Fuel Company, and he'll be here in a little while.  You will
want to work with him as closely as you can."  The energetic Sippens
came after a few moments, and he and Van Sickle, after being instructed
to be mutually helpful and to keep Cowperwood's name out of all matters
relating to this work, departed together. They were an odd pair--the
dusty old General phlegmatic, disillusioned, useful, but not inclined
to feel so; and the smart, chipper Sippens, determined to wreak a kind
of poetic vengeance on his old-time enemy, the South Side Gas Company,
via this seemingly remote Northside conspiracy.  In ten minutes they
were hand in glove, the General describing to Sippens the penurious and
unscrupulous brand of Councilman Duniway's politics and the friendly
but expensive character of Jacob Gerecht.  Such is life.

In the organization of the Hyde Park company Cowperwood, because he
never cared to put all his eggs in one basket, decided to secure a
second lawyer and a second dummy president, although he proposed to
keep De Soto Sippens as general practical adviser for all three or four
companies.  He was thinking this matter over when there appeared on the
scene a very much younger man than the old General, one Kent Barrows
McKibben, the only son of ex-Judge Marshall Scammon McKibben, of the
State Supreme Court.  Kent McKibben was thirty-three years old, tall,
athletic, and, after a fashion, handsome.  He was not at all vague
intellectually--that is, in the matter of the conduct of his
business--but dandified and at times remote.  He had an office in one
of the best blocks in Dearborn Street, which he reached in a reserved,
speculative mood every morning at nine, unless something important
called him down-town earlier.  It so happened that he had drawn up the
deeds and agreements for the real-estate company that sold Cowperwood
his lots at Thirty-seventh Street and Michigan Avenue, and when they
were ready he journeyed to the latter's office to ask if there were any
additional details which Cowperwood might want to have taken into
consideration.  When he was ushered in, Cowperwood turned to him his
keen, analytical eyes and saw at once a personality he liked.  McKibben
was just remote and artistic enough to suit him.  He liked his clothes,
his agnostic unreadableness, his social air.  McKibben, on his part,
caught the significance of the superior financial atmosphere at once.
He noted Cowperwood's light-brown suit picked out with strands of red,
his maroon tie, and small cameo cuff-links.  His desk, glass-covered,
looked clean and official.  The woodwork of the rooms was all cherry,
hand-rubbed and oiled, the pictures interesting steel-engravings of
American life, appropriately framed. The typewriter--at that time just
introduced--was in evidence, and the stock-ticker--also new--was
ticking volubly the prices current. The secretary who waited on
Cowperwood was a young Polish girl named Antoinette Nowak, reserved,
seemingly astute, dark, and very attractive.

"What sort of business is it you handle, Mr. McKibben?" asked
Cowperwood, quite casually, in the course of the conversation. And
after listening to McKibben's explanation he added, idly: "You might
come and see me some time next week.  It is just possible that I may
have something in your line."

In another man McKibben would have resented this remote suggestion of
future aid.  Now, instead, he was intensely pleased.  The man before
him gripped his imagination.  His remote intellectuality relaxed.  When
he came again and Cowperwood indicated the nature of the work he might
wish to have done McKibben rose to the bait like a fish to a fly.

"I wish you would let me undertake that, Mr. Cowperwood," he said,
quite eagerly.  "It's something I've never done, but I'm satisfied I
can do it.  I live out in Hyde Park and know most of the councilmen. I
can bring considerable influence to bear for you."

Cowperwood smiled pleasantly.

So a second company, officered by dummies of McKibben's selection, was
organized.  De Soto Sippens, without old General Van Sickle's
knowledge, was taken in as practical adviser.  An application for a
franchise was drawn up, and Kent Barrows McKibben began silent, polite
work on the South Side, coming into the confidence, by degrees, of the
various councilmen.

There was still a third lawyer, Burton Stimson, the youngest but
assuredly not the least able of the three, a pale, dark-haired Romeoish
youth with burning eyes, whom Cowperwood had encountered doing some
little work for Laughlin, and who was engaged to work on the West Side
with old Laughlin as ostensible organizer and the sprightly De Soto
Sippens as practical adviser.  Stimson was no mooning Romeo, however,
but an eager, incisive soul, born very poor, eager to advance himself.
Cowperwood detected that pliability of intellect which, while it might
spell disaster to some, spelled success for him.  He wanted the
intellectual servants.  He was willing to pay them handsomely, to keep
them busy, to treat them with almost princely courtesy, but he must
have the utmost loyalty. Stimson, while maintaining his calm and
reserve, could have kissed the arch-episcopal hand.  Such is the
subtlety of contact.

Behold then at once on the North Side, the South Side, the West
Side--dark goings to and fro and walkings up and down in the earth. In
Lake View old General Van Sickle and De Soto Sippens, conferring with
shrewd Councilman Duniway, druggist, and with Jacob Gerecht, ward boss
and wholesale butcher, both of whom were agreeable but exacting,
holding pleasant back-room and drug-store confabs with almost tabulated
details of rewards and benefits.  In Hyde Park, Mr. Kent Barrows
McKibben, smug and well dressed, a Chesterfield among lawyers, and with
him one J. J. Bergdoll, a noble hireling, long-haired and dusty,
ostensibly president of the Hyde Park Gas and Fuel Company, conferring
with Councilman Alfred B. Davis, manufacturer of willow and rattan
ware, and Mr. Patrick Gilgan, saloon-keeper, arranging a prospective
distribution of shares, offering certain cash consideration, lots,
favors, and the like. Observe also in the village of Douglas and West
Park on the West Side, just over the city line, the angular, humorous
Peter Laughlin and Burton Stimson arranging a similar deal or deals.

The enemy, the city gas companies, being divided into three factions,
were in no way prepared for what was now coming.  When the news finally
leaked out that applications for franchises had been made to the
several corporate village bodies each old company suspected the other
of invasion, treachery, robbery.  Pettifogging lawyers were sent, one
by each company, to the village council in each particular territory
involved, but no one of the companies had as yet the slightest idea who
was back of it all or of the general plan of operations.  Before any
one of them could reasonably protest, before it could decide that it
was willing to pay a very great deal to have the suburb adjacent to its
particular territory left free, before it could organize a legal fight,
councilmanic ordinances were introduced giving the applying company
what it sought; and after a single reading in each case and one open
hearing, as the law compelled, they were almost unanimously passed.
There were loud cries of dismay from minor suburban papers which had
almost been forgotten in the arrangement of rewards.  The large city
newspapers cared little at first, seeing these were outlying districts;
they merely made the comment that the villages were beginning well,
following in the steps of the city council in its distinguished career
of crime.

Cowperwood smiled as he saw in the morning papers the announcement of
the passage of each ordinance granting him a franchise.  He listened
with comfort thereafter on many a day to accounts by Laughlin, Sippens,
McKibben, and Van Sickle of overtures made to buy them out, or to take
over their franchises.  He worked on plans with Sippens looking to the
actual introduction of gas-plants. There were bond issues now to float,
stock to be marketed, contracts for supplies to be awarded, actual
reservoirs and tanks to be built, and pipes to be laid.  A pumped-up
public opposition had to be smoothed over.  In all this De Soto Sippens
proved a trump.  With Van Sickle, McKibben, and Stimson as his advisers
in different sections of the city he would present tabloid propositions
to Cowperwood, to which the latter had merely to bow his head in assent
or say no.  Then De Soto would buy, build, and excavate.  Cowperwood
was so pleased that he was determined to keep De Soto with him
permanently.  De Soto was pleased to think that he was being given a
chance to pay up old scores and to do large things; he was really
grateful.

"We're not through with those sharpers," he declared to Cowperwood,
triumphantly, one day.  "They'll fight us with suits.  They may join
hands later.  They blew up my gas-plant.  They may blow up ours."

"Let them blow," said Cowperwood.  "We can blow, too, and sue also. I
like lawsuits.  We'll tie them up so that they'll beg for quarter." His
eyes twinkled cheerfully.




Chapter IX

In Search of Victory


In the mean time the social affairs of Aileen had been prospering in a
small way, for while it was plain that they were not to be taken up at
once--that was not to be expected--it was also plain that they were not
to be ignored entirely.  One thing that helped in providing a nice
harmonious working atmosphere was the obvious warm affection of
Cowperwood for his wife.  While many might consider Aileen a little
brash or crude, still in the hands of so strong and capable a man as
Cowperwood she might prove available. So thought Mrs. Addison, for
instance, and Mrs. Rambaud.  McKibben and Lord felt the same way.  If
Cowperwood loved her, as he seemed to do, he would probably "put her
through" successfully.  And he really did love her, after his fashion.
He could never forget how splendid she had been to him in those old
days when, knowing full well the circumstances of his home, his wife,
his children, the probable opposition of her own family, she had thrown
over convention and sought his love.  How freely she had given of hers!
No petty, squeamish bickering and dickering here.  He had been "her
Frank" from the start, and he still felt keenly that longing in her to
be with him, to be his, which had produced those first wonderful,
almost terrible days.  She might quarrel, fret, fuss, argue, suspect,
and accuse him of flirtation with other women; but slight variations
from the norm in his case did not trouble her--at least she argued that
they wouldn't.  She had never had any evidence. She was ready to
forgive him anything, she said, and she was, too, if only he would love
her.

"You devil," she used to say to him, playfully.  "I know you.  I can
see you looking around.  That's a nice stenographer you have in the
office.  I suppose it's her."

"Don't be silly, Aileen," he would reply.  "Don't be coarse.  You know
I wouldn't take up with a stenographer.  An office isn't the place for
that sort of thing."

"Oh, isn't it? Don't silly me.  I know you.  Any old place is good
enough for you."

He laughed, and so did she.  She could not help it.  She loved him so.
There was no particular bitterness in her assaults.  She loved him, and
very often he would take her in his arms, kiss her tenderly, and coo:
"Are you my fine big baby? Are you my red-headed doll? Do you really
love me so much? Kiss me, then." Frankly, pagan passion in these two
ran high.  So long as they were not alienated by extraneous things he
could never hope for more delicious human contact.  There was no
reaction either, to speak of, no gloomy disgust.  She was physically
acceptable to him.  He could always talk to her in a genial, teasing
way, even tender, for she did not offend his intellectuality with
prudish or conventional notions. Loving and foolish as she was in some
ways, she would stand blunt reproof or correction.  She could suggest
in a nebulous, blundering way things that would be good for them to do.
Most of all at present their thoughts centered upon Chicago society,
the new house, which by now had been contracted for, and what it would
do to facilitate their introduction and standing.  Never did a woman's
life look more rosy, Aileen thought.  It was almost too good to be
true.  Her Frank was so handsome, so loving, so generous.  There was
not a small idea about him.  What if he did stray from her at times? He
remained faithful to her spiritually, and she knew as yet of no single
instance in which he had failed her.  She little knew, as much as she
knew, how blandly he could lie and protest in these matters.  But he
was fond of her just the same, and he really had not strayed to any
extent.

By now also, Cowperwood had invested about one hundred thousand dollars
in his gas-company speculations, and he was jubilant over his
prospects; the franchises were good for twenty years.  By that time he
would be nearly sixty, and he would probably have bought, combined
with, or sold out to the older companies at a great profit. The future
of Chicago was all in his favor.  He decided to invest as much as
thirty thousand dollars in pictures, if he could find the right ones,
and to have Aileen's portrait painted while she was still so beautiful.
This matter of art was again beginning to interest him immensely.
Addison had four or five good pictures--a Rousseau, a Greuze, a
Wouverman, and one Lawrence--picked up Heaven knows where.  A hotel-man
by the name of Collard, a dry-goods and real-estate merchant, was said
to have a very striking collection. Addison had told him of one Davis
Trask, a hardware prince, who was now collecting.  There were many
homes, he knew where art was beginning to be assembled.  He must begin,
too.

Cowperwood, once the franchises had been secured, had installed Sippens
in his own office, giving him charge for the time being. Small rented
offices and clerks were maintained in the region where practical
plant-building was going on.  All sorts of suits to enjoin, annul, and
restrain had been begun by the various old companies, but McKibben,
Stimson, and old General Van Sickle were fighting these with Trojan
vigor and complacency.  It was a pleasant scene.  Still no one knew
very much of Cowperwood's entrance into Chicago as yet.  He was a very
minor figure.  His name had not even appeared in connection with this
work.  Other men were being celebrated daily, a little to his envy.
When would he begin to shine? Soon, now, surely.  So off they went in
June, comfortable, rich, gay, in the best of health and spirits, intent
upon enjoying to the full their first holiday abroad.

It was a wonderful trip.  Addison was good enough to telegraph flowers
to New York for Mrs. Cowperwood to be delivered on shipboard. McKibben
sent books of travel.  Cowperwood, uncertain whether anybody would send
flowers, ordered them himself--two amazing baskets, which with
Addison's made three--and these, with attached cards, awaited them in
the lobby of the main deck.  Several at the captain's table took pains
to seek out the Cowperwoods.  They were invited to join several
card-parties and to attend informal concerts. It was a rough passage,
however, and Aileen was sick.  It was hard to make herself look just
nice enough, and so she kept to her room. She was very haughty, distant
to all but a few, and to these careful of her conversation.  She felt
herself coming to be a very important person.

Before leaving she had almost exhausted the resources of the Donovan
establishment in Chicago.  Lingerie, boudoir costumes,
walking-costumes, riding-costumes, evening-costumes she possessed in
plenty.  She had a jewel-bag hidden away about her person containing
all of thirty thousand dollars' worth of jewels.  Her shoes, stockings,
hats, and accessories in general were innumerable.  Because of all this
Cowperwood was rather proud of her.  She had such a capacity for life.
His first wife had been pale and rather anemic, while Aileen was fairly
bursting with sheer physical vitality.  She hummed and jested and
primped and posed.  There are some souls that just are, without
previous revision or introspection.  The earth with all its long past
was a mere suggestion to Aileen, dimly visualized if at all.  She may
have heard that there were once dinosaurs and flying reptiles, but if
so it made no deep impression on her. Somebody had said, or was saying,
that we were descended from monkeys, which was quite absurd, though it
might be true enough. On the sea the thrashing hills of green water
suggested a kind of immensity and terror, but not the immensity of the
poet's heart. The ship was safe, the captain at table in brass buttons
and blue uniform, eager to be nice to her--told her so.  Her faith
really, was in the captain.  And there with her, always, was
Cowperwood, looking at this whole, moving spectacle of life with a
suspicious, not apprehensive, but wary eye, and saying nothing about it.

In London letters given them by Addison brought several invitations to
the opera, to dinner, to Goodwood for a weekend, and so on. Carriages,
tallyhoes, cabs for riding were invoked.  A week-end invitation to a
houseboat on the Thames was secured.  Their English hosts, looking on
all this as a financial adventure, good financial wisdom, were
courteous and civil, nothing more.  Aileen was intensely curious.  She
noted servants, manners, forms.  Immediately she began to think that
America was not good enough, perhaps; it wanted so many things.

"Now, Aileen, you and I have to live in Chicago for years and years,"
commented Cowperwood.  "Don't get wild.  These people don't care for
Americans, can't you see that? They wouldn't accept us if we were over
here--not yet, anyhow.  We're merely passing strangers, being
courteously entertained." Cowperwood saw it all.

Aileen was being spoiled in a way, but there was no help.  She dressed
and dressed.  The Englishmen used to look at her in Hyde Park, where
she rode and drove; at Claridges' where they stayed; in Bond Street,
where she shopped.  The Englishwomen, the majority of them remote,
ultra-conservative, simple in their tastes, lifted their eyes.
Cowperwood sensed the situation, but said nothing. He loved Aileen, and
she was satisfactory to him, at least for the present, anyhow,
beautiful.  If he could adjust her station in Chicago, that would be
sufficient for a beginning.  After three weeks of very active life,
during which Aileen patronized the ancient and honorable glories of
England, they went on to Paris.

Here she was quickened to a child-like enthusiasm.  "You know," she
said to Cowperwood, quite solemnly, the second morning, "the English
don't know how to dress.  I thought they did, but the smartest of them
copy the French.  Take those men we saw last night in the Cafe
d'Anglais.  There wasn't an Englishman I saw that compared with them."

"My dear, your tastes are exotic," replied Cowperwood, who was watching
her with pleased interest while he adjusted his tie. "The French smart
crowd are almost too smart, dandified.  I think some of those young
fellows had on corsets."

"What of it?" replied Aileen.  "I like it.  If you're going to be
smart, why not be very smart?"

"I know that's your theory, my dear," he said, "but it can be overdone.
There is such a thing as going too far.  You have to compromise even if
you don't look as well as you might.  You can't be too very
conspicuously different from your neighbors, even in the right
direction."

"You know," she said, stopping and looking at him, "I believe you're
going to get very conservative some day--like my brothers."

She came over and touched his tie and smoothed his hair.

"Well, one of us ought to be, for the good of the family," he
commented, half smiling.

"I'm not so sure, though, that it will be you, either."

"It's a charming day.  See how nice those white-marble statues look.
Shall we go to the Cluny or Versailles or Fontainbleau? To-night we
ought to see Bernhardt at the Francaise."

Aileen was so gay.  It was so splendid to be traveling with her true
husband at last.

It was on this trip that Cowperwood's taste for art and life and his
determination to possess them revived to the fullest.  He made the
acquaintance in London, Paris, and Brussels of the important art
dealers.  His conception of great masters and the older schools of art
shaped themselves.  By one of the dealers in London, who at once
recognized in him a possible future patron, he was invited with Aileen
to view certain private collections, and here and there was an artist,
such as Lord Leighton, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, or Whistler, to whom he
was introduced casually, an interested stranger. These men only saw a
strong, polite, remote, conservative man. He realized the emotional,
egotistic, and artistic soul.  He felt on the instant that there could
be little in common between such men and himself in so far as personal
contact was concerned, yet there was mutual ground on which they could
meet.  He could not be a slavish admirer of anything, only a princely
patron.  So he walked and saw, wondering how soon his dreams of
grandeur were to be realized.

In London he bought a portrait by Raeburn; in Paris a plowing scene by
Millet, a small Jan Steen, a battle piece by Meissonier, and a romantic
courtyard scene by Isabey.  Thus began the revival of his former
interest in art; the nucleus of that future collection which was to
mean so much to him in later years.

On their return, the building of the new Chicago mansion created the
next interesting diversion in the lives of Aileen and Cowperwood.
Because of some chateaux they saw in France that form, or rather a
modification of it as suggested by Taylor Lord, was adopted.  Mr. Lord
figured that it would take all of a year, perhaps a year and a half, to
deliver it in perfect order, but time was of no great importance in
this connection.  In the mean while they could strengthen their social
connections and prepare for that interesting day when they should be of
the Chicago elite.

There were, at this time, several elements in Chicago--those who,
having grown suddenly rich from dull poverty, could not so easily
forget the village church and the village social standards; those who,
having inherited wealth, or migrated from the East where wealth was
old, understood more of the savoir faire of the game; and those who,
being newly born into wealth and seeing the drift toward a smarter
American life, were beginning to wish they might shine in it--these
last the very young people.  The latter were just beginning to dream of
dances at Kinsley's, a stated Kirmess, and summer diversions of the
European kind, but they had not arrived as yet.  The first class,
although by far the dullest and most bovine, was still the most
powerful because they were the richest, money as yet providing the
highest standard.  The functions which these people provided were
stupid to the verge of distraction; really they were only the week-day
receptions and Sunday-afternoon calls of Squeedunk and Hohokus raised
to the Nth power.  The purpose of the whole matter was to see and be
seen.  Novelty in either thought or action was decidedly eschewed.  It
was, as a matter of fact, customariness of thought and action and the
quintessence of convention that was desired.  The idea of introducing a
"play actress," for instance, as was done occasionally in the East or
in London--never; even a singer or an artist was eyed askance. One
could easily go too far! But if a European prince should have strayed
to Chicago (which he never did) or if an Eastern social magnate chanced
to stay over a train or two, then the topmost circle of local wealth
was prepared to strain itself to the breaking-point.  Cowperwood had
sensed all this on his arrival, but he fancied that if he became rich
and powerful enough he and Aileen, with their fine house to help them,
might well be the leaven which would lighten the whole lump.
Unfortunately, Aileen was too obviously on the qui vive for those
opportunities which might lead to social recognition and equality, if
not supremacy. Like the savage, unorganized for protection and at the
mercy of the horrific caprice of nature, she was almost tremulous at
times with thoughts of possible failure.  Almost at once she had
recognized herself as unsuited temperamentally for association with
certain types of society women.  The wife of Anson Merrill, the great
dry-goods prince, whom she saw in one of the down-town stores one day,
impressed her as much too cold and remote.  Mrs. Merrill was a woman of
superior mood and education who found herself, in her own estimation,
hard put to it for suitable companionship in Chicago.  She was
Eastern-bred-Boston--and familiar in an offhand way with the superior
world of London, which she had visited several times.  Chicago at its
best was to her a sordid commercial mess. She preferred New York or
Washington, but she had to live here. Thus she patronized nearly all of
those with whom she condescended to associate, using an upward tilt of
the head, a tired droop of the eyelids, and a fine upward arching of
the brows to indicate how trite it all was.

It was a Mrs. Henry Huddlestone who had pointed out Mrs. Merrill to
Aileen.  Mrs. Huddlestone was the wife of a soap manufacturer living
very close to the Cowperwoods' temporary home, and she and her husband
were on the outer fringe of society.  She had heard that the
Cowperwoods were people of wealth, that they were friendly with the
Addisons, and that they were going to build a
two-hundred-thousand-dollar mansion.  (The value of houses always grows
in the telling.) That was enough.  She had called, being three doors
away, to leave her card; and Aileen, willing to curry favor here and
there, had responded.  Mrs. Huddlestone was a little woman, not very
attractive in appearance, clever in a social way, and eminently
practical.

"Speaking of Mrs. Merrill," commented Mrs. Huddlestone, on this
particular day, "there she is--near the dress-goods counter.  She
always carries that lorgnette in just that way."

Aileen turned and examined critically a tall, dark, slender woman of
the high world of the West, very remote, disdainful, superior.

"You don't know her?" questioned Aileen, curiously, surveying her at
leisure.

"No," replied Mrs. Huddlestone, defensively.  "They live on the North
Side, and the different sets don't mingle so much."

As a matter of fact, it was just the glory of the principal families
that they were above this arbitrary division of "sides," and could pick
their associates from all three divisions.

"Oh!" observed Aileen, nonchalantly.  She was secretly irritated to
think that Mrs. Huddlestone should find it necessary to point out Mrs.
Merrill to her as a superior person.

"You know, she darkens her eyebrows a little, I think," suggested Mrs.
Huddlestone, studying her enviously.  "Her husband, they say, isn't the
most faithful person in the world.  There's another woman, a Mrs.
Gladdens, that lives very close to them that he's very much interested
in."

"Oh!" said Aileen, cautiously.  After her own Philadelphia experience
she had decided to be on her guard and not indulge in too much gossip.
Arrows of this particular kind could so readily fly in her direction.

"But her set is really much the smartest," complimented Aileen's
companion.

Thereafter it was Aileen's ambition to associate with Mrs. Anson
Merrill, to be fully and freely accepted by her.  She did not know,
although she might have feared, that that ambition was never to be
realized.

But there were others who had called at the first Cowperwood home, or
with whom the Cowperwoods managed to form an acquaintance. There were
the Sunderland Sledds, Mr. Sledd being general traffic manager of one
of the southwestern railways entering the city, and a gentleman of
taste and culture and some wealth; his wife an ambitious nobody.  There
were the Walter Rysam Cottons, Cotton being a wholesale coffee-broker,
but more especially a local social litterateur; his wife a graduate of
Vassar.  There were the Norrie Simmses, Simms being secretary and
treasurer of the Douglas Trust and Savings Company, and a power in
another group of financial people, a group entirely distinct from that
represented by Addison and Rambaud.

Others included the Stanislau Hoecksemas, wealthy furriers; the Duane
Kingslands, wholesale flour; the Webster Israelses, packers; the
Bradford Candas, jewelers.  All these people amounted to something
socially.  They all had substantial homes and substantial incomes, so
that they were worthy of consideration.  The difference between Aileen
and most of the women involved a difference between naturalism and
illusion.  But this calls for some explanation.

To really know the state of the feminine mind at this time, one would
have to go back to that period in the Middle Ages when the Church
flourished and the industrious poet, half schooled in the facts of
life, surrounded women with a mystical halo.  Since that day the maiden
and the matron as well has been schooled to believe that she is of a
finer clay than man, that she was born to uplift him, and that her
favors are priceless.  This rose-tinted mist of romance, having nothing
to do with personal morality, has brought about, nevertheless, a
holier-than-thou attitude of women toward men, and even of women toward
women.  Now the Chicago atmosphere in which Aileen found herself was
composed in part of this very illusion.  The ladies to whom she had
been introduced were of this high world of fancy.  They conceived
themselves to be perfect, even as they were represented in religious
art and in fiction. Their husbands must be models, worthy of their high
ideals, and other women must have no blemish of any kind.  Aileen,
urgent, elemental, would have laughed at all this if she could have
understood.  Not understanding, she felt diffident and uncertain of
herself in certain presences.

Instance in this connection Mrs. Norrie Simms, who was a satellite of
Mrs. Anson Merrill.  To be invited to the Anson Merrills' for tea,
dinner, luncheon, or to be driven down-town by Mrs. Merrill, was
paradise to Mrs. Simms.  She loved to recite the bon mots of her idol,
to discourse upon her astonishing degree of culture, to narrate how
people refused on occasion to believe that she was the wife of Anson
Merrill, even though she herself declared it--those old chestnuts of
the social world which must have had their origin in Egypt and Chaldea.
Mrs. Simms herself was of a nondescript type, not a real personage,
clever, good-looking, tasteful, a social climber.  The two Simms
children (little girls) had been taught all the social graces of the
day--to pose, smirk, genuflect, and the like, to the immense delight of
their elders.  The nurse in charge was in uniform, the governess was a
much put-upon person. Mrs. Simms had a high manner, eyes for those
above her only, a serene contempt for the commonplace world in which
she had to dwell.

During the first dinner at which she entertained the Cowperwoods Mrs.
Simms attempted to dig into Aileen's Philadelphia history, asking if
she knew the Arthur Leighs, the Trevor Drakes, Roberta Willing, or the
Martyn Walkers.  Mrs. Simms did not know them herself, but she had
heard Mrs. Merrill speak of them, and that was enough of a handle
whereby to swing them.  Aileen, quick on the defense, ready to lie
manfully on her own behalf, assured her that she had known them, as
indeed she had--very casually--and before the rumor which connected her
with Cowperwood had been voiced abroad.  This pleased Mrs. Simms.

"I must tell Nellie," she said, referring thus familiarly to Mrs.
Merrill.

Aileen feared that if this sort of thing continued it would soon be all
over town that she had been a mistress before she had been a wife, that
she had been the unmentioned corespondent in the divorce suit, and that
Cowperwood had been in prison.  Only his wealth and her beauty could
save her; and would they?

One night they had been to dinner at the Duane Kingslands', and Mrs.
Bradford Canda had asked her, in what seemed a very significant way,
whether she had ever met her friend Mrs. Schuyler Evans, of
Philadelphia.  This frightened Aileen.

"Don't you suppose they must know, some of them, about us?" she asked
Cowperwood, on the way home.

"I suppose so," he replied, thoughtfully.  "I'm sure I don't know. I
wouldn't worry about that if I were you.  If you worry about it you'll
suggest it to them.  I haven't made any secret of my term in prison in
Philadelphia, and I don't intend to.  It wasn't a square deal, and they
had no right to put me there."

"I know, dear," replied Aileen, "it might not make so much difference
if they did know.  I don't see why it should.  We are not the only ones
that have had marriage troubles, I'm sure.

"There's just one thing about this; either they accept us or they
don't.  If they don't, well and good; we can't help it.  We'll go on
and finish the house, and give them a chance to be decent.  If they
won't be, there are other cities.  Money will arrange matters in New
York--that I know.  We can build a real place there, and go in on equal
terms if we have money enough--and I will have money enough," he added,
after a moment's pondering.  "Never fear.  I'll make millions here,
whether they want me to or not, and after that--well, after that, we'll
see what we'll see.  Don't worry.  I haven't seen many troubles in this
world that money wouldn't cure."

His teeth had that even set that they always assumed when he was
dangerously in earnest.  He took Aileen's hand, however, and pressed it
gently.

"Don't worry," he repeated.  "Chicago isn't the only city, and we won't
be the poorest people in America, either, in ten years. Just keep up
your courage.  It will all come out right.  It's certain to."

Aileen looked out on the lamp-lit length of Michigan Avenue, down which
they were rolling past many silent mansions.  The tops of all the lamps
were white, and gleamed through the shadows, receding to a thin point.
It was dark, but fresh and pleasant.  Oh, if only Frank's money could
buy them position and friendship in this interesting world; if it only
would! She did not quite realize how much on her own personality, or
the lack of it, this struggle depended.




Chapter X

A Test


The opening of the house in Michigan Avenue occurred late in November
in the fall of eighteen seventy-eight.  When Aileen and Cowperwood had
been in Chicago about two years.  Altogether, between people whom they
had met at the races, at various dinners and teas, and at receptions of
the Union and Calumet Clubs (to which Cowperwood, through Addison's
backing, had been admitted) and those whom McKibben and Lord
influenced, they were able to send invitations to about three hundred,
of whom some two hundred and fifty responded. Up to this time, owing to
Cowperwood's quiet manipulation of his affairs, there had been no
comment on his past--no particular interest in it.  He had money,
affable ways, a magnetic personality. The business men of the
city--those whom he met socially--were inclined to consider him
fascinating and very clever.  Aileen being beautiful and graceful for
attention, was accepted at more or less her own value, though the
kingly high world knew them not.

It is amazing what a showing the socially unplaced can make on occasion
where tact and discrimination are used.  There was a weekly social
paper published in Chicago at this time, a rather able publication as
such things go, which Cowperwood, with McKibben's assistance, had
pressed into service.  Not much can be done under any circumstances
where the cause is not essentially strong; but where, as in this case,
there is a semblance of respectability, considerable wealth, and great
force and magnetism, all things are possible.  Kent McKibben knew
Horton Biggers, the editor, who was a rather desolate and disillusioned
person of forty-five, gray, and depressed-looking--a sort of human
sponge or barnacle who was only galvanized into seeming interest and
cheerfulness by sheer necessity.  Those were the days when the society
editor was accepted as a member of society--de facto--and treated more
as a guest than a reporter, though even then the tendency was toward
elimination. Working for Cowperwood, and liking him, McKibben said to
Biggers one evening:

"You know the Cowperwoods, don't you, Biggers?"

"No," replied the latter, who devoted himself barnacle-wise to the more
exclusive circles.  "Who are they?"

"Why, he's a banker over here in La Salle Street.  They're from
Philadelphia.  Mrs. Cowperwood's a beautiful woman--young and all that.
They're building a house out here on Michigan Avenue.  You ought to
know them.  They're going to get in, I think.  The Addisons like them.
If you were to be nice to them now I think they'd appreciate it later.
He's rather liberal, and a good fellow."

Biggers pricked up his ears.  This social journalism was thin picking
at best, and he had very few ways of turning an honest penny.  The
would be's and half-in's who expected nice things said of them had to
subscribe, and rather liberally, to his paper.  Not long after this
brief talk Cowperwood received a subscription blank from the business
office of the Saturday Review, and immediately sent a check for one
hundred dollars to Mr. Horton Biggers direct. Subsequently certain not
very significant personages noticed that when the Cowperwoods dined at
their boards the function received comment by the Saturday Review, not
otherwise.  It looked as though the Cowperwoods must be favored; but
who were they, anyhow?

The danger of publicity, and even moderate social success, is that
scandal loves a shining mark.  When you begin to stand out the least
way in life, as separate from the mass, the cognoscenti wish to know
who, what, and why.  The enthusiasm of Aileen, combined with the genius
of Cowperwood, was for making their opening entertainment a very
exceptional affair, which, under the circumstances, and all things
considered, was a dangerous thing to do.  As yet Chicago was
exceedingly slow socially.  Its movements were, as has been said, more
or less bovine and phlegmatic.  To rush in with something utterly
brilliant and pyrotechnic was to take notable chances.  The more
cautious members of Chicago society, even if they did not attend, would
hear, and then would come ultimate comment and decision.

The function began with a reception at four, which lasted until
six-thirty, and this was followed by a dance at nine, with music by a
famous stringed orchestra of Chicago, a musical programme by artists of
considerable importance, and a gorgeous supper from eleven until one in
a Chinese fairyland of lights, at small tables filling three of the
ground-floor rooms.  As an added fillip to the occasion Cowperwood had
hung, not only the important pictures which he had purchased abroad,
but a new one--a particularly brilliant Gerome, then in the heyday of
his exotic popularity--a picture of nude odalisques of the harem,
idling beside the highly colored stone marquetry of an oriental bath.
It was more or less "loose" art for Chicago, shocking to the
uninitiated, though harmless enough to the illuminati; but it gave a
touch of color to the art-gallery which the latter needed.  There was
also, newly arrived and newly hung, a portrait of Aileen by a Dutch
artist, Jan van Beers, whom they had encountered the previous summer at
Brussels.  He had painted Aileen in nine sittings, a rather brilliant
canvas, high in key, with a summery, out-of-door world behind her--a
low stone-curbed pool, the red corner of a Dutch brick palace, a
tulip-bed, and a blue sky with fleecy clouds.  Aileen was seated on the
curved arm of a stone bench, green grass at her feet, a pink-and-white
parasol with a lacy edge held idly to one side; her rounded, vigorous
figure clad in the latest mode of Paris, a white and blue striped-silk
walking-suit, with a blue-and-white-banded straw hat, wide-brimmed,
airy, shading her lusty, animal eyes.  The artist had caught her spirit
quite accurately, the dash, the assumption, the bravado based on the
courage of inexperience, or lack of true subtlety.  A refreshing thing
in its way, a little showy, as everything that related to her was, and
inclined to arouse jealousy in those not so liberally endowed by life,
but fine as a character piece.  In the warm glow of the guttered
gas-jets she looked particularly brilliant here, pampered, idle,
jaunty--the well-kept, stall-fed pet of the world. Many stopped to see,
and many were the comments, private and otherwise.

This day began with a flurry of uncertainty and worried anticipation on
the part of Aileen.  At Cowperwood's suggestion she had employed a
social secretary, a poor hack of a girl, who had sent out all the
letters, tabulated the replies, run errands, and advised on one detail
and another.  Fadette, her French maid, was in the throes of preparing
for two toilets which would have to be made this day, one by two
o'clock at least, another between six and eight.  Her "mon dieus" and
"par bleus" could be heard continuously as she hunted for some article
of dress or polished an ornament, buckle, or pin.  The struggle of
Aileen to be perfect was, as usual, severe.  Her meditations, as to the
most becoming gown to wear were trying.  Her portrait was on the east
wall in the art-gallery, a spur to emulation; she felt as though all
society were about to judge her.  Theresa Donovan, the local
dressmaker, had given some advice; but Aileen decided on a heavy brown
velvet constructed by Worth, of Paris--a thing of varying aspects,
showing her neck and arms to perfection, and composing charmingly with
her flesh and hair.  She tried amethyst ear-rings and changed to topaz;
she stockinged her legs in brown silk, and her feet were shod in brown
slippers with red enamel buttons.

The trouble with Aileen was that she never did these things with that
ease which is a sure sign of the socially efficient.  She never quite
so much dominated a situation as she permitted it to dominate her.
Only the superior ease and graciousness of Cowperwood carried her
through at times; but that always did.  When he was near she felt quite
the great lady, suited to any realm.  When she was alone her courage,
great as it was, often trembled in the balance.  Her dangerous past was
never quite out of her mind.

At four Kent McKibben, smug in his afternoon frock, his quick,
receptive eyes approving only partially of all this show and effort,
took his place in the general reception-room, talking to Taylor Lord,
who had completed his last observation and was leaving to return later
in the evening.  If these two had been closer friends, quite intimate,
they would have discussed the Cowperwoods' social prospects; but as it
was, they confined themselves to dull conventionalities.  At this
moment Aileen came down-stairs for a moment, radiant.  Kent McKibben
thought he had never seen her look more beautiful.  After all,
contrasted with some of the stuffy creatures who moved about in
society, shrewd, hard, bony, calculating, trading on their assured
position, she was admirable.  It was a pity she did not have more
poise; she ought to be a little harder--not quite so genial.  Still,
with Cowperwood at her side, she might go far.

"Really, Mrs. Cowperwood," he said, "it is all most charming.  I was
just telling Mr. Lord here that I consider the house a triumph."

From McKibben, who was in society, and with Lord, another "in" standing
by, this was like wine to Aileen.  She beamed joyously.

Among the first arrivals were Mrs. Webster Israels, Mrs. Bradford
Canda, and Mrs. Walter Rysam Cotton, who were to assist in receiving.
These ladies did not know that they were taking their future
reputations for sagacity and discrimination in their hands; they had
been carried away by the show of luxury of Aileen, the growing
financial repute of Cowperwood, and the artistic qualities of the new
house.  Mrs. Webster Israels's mouth was of such a peculiar shape that
Aileen was always reminded of a fish; but she was not utterly homely,
and to-day she looked brisk and attractive.  Mrs. Bradford Canda, whose
old rose and silver-gray dress made up in part for an amazing
angularity, but who was charming withal, was the soul of interest, for
she believed this to be a very significant affair.  Mrs. Walter Rysam
Cotton, a younger woman than either of the others, had the polish of
Vassar life about her, and was "above" many things.  Somehow she half
suspected the Cowperwoods might not do, but they were making strides,
and might possibly surpass all other aspirants.  It behooved her to be
pleasant.

Life passes from individuality and separateness at times to a sort of
Monticelliesque mood of color, where individuality is nothing, the
glittering totality all.  The new house, with its charming French
windows on the ground floor, its heavy bands of stone flowers and
deep-sunk florated door, was soon crowded with a moving, colorful flow
of people.

Many whom Aileen and Cowperwood did not know at all had been invited by
McKibben and Lord; they came, and were now introduced.  The adjacent
side streets and the open space in front of the house were crowded with
champing horses and smartly veneered carriages. All with whom the
Cowperwoods had been the least intimate came early, and, finding the
scene colorful and interesting, they remained for some time.  The
caterer, Kinsley, had supplied a small army of trained servants who
were posted like soldiers, and carefully supervised by the Cowperwood
butler.  The new dining-room, rich with a Pompeian scheme of color, was
aglow with a wealth of glass and an artistic arrangement of delicacies.
The afternoon costumes of the women, ranging through autumnal grays,
purples, browns, and greens, blended effectively with the brown-tinted
walls of the entry-hall, the deep gray and gold of the general
living-room, the old-Roman red of the dining-room, the white-and-gold
of the music-room, and the neutral sepia of the art-gallery.

Aileen, backed by the courageous presence of Cowperwood, who, in the
dining-room, the library, and the art-gallery, was holding a private
levee of men, stood up in her vain beauty, a thing to see--almost to
weep over, embodying the vanity of all seeming things, the mockery of
having and yet not having.  This parading throng that was more curious
than interested, more jealous than sympathetic, more critical than
kind, was coming almost solely to observe.

"Do you know, Mrs. Cowperwood," Mrs. Simms remarked, lightly, "your
house reminds me of an art exhibit to-day.  I hardly know why."

Aileen, who caught the implied slur, had no clever words wherewith to
reply.  She was not gifted in that way, but she flared with resentment.

"Do you think so?" she replied, caustically.

Mrs. Simms, not all dissatisfied with the effect she had produced,
passed on with a gay air, attended by a young artist who followed
amorously in her train.

Aileen saw from this and other things like it how little she was really
"in." The exclusive set did not take either her or Cowperwood seriously
as yet.  She almost hated the comparatively dull Mrs. Israels, who had
been standing beside her at the time, and who had heard the remark; and
yet Mrs. Israels was much better than nothing. Mrs. Simms had
condescended a mild "how'd do" to the latter.

It was in vain that the Addisons, Sledds, Kingslands, Hoecksemas, and
others made their appearance; Aileen was not reassured. However, after
dinner the younger set, influenced by McKibben, came to dance, and
Aileen was at her best in spite of her doubts. She was gay, bold,
attractive.  Kent McKibben, a past master in the mazes and mysteries of
the grand march, had the pleasure of leading her in that airy, fairy
procession, followed by Cowperwood, who gave his arm to Mrs. Simms.
Aileen, in white satin with a touch of silver here and there and
necklet, bracelet, ear-rings, and hair-ornament of diamonds, glittered
in almost an exotic way. She was positively radiant.  McKibben, almost
smitten, was most attentive.

"This is such a pleasure," he whispered, intimately.  "You are very
beautiful--a dream!"

"You would find me a very substantial one," returned Aileen. "Would
that I might find," he laughed, gaily; and Aileen, gathering the hidden
significance, showed her teeth teasingly.  Mrs. Simms, engrossed by
Cowperwood, could not hear as she would have liked.

After the march Aileen, surrounded by a half-dozen of gay, rudely
thoughtless young bloods, escorted them all to see her portrait. The
conservative commented on the flow of wine, the intensely nude Gerome
at one end of the gallery, and the sparkling portrait of Aileen at the
other, the enthusiasm of some of the young men for her company.  Mrs.
Rambaud, pleasant and kindly, remarked to her husband that Aileen was
"very eager for life," she thought.  Mrs. Addison, astonished at the
material flare of the Cowperwoods, quite transcending in glitter if not
in size and solidity anything she and Addison had ever achieved,
remarked to her husband that "he must be making money very fast."

"The man's a born financier, Ella," Addison explained, sententiously.
"He's a manipulator, and he's sure to make money.  Whether they can get
into society I don't know.  He could if he were alone, that's sure.
She's beautiful, but he needs another kind of woman, I'm afraid.  She's
almost too good-looking."

"That's what I think, too.  I like her, but I'm afraid she's not going
to play her cards right.  It's too bad, too."

Just then Aileen came by, a smiling youth on either side, her own face
glowing with a warmth of joy engendered by much flattery. The
ball-room, which was composed of the music and drawing rooms thrown
into one, was now the objective.  It glittered before her with a moving
throng; the air was full of the odor of flowers, and the sound of music
and voices.

"Mrs. Cowperwood," observed Bradford Canda to Horton Biggers, the
society editor, "is one of the prettiest women I have seen in a long
time.  She's almost too pretty."

"How do you think she's taking?" queried the cautious Biggers.
"Charming, but she's hardly cold enough, I'm afraid; hardly clever
enough.  It takes a more serious type.  She's a little too
high-spirited.  These old women would never want to get near her; she
makes them look too old.  She'd do better if she were not so young and
so pretty."

"That's what I think exactly," said Biggers.  As a matter of fact, he
did not think so at all; he had no power of drawing any such accurate
conclusions.  But he believed it now, because Bradford Canda had said
it.




Chapter XI

The Fruits of Daring


Next morning, over the breakfast cups at the Norrie Simmses' and
elsewhere, the import of the Cowperwoods' social efforts was discussed
and the problem of their eventual acceptance or non-acceptance
carefully weighed.

"The trouble with Mrs. Cowperwood," observed Mrs. Simms, "is that she
is too gauche.  The whole thing was much too showy.  The idea of her
portrait at one end of the gallery and that Gerome at the other! And
then this item in the Press this morning! Why, you'd really think they
were in society." Mrs. Simms was already a little angry at having let
herself be used, as she now fancied she had been, by Taylor Lord and
Kent McKibben, both friends of hers.

"What did you think of the crowd?" asked Norrie, buttering a roll.

"Why, it wasn't representative at all, of course.  We were the most
important people they had there, and I'm sorry now that we went.  Who
are the Israelses and the Hoecksemas, anyhow? That dreadful woman!"
(She was referring to Mrs. Hoecksema.) "I never listened to duller
remarks in my life."

"I was talking to Haguenin of the Press in the afternoon," observed
Norrie.  "He says that Cowperwood failed in Philadelphia before he came
here, and that there were a lot of lawsuits.  Did you ever hear that?"

"No.  But she says she knows the Drakes and the Walkers there. I've
been intending to ask Nellie about that.  I have often wondered why he
should leave Philadelphia if he was getting along so well. People don't
usually do that."

Simms was envious already of the financial showing Cowperwood was
making in Chicago.  Besides, Cowperwood's manner bespoke supreme
intelligence and courage, and that is always resented by all save the
suppliants or the triumphant masters of other walks in life. Simms was
really interested at last to know something more about Cowperwood,
something definite.

Before this social situation had time to adjust itself one way or the
other, however, a matter arose which in its way was far more vital,
though Aileen might not have thought so.  The feeling between the new
and old gas companies was becoming strained; the stockholders of the
older organization were getting uneasy.  They were eager to find out
who was back of these new gas companies which were threatening to poach
on their exclusive preserves.  Finally one of the lawyers who had been
employed by the North Chicago Gas Illuminating Company to fight the
machinations of De Soto Sippens and old General Van Sickle, finding
that the Lake View Council had finally granted the franchise to the new
company and that the Appellate Court was about to sustain it, hit upon
the idea of charging conspiracy and wholesale bribery of councilmen.
Considerable evidence had accumulated that Duniway, Jacob Gerecht, and
others on the North Side had been influenced by cash, and to bring
legal action would delay final approval of the franchises and give the
old company time to think what else to do.  This North Side company
lawyer, a man by the name of Parsons, had been following up the
movements of Sippens and old General Van Sickle, and had finally
concluded that they were mere dummies and pawns, and that the real
instigator in all this excitement was Cowperwood, or, if not he, then
men whom he represented.  Parsons visited Cowperwood's office one day
in order to see him; getting no satisfaction, he proceeded to look up
his record and connections.  These various investigations and
counter-schemings came to a head in a court proceeding filed in the
United States Circuit Court late in November, charging Frank Algernon
Cowperwood, Henry De Soto Sippens, Judson P. Van Sickle, and others
with conspiracy; this again was followed almost immediately by suits
begun by the West and South Side companies charging the same thing.  In
each case Cowperwood's name was mentioned as the secret power behind
the new companies, conspiring to force the old companies to buy him
out.  His Philadelphia history was published, but only in part--a
highly modified account he had furnished the newspapers some time
before.  Though conspiracy and bribery are ugly words, still lawyers'
charges prove nothing.  But a penitentiary record, for whatever reason
served, coupled with previous failure, divorce, and scandal (though the
newspapers made only the most guarded reference to all this), served to
whet public interest and to fix Cowperwood and his wife in the public
eye.

Cowperwood himself was solicited for an interview, but his answer was
that he was merely a financial agent for the three new companies, not
an investor; and that the charges, in so far as he was concerned, were
untrue, mere legal fol-de-rol trumped up to make the situation as
annoying as possible.  He threatened to sue for libel. Nevertheless,
although these suits eventually did come to nothing (for he had fixed
it so that he could not be traced save as a financial agent in each
case), yet the charges had been made, and he was now revealed as a
shrewd, manipulative factor, with a record that was certainly
spectacular.

"I see," said Anson Merrill to his wife, one morning at breakfast,
"that this man Cowperwood is beginning to get his name in the papers."
He had the Times on the table before him, and was looking at a headline
which, after the old-fashioned pyramids then in vogue, read:
"Conspiracy charged against various Chicago citizens. Frank Algernon
Cowperwood, Judson P. Van Sickle, Henry De Soto Sippens, and others
named in Circuit Court complaint." It went on to specify other facts.
"I supposed he was just a broker."

"I don't know much about them," replied his wife, "except what Bella
Simms tells me.  What does it say?"

He handed her the paper.

"I have always thought they were merely climbers," continued Mrs.
Merrill.  "From what I hear she is impossible.  I never saw her."

"He begins well for a Philadelphian," smiled Merrill.  "I've seen him
at the Calumet.  He looks like a very shrewd man to me.  He's going
about his work in a brisk spirit, anyhow."

Similarly Mr. Norman Schryhart, a man who up to this time had taken no
thought of Cowperwood, although he had noted his appearance about the
halls of the Calumet and Union League Clubs, began to ask seriously who
he was.  Schryhart, a man of great physical and mental vigor, six feet
tall, hale and stolid as an ox, a very different type of man from Anson
Merrill, met Addison one day at the Calumet Club shortly after the
newspaper talk began.  Sinking into a great leather divan beside him,
he observed:

"Who is this man Cowperwood whose name is in the papers these days,
Addison? You know: all these people.  Didn't you introduce him to me
once?"

"I surely did," replied Addison, cheerfully, who, in spite of the
attacks on Cowperwood, was rather pleased than otherwise.  It was quite
plain from the concurrent excitement that attended all this struggle,
that Cowperwood must be managing things rather adroitly, and, best of
all, he was keeping his backers' names from view. "He's a Philadelphian
by birth.  He came out here several years ago, and went into the grain
and commission business.  He's a banker now.  A rather shrewd man, I
should say.  He has a lot of money."

"Is it true, as the papers say, that he failed for a million in
Philadelphia in 1871?"

"In so far as I know, it is."

"Well, was he in the penitentiary down there?"

"I think so--yes.  I believe it was for nothing really criminal,
though.  There appears to have been some political-financial mix-up,
from all I can learn."

"And is he only forty, as the papers say?"

"About that, I should judge.  Why?"

"Oh, this scheme of his looks rather pretentious to me--holding up the
old gas companies here.  Do you suppose he'll manage to do it?"

"I don't know that.  All I know is what I have read in the papers,"
replied Addison, cautiously.  As a matter of fact, he did not care to
talk about this business at all.  Cowperwood was busy at this very
time, through an agent, attempting to effect a compromise and union of
all interests concerned.  It was not going very well.

"Humph!" commented Schryhart.  He was wondering why men like himself,
Merrill, Arneel, and others had not worked into this field long ago or
bought out the old companies.  He went away interested, and a day or
two later--even the next morning--had formulated a scheme.  Not unlike
Cowperwood, he was a shrewd, hard, cold man. He believed in Chicago
implicitly and in all that related to its future.  This gas situation,
now that Cowperwood had seen the point, was very clear to him.  Even
yet it might not be impossible for a third party to step in and by
intricate manipulation secure the much coveted rewards.  Perhaps
Cowperwood himself could be taken over--who could tell?

Mr. Schryhart, being a very dominating type of person, did not believe
in minor partnerships or investments.  If he went into a thing of this
kind it was his preference to rule.  He decided to invite Cowperwood to
visit the Schryhart office and talk matters over.  Accordingly, he had
his secretary pen a note, which in rather lofty phrases invited
Cowperwood to call "on a matter of importance."

Now just at this time, it so chanced, Cowperwood was feeling rather
secure as to his place in the Chicago financial world, although he was
still smarting from the bitterness of the aspersions recently cast upon
him from various quarters.  Under such circumstances it was his
temperament to evince a rugged contempt for humanity, rich and poor
alike.  He was well aware that Schryhart, although introduced, had
never previously troubled to notice him.

"Mr. Cowperwood begs me to say," wrote Miss Antoinette Nowak, at his
dictation, "that he finds himself very much pressed for time at
present, but he would be glad to see Mr. Schryhart at his office at any
time."

This irritated the dominating, self-sufficient Schryhart a little, but
nevertheless he was satisfied that a conference could do no harm in
this instance--was advisable, in fact.  So one Wednesday afternoon he
journeyed to the office of Cowperwood, and was most hospitably received.

"How do you do, Mr. Schryhart," observed Cowperwood, cordially,
extending his hand.  "I'm glad to see you again.  I believe we met once
before several years ago."

"I think so myself," replied Mr. Schryhart, who was broad-shouldered,
square-headed, black-eyed, and with a short black mustache gracing a
firm upper lip.  He had hard, dark, piercing eyes.  "I see by the
papers, if they can be trusted," he said, coming direct to the point,
"that you are interesting yourself in local gas.  Is that true?"

"I'm afraid the papers cannot be generally relied on," replied
Cowperwood, quite blandly.  "Would you mind telling me what makes you
interested to know whether I am or not?"

"Well, to tell the truth," replied Schryhart, staring at the financier,
"I am interested in this local gas situation myself. It offers a rather
profitable field for investment, and several members of the old
companies have come to me recently to ask me to help them combine."
(This was not true at all.) "I have been wondering what chance you
thought you had of winning along the lines you are now taking."

Cowperwood smiled.  "I hardly care to discuss that," he said, "unless I
know much more of your motives and connections than I do at present.
Do I understand that you have really been appealed to by stockholders
of the old companies to come in and help adjust this matter?"

"Exactly," said Schryhart.

"And you think you can get them to combine? On what basis?"

"Oh, I should say it would be a simple matter to give each of them two
or three shares of a new company for one in each of the old. We could
then elect one set of officers, have one set of offices, stop all these
suits, and leave everybody happy."

He said this in an easy, patronizing way, as though Cowperwood had not
really thought it all out years before.  It amazed the latter no little
to see his own scheme patronizingly brought back to him, and that, too,
by a very powerful man locally--one who thus far had chosen to overlook
him utterly.

"On what basis," asked Cowperwood, cautiously, "would you expect these
new companies to come in?"

"On the same basis as the others, if they are not too heavily
capitalized.  I haven't thought out all the details.  Two or three for
one, according to investment.  Of course, the prejudices of these old
companies have to be considered."

Cowperwood meditated.  Should or should he not entertain this offer?
Here was a chance to realize quickly by selling out to the old
companies.  Only Schryhart, not himself, would be taking the big end in
this manipulative deal.  Whereas if he waited--even if Schryhart
managed to combine the three old companies into one--he might be able
to force better terms.  He was not sure.  Finally he asked, "How much
stock of the new company would be left in your hands--or in the hands
of the organizing group--after each of the old and new companies had
been provided for on this basis?"

"Oh, possibly thirty-five or forty per cent. of the whole," replied
Schryhart, ingratiatingly.  "The laborer is worthy of his hire."

"Quite so," replied Cowperwood, smiling, "but, seeing that I am the man
who has been cutting the pole to knock this persimmon it seems to me
that a pretty good share of that should come to me; don't you think so?"

"Just what do you mean?"

"Just what I have said.  I personally have organized the new companies
which have made this proposed combination possible.  The plan you
propose is nothing more than what I have been proposing for some time.
The officers and directors of the old companies are angry at me merely
because I am supposed to have invaded the fields that belong to them.
Now, if on account of that they are willing to operate through you
rather than through me, it seems to me that I should have a much larger
share in the surplus.  My personal interest in these new companies is
not very large.  I am really more of a fiscal agent than anything
else." (This was not true, but Cowperwood preferred to have his guest
think so.)

Schryhart smiled.  "But, my dear sir," he explained, "you forget that I
will be supplying nearly all the capital to do this."

"You forget," retorted Cowperwood, "that I am not a novice.  I will
guarantee to supply all the capital myself, and give you a good bonus
for your services, if you want that.  The plants and franchises of the
old and new companies are worth something.  You must remember that
Chicago is growing."

"I know that," replied Schryhart, evasively, "but I also know that you
have a long, expensive fight ahead of you.  As things are now you
cannot, of yourself, expect to bring these old companies to terms.
They won't work with you, as I understand it.  It will require an
outsider like myself--some one of influence, or perhaps, I had better
say, of old standing in Chicago, some one who knows these people--to
bring about this combination.  Have you any one, do you think, who can
do it better than I?"

"It is not at all impossible that I will find some one," replied
Cowperwood, quite easily.

"I hardly think so; certainly not as things are now.  The old companies
are not disposed to work through you, and they are through me.  Don't
you think you had better accept my terms and allow me to go ahead and
close this matter up?"

"Not at all on that basis," replied Cowperwood, quite simply.  "We have
invaded the enemies' country too far and done too much.  Three for one
or four for one--whatever terms are given the stockholders of the old
companies--is the best I will do about the new shares, and I must have
one-half of whatever is left for myself.  At that I will have to divide
with others." (This was not true either.)

"No," replied Schryhart, evasively and opposingly, shaking his square
head.  "It can't be done.  The risks are too great.  I might allow you
one-fourth, possibly--I can't tell yet."

"One-half or nothing," said Cowperwood, definitely.

Schryhart got up.  "That's the best you will do, is it?" he inquired.

"The very best."

"I'm afraid then," he said, "we can't come to terms.  I'm sorry. You
may find this a rather long and expensive fight."

"I have fully anticipated that," replied the financier.




Chapter XII

A New Retainer


Cowperwood, who had rebuffed Schryhart so courteously but firmly, was
to learn that he who takes the sword may well perish by the sword.  His
own watchful attorney, on guard at the state capitol, where
certificates of incorporation were issued in the city and village
councils, in the courts and so forth, was not long in learning that a
counter-movement of significance was under way. Old General Van Sickle
was the first to report that something was in the wind in connection
with the North Side company.  He came in late one afternoon, his dusty
greatcoat thrown loosely about his shoulders, his small, soft hat low
over his shaggy eyes, and in response to Cowperwood's "Evening,
General, what can I do for you?" seated himself portentously.

"I think you'll have to prepare for real rough weather in the future,
Captain," he remarked, addressing the financier with a courtesy title
that he had fallen in the habit of using.

"What's the trouble now?" asked Cowperwood.

"No real trouble as yet, but there may be.  Some one--I don't know
who--is getting these three old companies together in one. There's a
certificate of incorporation been applied for at Springfield for the
United Gas and Fuel Company of Chicago, and there are some directors'
meetings now going on at the Douglas Trust Company.  I got this from
Duniway, who seems to have friends somewhere that know."

Cowperwood put the ends of his fingers together in his customary way
and began to tap them lightly and rhythmically.

"Let me see--the Douglas Trust Company.  Mr. Simms is president of
that.  He isn't shrewd enough to organize a thing of that kind. Who are
the incorporators?"

The General produced a list of four names, none of them officers or
directors of the old companies.

"Dummies, every one," said Cowperwood, succinctly.  "I think I know,"
he said, after a few moments' reflection, "who is behind it, General;
but don't let that worry you.  They can't harm us if they do unite.
They're bound to sell out to us or buy us out eventually."

Still it irritated him to think that Schryhart had succeeded in
persuading the old companies to combine on any basis; he had meant to
have Addison go shortly, posing as an outside party, and propose this
very thing.  Schryhart, he was sure, had acted swiftly following their
interview.  He hurried to Addison's office in the Lake National.

"Have you heard the news?" exclaimed that individual, the moment
Cowperwood appeared.  "They're planning to combine.  It's Schryhart. I
was afraid of that.  Simms of the Douglas Trust is going to act as the
fiscal agent.  I had the information not ten minutes ago."

"So did I," replied Cowperwood, calmly.  "We should have acted a little
sooner.  Still, it isn't our fault exactly.  Do you know the terms of
agreement?"

"They're going to pool their stock on a basis of three to one, with
about thirty per cent. of the holding company left for Schryhart to
sell or keep, as he wants to.  He guarantees the interest.  We did that
for him--drove the game right into his bag."

"Nevertheless," replied Cowperwood, "he still has us to deal with. I
propose now that we go into the city council and ask for a blanket
franchise.  It can be had.  If we should get it, it will bring them to
their knees.  We will really be in a better position than they are with
these smaller companies as feeders.  We can unite with ourselves."

"That will take considerable money, won't it?"

"Not so much.  We may never need to lay a pipe or build a plant. They
will offer to sell out, buy, or combine before that.  We can fix the
terms.  Leave it to me.  You don't happen to know by any chance this
Mr. McKenty, who has so much say in local affairs here--John J.
McKenty?"

Cowperwood was referring to a man who was at once gambler, rumored
owner or controller of a series of houses of prostitution, rumored
maker of mayors and aldermen, rumored financial backer of many saloons
and contracting companies--in short, the patron saint of the political
and social underworld of Chicago, and who was naturally to be reckoned
with in matters which related to the city and state legislative
programme.

"I don't," said Addison; "but I can get you a letter.  Why?"

"Don't trouble to ask me that now.  Get me as strong an introduction as
you can."

"I'll have one for you to-day some time," replied Addison, efficiently.
"I'll send it over to you."

Cowperwood went out while Addison speculated as to this newest move.
Trust Cowperwood to dig a pit into which the enemy might fall.  He
marveled sometimes at the man's resourcefulness.  He never quarreled
with the directness and incisiveness of Cowperwood's action.

The man, McKenty, whom Cowperwood had in mind in this rather disturbing
hour, was as interesting and forceful an individual as one would care
to meet anywhere, a typical figure of Chicago and the West at the time.
He was a pleasant, smiling, bland, affable person, not unlike
Cowperwood in magnetism and subtlety, but different by a degree of
animal coarseness (not visible on the surface) which Cowperwood would
scarcely have understood, and in a kind of temperamental pull drawing
to him that vast pathetic life of the underworld in which his soul
found its solution.  There is a kind of nature, not artistic, not
spiritual, in no way emotional, nor yet unduly philosophical, that is
nevertheless a sphered content of life; not crystalline, perhaps, and
yet not utterly dark--an agate temperament, cloudy and strange.  As a
three-year-old child McKenty had been brought from Ireland by his
emigrant parents during a period of famine.  He had been raised on the
far South Side in a shanty which stood near a maze of railroad-tracks,
and as a naked baby he had crawled on its earthen floor.  His father
had been promoted to a section boss after working for years as a
day-laborer on the adjoining railroad, and John, junior, one of eight
other children, had been sent out early to do many things--to be an
errand-boy in a store, a messenger-boy for a telegraph company, an
emergency sweep about a saloon, and finally a bartender.  This last was
his true beginning, for he was discovered by a keen-minded politician
and encouraged to run for the state legislature and to study law.  Even
as a stripling what things had he not learned--robbery, ballot-box
stuffing, the sale of votes, the appointive power of leaders, graft,
nepotism, vice exploitation--all the things that go to make up (or did)
the American world of politics and financial and social strife.  There
is a strong assumption in the upper walks of life that there is nothing
to be learned at the bottom.  If you could have looked into the
capacious but balanced temperament of John J. McKenty you would have
seen a strange wisdom there and stranger memories--whole worlds of
brutalities, tendernesses, errors, immoralities suffered, endured, even
rejoiced in--the hardy, eager life of the animal that has nothing but
its perceptions, instincts, appetites to guide it.  Yet the man had the
air and the poise of a gentleman.

To-day, at forty-eight, McKenty was an exceedingly important personage.
His roomy house on the West Side, at Harrison Street and Ashland
Avenue, was visited at sundry times by financiers, business men,
office-holders, priests, saloon-keepers--in short, the whole range and
gamut of active, subtle, political life.  From McKenty they could
obtain that counsel, wisdom, surety, solution which all of them on
occasion were anxious to have, and which in one deft way and
another--often by no more than gratitude and an acknowledgment of his
leadership--they were willing to pay for. To police captains and
officers whose places he occasionally saved, when they should justly
have been discharged; to mothers whose erring boys or girls he took out
of prison and sent home again; to keepers of bawdy houses whom he
protected from a too harsh invasion of the grafting propensities of the
local police; to politicians and saloon-keepers who were in danger of
being destroyed by public upheavals of one kind and another, he seemed,
in hours of stress, when his smooth, genial, almost artistic face
beamed on them, like a heaven-sent son of light, a kind of Western god,
all-powerful, all-merciful, perfect.  On the other hand, there were
ingrates, uncompromising or pharasaical religionists and reformers,
plotting, scheming rivals, who found him deadly to contend with.  There
were many henchmen--runners from an almost imperial throne--to do his
bidding.  He was simple in dress and taste, married and (apparently)
very happy, a professing though virtually non-practising Catholic, a
suave, genial Buddha-like man, powerful and enigmatic.

When Cowperwood and McKenty first met, it was on a spring evening at
the latter's home.  The windows of the large house were pleasantly
open, though screened, and the curtains were blowing faintly in a light
air.  Along with a sense of the new green life everywhere came a breath
of stock-yards.

On the presentation of Addison's letter and of another, secured through
Van Sickle from a well-known political judge, Cowperwood had been
invited to call.  On his arrival he was offered a drink, a cigar,
introduced to Mrs. McKenty--who, lacking an organized social life of
any kind, was always pleased to meet these celebrities of the upper
world, if only for a moment--and shown eventually into the library.
Mrs. McKenty, as he might have observed if he had had the eye for it,
was plump and fifty, a sort of superannuated Aileen, but still showing
traces of a former hardy beauty, and concealing pretty well the
evidences that she had once been a prostitute.  It so happened that on
this particular evening McKenty was in a most genial frame of mind.
There were no immediate political troubles bothering him just now.  It
was early in May. Outside the trees were budding, the sparrows and
robins were voicing their several moods.  A delicious haze was in the
air, and some early mosquitoes were reconnoitering the screens which
protected the windows and doors.  Cowperwood, in spite of his various
troubles, was in a complacent state of mind himself.  He liked
life--even its very difficult complications--perhaps its complications
best of all.  Nature was beautiful, tender at times, but difficulties,
plans, plots, schemes to unravel and make smooth--these things were
what made existence worth while.

"Well now, Mr. Cowperwood," McKenty began, when they finally entered
the cool, pleasant library, "what can I do for you?"

"Well, Mr. McKenty," said Cowperwood, choosing his words and bringing
the finest resources of his temperament into play, "it isn't so much,
and yet it is.  I want a franchise from the Chicago city council, and I
want you to help me get it if you will.  I know you may say to me why
not go to the councilmen direct.  I would do that, except that there
are certain other elements--individuals--who might come to you.  It
won't offend you, I know, when I say that I have always understood that
you are a sort of clearing-house for political troubles in Chicago."

Mr. McKenty smiled.  "That's flattering," he replied, dryly.

"Now, I am rather new myself to Chicago," went on Cowperwood, softly.
"I have been here only a year or two.  I come from Philadelphia.  I
have been interested as a fiscal agent and an investor in several gas
companies that have been organized in Lake View, Hyde Park, and
elsewhere outside the city limits, as you may possibly have seen by the
papers lately.  I am not their owner, in the sense that I have provided
all or even a good part of the money invested in them.  I am not even
their manager, except in a very general way.  I might better be called
their promoter and guardian; but I am that for other people and myself."

Mr. McKenty nodded.

"Now, Mr. McKenty, it was not very long after I started out to get
franchises to do business in Lake View and Hyde Park before I found
myself confronted by the interests which control the three old city gas
companies.  They were very much opposed to our entering the field in
Cook County anywhere, as you may imagine, although we were not really
crowding in on their field.  Since then they have fought me with
lawsuits, injunctions, and charges of bribery and conspiracy."

"I know," put in Mr. McKenty.  "I have heard something of it."

"Quite so," replied Cowperwood.  "Because of their opposition I made
them an offer to combine these three companies and the three new ones
into one, take out a new charter, and give the city a uniform gas
service.  They would not do that--largely because I was an outsider, I
think.  Since then another person, Mr. Schryhart"--McKenty nodded--"who
has never had anything to do with the gas business here, has stepped in
and offered to combine them. His plan is to do exactly what I wanted to
do; only his further proposition is, once he has the three old
companies united, to invade this new gas field of ours and hold us up,
or force us to sell by obtaining rival franchises in these outlying
places.  There is talk of combining these suburbs with Chicago, as you
know, which would allow these three down-town franchises to become
mutually operative with our own.  This makes it essential for us to do
one of several things, as you may see--either to sell out on the best
terms we can now, or to continue the fight at a rather heavy expense
without making any attempt to strike back, or to get into the city
council and ask for a franchise to do business in the down-town
section--a general blanket franchise to sell gas in Chicago alongside
of the old companies--with the sole intention of protecting ourselves,
as one of my officers is fond of saying," added Cowperwood, humorously.

McKenty smiled again.  "I see," he said.  "Isn't that a rather large
order, though, Mr. Cowperwood, seeking a new franchise? Do you suppose
the general public would agree that the city needs an extra gas
company? It's true the old companies haven't been any too generous.  My
own gas isn't of the best." He smiled vaguely, prepared to listen
further.

"Now, Mr. McKenty, I know that you are a practical man," went on
Cowperwood, ignoring this interruption, "and so am I.  I am not coming
to you with any vague story concerning my troubles and expecting you to
be interested as a matter of sympathy.  I realize that to go into the
city council of Chicago with a legitimate proposition is one thing.  To
get it passed and approved by the city authorities is another.  I need
advice and assistance, and I am not begging it.  If I could get a
general franchise, such as I have described, it would be worth a very
great deal of money to me.  It would help me to close up and realize on
these new companies which are entirely sound and needed.  It would help
me to prevent the old companies from eating me up.  As a matter of
fact, I must have such a franchise to protect my interests and give me
a running fighting chance.  Now, I know that none of us are in politics
or finance for our health.  If I could get such a franchise it would be
worth from one-fourth to one-half of all I personally would make out of
it, providing my plan of combining these new companies with the old
ones should go through--say, from three to four hundred thousand
dollars." (Here again Cowperwood was not quite frank, but safe.) "It is
needless to say to you that I can command ample capital.  This
franchise would do that.  Briefly, I want to know if you won't give me
your political support in this matter and join in with me on the basis
that I propose? I will make it perfectly clear to you beforehand who my
associates are.  I will put all the data and details on the table
before you so that you can see for yourself how things are.  If you
should find at any time that I have misrepresented anything you are at
full liberty, of course, to withdraw.  As I said before," he concluded,
"I am not a beggar. I am not coming here to conceal any facts or to
hide anything which might deceive you as to the worth of all this to
us.  I want you to know the facts.  I want you to give me your aid on
such terms as you think are fair and equitable.  Really the only
trouble with me in this situation is that I am not a silk stocking.  If
I were this gas war would have been adjusted long ago.  These gentlemen
who are so willing to reorganize through Mr. Schryhart are largely
opposed to me because I am--comparatively--a stranger in Chicago and
not in their set.  If I were"--he moved his hand slightly--"I don't
suppose I would be here this evening asking for your favor, although
that does not say that I am not glad to be here, or that I would not be
glad to work with you in any way that I might. Circumstances simply
have not thrown me across your path before."

As he talked his eye fixed McKenty steadily, almost innocently; and the
latter, following him clearly, felt all the while that he was listening
to a strange, able, dark, and very forceful man. There was no beating
about the bush here, no squeamishness of spirit, and yet there was
subtlety--the kind McKenty liked.  While he was amused by Cowperwood's
casual reference to the silk stockings who were keeping him out, it
appealed to him.  He caught the point of view as well as the intention
of it.  Cowperwood represented a new and rather pleasing type of
financier to him.  Evidently, he was traveling in able company if one
could believe the men who had introduced him so warmly.  McKenty, as
Cowperwood was well aware, had personally no interest in the old
companies and also--though this he did not say--no particular sympathy
with them.  They were just remote financial corporations to him, paying
political tribute on demand, expecting political favors in return.
Every few weeks now they were in council, asking for one gas-main
franchise after another (special privileges in certain streets), asking
for better (more profitable) light-contracts, asking for dock
privileges in the river, a lower tax rate, and so forth and so on.
McKenty did not pay much attention to these things personally.  He had
a subordinate in council, a very powerful henchman by the name of
Patrick Dowling, a meaty, vigorous Irishman and a true watch-dog of
graft for the machine, who worked with the mayor, the city treasurer,
the city tax receiver--in fact, all the officers of the current
administration--and saw that such minor matters were properly
equalized.  Mr. McKenty had only met two or three of the officers of
the South Side Gas Company, and that quite casually.  He did not like
them very well.  The truth was that the old companies were officered by
men who considered politicians of the McKenty and Dowling stripe as
very evil men; if they paid them and did other such wicked things it
was because they were forced to do so.

"Well," McKenty replied, lingering his thin gold watch-chain in a
thoughtful manner, "that's an interesting scheme you have.  Of course
the old companies wouldn't like your asking for a rival franchise, but
once you had it they couldn't object very well, could they?" He smiled.
Mr. McKenty spoke with no suggestion of a brogue.  "From one point of
view it might be looked upon as bad business, but not entirely.  They
would be sure to make a great cry, though they haven't been any too
kind to the public themselves. But if you offered to combine with them
I see no objection.  It's certain to be as good for them in the long
run as it is for you. This merely permits you to make a better bargain."

"Exactly," said Cowperwood.

"And you have the means, you tell me, to lay mains in every part of the
city, and fight with them for business if they won't give in?"

"I have the means," said Cowperwood, "or if I haven't I can get them."

Mr. McKenty looked at Mr. Cowperwood very solemnly.  There was a kind
of mutual sympathy, understanding, and admiration between the two men,
but it was still heavily veiled by self-interest.  To Mr. McKenty
Cowperwood was interesting because he was one of the few business men
he had met who were not ponderous, pharasaical, even hypocritical when
they were dealing with him.

"Well, I'll tell you what I'll do, Mr. Cowperwood," he said, finally.
"I'll take it all under consideration.  Let me think it over until
Monday, anyhow.  There is more of an excuse now for the introduction of
a general gas ordinance than there would be a little later--I can see
that.  Why don't you draw up your proposed franchise and let me see it?
Then we might find out what some of the other gentlemen of the city
council think."

Cowperwood almost smiled at the word "gentlemen."

"I have already done that," he said.  "Here it is."

McKenty took it, surprised and yet pleased at this evidence of business
proficiency.  He liked a strong manipulator of this kind--the more
since he was not one himself, and most of those that he did know were
thin-blooded and squeamish.

"Let me take this," he said.  "I'll see you next Monday again if you
wish.  Come Monday."

Cowperwood got up.  "I thought I'd come and talk to you direct, Mr.
McKenty," he said, "and now I'm glad that I did.  You will find, if you
will take the trouble to look into this matter, that it is just as I
represent it.  There is a very great deal of money here in one way and
another, though it will take some little time to work it out."

Mr. McKenty saw the point.  "Yes," he said, sweetly, "to be sure."

They looked into each other's eyes as they shook hands.

"I'm not sure but you haven't hit upon a very good idea here,"
concluded McKenty, sympathetically.  "A very good idea, indeed. Come
and see me again next Monday, or about that time, and I'll let you know
what I think.  Come any time you have anything else you want of me.
I'll always be glad to see you.  It's a fine night, isn't it?" he
added, looking out as they neared the door. "A nice moon that!" he
added.  A sickle moon was in the sky.  "Good night."




Chapter XIII

The Die is Cast


The significance of this visit was not long in manifesting itself. At
the top, in large affairs, life goes off into almost inexplicable
tangles of personalities.  Mr. McKenty, now that the matter had been
called to his attention, was interested to learn about this gas
situation from all sides--whether it might not be more profitable to
deal with the Schryhart end of the argument, and so on.  But his
eventual conclusion was that Cowperwood's plan, as he had outlined it,
was the most feasible for political purposes, largely because the
Schryhart faction, not being in a position where they needed to ask the
city council for anything at present, were so obtuse as to forget to
make overtures of any kind to the bucaneering forces at the City Hall.

When Cowperwood next came to McKenty's house the latter was in a
receptive frame of mind.  "Well," he said, after a few genial
preliminary remarks, "I've been learning what's going on.  Your
proposition is fair enough.  Organize your company, and arrange your
plan conditionally.  Then introduce your ordinance, and we'll see what
can be done." They went into a long, intimate discussion as to how the
forthcoming stock should be divided, how it was to be held in escrow by
a favorite bank of Mr. McKenty's until the terms of the agreement under
the eventual affiliation with the old companies or the new union
company should be fulfilled, and details of that sort.  It was rather a
complicated arrangement, not as satisfactory to Cowperwood as it might
have been, but satisfactory in that it permitted him to win.  It
required the undivided services of General Van Sickle, Henry De Soto
Sippens, Kent Barrows McKibben, and Alderman Dowling for some little
time.  But finally all was in readiness for the coup.

On a certain Monday night, therefore, following the Thursday on which,
according to the rules of the city council, an ordinance of this
character would have to be introduced, the plan, after being publicly
broached but this very little while, was quickly considered by the city
council and passed.  There had been really no time for public
discussion.  This was just the thing, of course, that Cowperwood and
McKenty were trying to avoid.  On the day following the particular
Thursday on which the ordinance had been broached in council as certain
to be brought up for passage, Schryhart, through his lawyers and the
officers of the old individual gas companies, had run to the newspapers
and denounced the whole thing as plain robbery; but what were they to
do? There was so little time for agitation.  True the newspapers,
obedient to this larger financial influence, began to talk of "fair
play to the old companies," and the uselessness of two large rival
companies in the field when one would serve as well.  Still the public,
instructed or urged by the McKenty agents to the contrary, were not
prepared to believe it.  They had not been so well treated by the old
companies as to make any outcry on their behalf.

Standing outside the city council door, on the Monday evening when the
bill was finally passed, Mr. Samuel Blackman, president of the South
Side Gas Company, a little, wispy man with shoe-brush whiskers,
declared emphatically:

"This is a scoundrelly piece of business.  If the mayor signs that he
should be impeached.  There is not a vote in there to-night that has
not been purchased--not one.  This is a fine element of brigandage to
introduce into Chicago; why, people who have worked years and years to
build up a business are not safe!"

"It's true, every word of it," complained Mr. Jordan Jules, president
of the North Side company, a short, stout man with a head like an egg
lying lengthwise, a mere fringe of hair, and hard, blue eyes. He was
with Mr. Hudson Baker, tall and ambling, who was president of the West
Chicago company.  All of these had come to protest.

"It's that scoundrel from Philadelphia.  He's the cause of all our
troubles.  It's high time the respectable business element of Chicago
realized just what sort of a man they have to deal with in him.  He
ought to be driven out of here.  Look at his Philadelphia record.  They
sent him to the penitentiary down there, and they ought to do it here."

Mr. Baker, very recently the guest of Schryhart, and his henchman, too,
was also properly chagrined.  "The man is a charlatan," he protested to
Blackman.  "He doesn't play fair.  It is plain that he doesn't belong
in respectable society."

Nevertheless, and in spite of this, the ordinance was passed.  It was a
bitter lesson for Mr. Norman Schryhart, Mr. Norrie Simms, and all those
who had unfortunately become involved.  A committee composed of all
three of the old companies visited the mayor; but the latter, a tool of
McKenty, giving his future into the hands of the enemy, signed it just
the same.  Cowperwood had his franchise, and, groan as they might, it
was now necessary, in the language of a later day, "to step up and see
the captain." Only Schryhart felt personally that his score with
Cowperwood was not settled. He would meet him on some other ground
later.  The next time he would try to fight fire with fire.  But for
the present, shrewd man that he was, he was prepared to compromise.

Thereafter, dissembling his chagrin as best he could, he kept on the
lookout for Cowperwood at both of the clubs of which he was a member;
but Cowperwood had avoided them during this period of excitement, and
Mahomet would have to go to the mountain.  So one drowsy June afternoon
Mr. Schryhart called at Cowperwood's office. He had on a bright, new,
steel-gray suit and a straw hat.  From his pocket, according to the
fashion of the time, protruded a neat, blue-bordered silk handkerchief,
and his feet were immaculate in new, shining Oxford ties.

"I'm sailing for Europe in a few days, Mr. Cowperwood," he remarked,
genially, "and I thought I'd drop round to see if you and I could reach
some agreement in regard to this gas situation.  The officers of the
old companies naturally feel that they do not care to have a rival in
the field, and I'm sure that you are not interested in carrying on a
useless rate war that won't leave anybody any profit. I recall that you
were willing to compromise on a half-and-half basis with me before, and
I was wondering whether you were still of that mind."

"Sit down, sit down, Mr. Schryhart," remarked Cowperwood, cheerfully,
waving the new-comer to a chair.  "I'm pleased to see you again. No,
I'm no more anxious for a rate war than you are.  As a matter of fact,
I hope to avoid it; but, as you see, things have changed somewhat since
I saw you.  The gentlemen who have organized and invested their money
in this new city gas company are perfectly willing--rather anxious, in
fact--to go on and establish a legitimate business.  They feel all the
confidence in the world that they can do this, and I agree with them.
A compromise might be effected between the old and the new companies,
but not on the basis on which I was willing to settle some time ago.  A
new company has been organized since then, stock issued, and a great
deal of money expended." (This was not true.) "That stock will have to
figure in any new agreement.  I think a general union of all the
companies is desirable, but it will have to be on a basis of one, two,
three, or four shares--whatever is decided--at par for all stock
involved."

Mr. Schryhart pulled a long face.  "Don't you think that's rather
steep?" he said, solemnly.

"Not at all, not at all!" replied Cowperwood.  "You know these new
expenditures were not undertaken voluntarily." (The irony of this did
not escape Mr. Schryhart, but he said nothing.)

"I admit all that, but don't you think, since your shares are worth
practically nothing at present, that you ought to be satisfied if they
were accepted at par?"

"I can't see why," replied Cowperwood.  "Our future prospects are
splendid.  There must be an even adjustment here or nothing.  What I
want to know is how much treasury stock you would expect to have in the
safe for the promotion of this new organization after all the old
stockholders have been satisfied?"

"Well, as I thought before, from thirty to forty per cent. of the total
issue," replied Schryhart, still hopeful of a profitable adjustment.
"I should think it could be worked on that basis."

"And who gets that?"

"Why, the organizer," said Schryhart, evasively.  "Yourself, perhaps,
and myself."

"And how would you divide it? Half and half, as before?"

"I should think that would be fair."

"It isn't enough," returned Cowperwood, incisively.  "Since I talked to
you last I have been compelled to shoulder obligations and make
agreements which I did not anticipate then.  The best I can do now is
to accept three-fourths."

Schryhart straightened up determinedly and offensively.  This was
outrageous, he thought, impossible! The effrontery of it!

"It can never be done, Mr. Cowperwood," he replied, forcefully. "You
are trying to unload too much worthless stock on the company as it is.
The old companies' stock is selling right now, as you know, for from
one-fifty to two-ten.  Your stock is worth nothing. If you are to be
given two or three for one for that, and three-fourths of the remainder
in the treasury, I for one want nothing to do with the deal.  You would
be in control of the company, and it will be water-logged, at that.
Talk about getting something for nothing! The best I would suggest to
the stockholders of the old companies would be half and half.  And I
may say to you frankly, although you may not believe it, that the old
companies will not join in with you in any scheme that gives you
control. They are too much incensed.  Feeling is running too high.  It
will mean a long, expensive fight, and they will never compromise. Now,
if you have anything really reasonable to offer I would be glad to hear
it.  Otherwise I am afraid these negotiations are not going to come to
anything."

"Share and share alike, and three-fourths of the remainder," repeated
Cowperwood, grimly.  "I do not want to control.  If they want to raise
the money and buy me out on that basis I am willing to sell.  I want a
decent return for investments I have made, and I am going to have it.
I cannot speak for the others behind me, but as long as they deal
through me that is what they will expect."

Mr. Schryhart went angrily away.  He was exceedingly wroth.  This
proposition as Cowperwood now outlined it was bucaneering at its best.
He proposed for himself to withdraw from the old companies if
necessary, to close out his holdings and let the old companies deal
with Cowperwood as best they could.  So long as he had anything to do
with it, Cowperwood should never gain control of the gas situation.
Better to take him at his suggestion, raise the money and buy him out,
even at an exorbitant figure.  Then the old gas companies could go
along and do business in their old-fashioned way without being
disturbed.  This bucaneer! This upstart! What a shrewd, quick, forceful
move he had made! It irritated Mr. Schryhart greatly.

The end of all this was a compromise in which Cowperwood accepted
one-half of the surplus stock of the new general issue, and two for one
of every share of stock for which his new companies had been organized,
at the same time selling out to the old companies--clearing out
completely.  It was a most profitable deal, and he was enabled to
provide handsomely not only for Mr. McKenty and Addison, but for all
the others connected with him.  It was a splendid coup, as McKenty and
Addison assured him.  Having now done so much, he began to turn his
eyes elsewhere for other fields to conquer.

But this victory in one direction brought with it corresponding
reverses in another: the social future of Cowperwood and Aileen was now
in great jeopardy.  Schryhart, who was a force socially, having met
with defeat at the hands of Cowperwood, was now bitterly opposed to
him.  Norrie Simms naturally sided with his old associates. But the
worst blow came through Mrs. Anson Merrill.  Shortly after the
housewarming, and when the gas argument and the conspiracy charges were
rising to their heights, she had been to New York and had there chanced
to encounter an old acquaintance of hers, Mrs. Martyn Walker, of
Philadelphia, one of the circle which Cowperwood once upon a time had
been vainly ambitious to enter.  Mrs. Merrill, aware of the interest
the Cowperwoods had aroused in Mrs. Simms and others, welcomed the
opportunity to find out something definite.

"By the way, did you ever chance to hear of a Frank Algernon Cowperwood
or his wife in Philadelphia?" she inquired of Mrs. Walker.

"Why, my dear Nellie," replied her friend, nonplussed that a woman so
smart as Mrs. Merrill should even refer to them, "have those people
established themselves in Chicago? His career in Philadelphia was, to
say the least, spectacular.  He was connected with a city treasurer
there who stole five hundred thousand dollars, and they both went to
the penitentiary.  That wasn't the worst of it! He became intimate with
some young girl--a Miss Butler, the sister of Owen Butler, by the way,
who is now such a power down there, and--" She merely lifted her eyes.
"While he was in the penitentiary her father died and the family b

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