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The Deluge

by David Graham Phillips · English · Gutenberg #7832 · 536,095 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Deluge

Author: David Graham Phillips


        
Release date: April 1, 2005 [eBook #7832]
                Most recently updated: March 16, 2018

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/7832

Credits: Produced by An Anonymous Volunteer, and David Widger


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE DELUGE ***




Produced by An Anonymous Volunteer





THE DELUGE


By David Graham Phillips

Author of The Cost, The Plum Tree, The Social Secretary, etc.


With Illustrations By George Gibbs



CONTENTS

     I MR. BLACKLOCK
    II IN THOSE DAYS AROSE KINGS
   III CAME A WOMAN
    IV A CANDIDATE FOR “RESPECTABILITY”
      V DANGER SIGNALS
    VI OF “GENTLEMEN”
    VII BLACKLOCK GOES INTO TRAINING
  VIII ON THE TRAIL OF LANGDON
    IX LANGDON AT HOME
     X TWO “PILLARS OF SOCIETY”
     XI WHEN A MAN IS NOT A MAN
   XII ANITA
  XIII “UNTIL TO-MORROW”
    XIV FRESH AIR IN A GREENHOUSE
    XV SOME STRANGE LAPSES OF A LOVER
   XVI TRAPPED AND TRIMMED
  XVII A GENTEEL “HOLD-UP”
  XVIII ANITA BEGINS TO BE HERSELF
   XIX A WINDFALL FROM “GENTLEMAN JOE”
     XX A BREATHING SPELL
   XXI MOST UNLADYLIKE
  XXII MOST UNGENTLEMANLY
 XXIII “SHE HAS CHOSEN”
   XXIV BLACKLOCK ATTENDS FAMILY PRAYERS
   XXV “MY WIFE MUST”
   XXVI THE WEAK STRAND
 XXVII A CONSPIRACY AGAINST ANITA
XXVIII BLACKLOCK SEES A LIGHT
  XXIX A HOUSEWARMING
   XXX BLACKLOCK OPENS FIRE
  XXXI ANITA'S SECRET
 XXXII LANGDON COMES TO THE SURFACE
XXXIII MRS. LANGDON MAKES A CALL
 XXXIV “MY RIGHT EYE OFFENDS ME”
   XXXV “WILD WEEK”
  XXXVI “BLACK MATT'S” TRIUMPH




I. MR. BLACKLOCK


When Napoleon was about to crown himself--so I have somewhere read--they
submitted to him the royal genealogy they had faked up for him. He crumpled
the parchment and flung it in the face of the chief herald, or whoever it
was. “My line,” said he, “dates from Montenotte.” And so I say, my line
dates from the campaign that completed and established my fame--from “Wild
Week.”

I shall not pause to recite the details of the obscurity from which I
emerged. It would be an interesting, a romantic story; but it is a familiar
story, also, in this land which Lincoln so finely and so fully described
when he said: “The republic is opportunity.”

One fact only: _I did not take the name Blacklock_.

I was born Blacklock, and christened Matthew; and my hair's being very
black and growing so that a lock of it often falls down the middle of my
forehead is a coincidence. The malicious and insinuating story that I used
to go under another name arose, no doubt, from my having been a bootblack
in my early days, and having let my customers shorten my name into Matt
Black. But, as soon as I graduated from manual labor, I resumed my rightful
name and have borne it--I think I may say without vanity--in honor to
honor.

Some one has written: “It was a great day for fools when modesty was made
a virtue.” I heartily subscribe to that. Life means action; action means
self-assertion; self-assertion rouses all the small, colorless people to
the only sort of action of which they are capable--to sneering at the doer
as egotistical, vain, conceited, bumptious and the like. So be it! I have
an individuality, aggressive, restless and, like all such individualities,
necessarily in the lime-light; I have from the beginning lost no
opportunity to impress that individuality upon my time. Let those who have
nothing to advertise, and those less courageous and less successful than
I at advertisement, jeer and spit. I ignore them. I make no apologies for
egotism. I think, when my readers have finished, they will demand none.
They will see that I had work to do, and that I did it in the only way an
intelligent man ever tries to do his work--his own way, the way natural to
him!

Wild Week! Its cyclones, rising fury on fury to that historic climax of
chaos, sing their mad song in my ears again as I write. But I shall by no
means confine my narrative to business and finance. Take a cross-section
of life anywhere, and you have a tangled interweaving of the action and
reaction of men upon men, of women upon women, of men and women upon one
another. And this shall be a cross-section out of the very heart of our
life to-day, with its big and bold energies and passions--the swiftest and
intensest life ever lived by the human race.

To begin:




II. IN THOSE DAYS AROSE KINGS


Imagine yourself back two years and a half before Wild Week, back at
the time when the kings of finance had just completed their apparently
final conquest of the industries of the country, when they were seating
themselves upon thrones encircled by vast armies of capital and brains,
when all the governments of the nation--national, state and city--were
prostrate under their iron heels.

You may remember that I was a not inconspicuous figure then. Of all their
financial agents, I was the best-known, the most trusted by them, the most
believed in by the people. I had a magnificent suite of offices in the
building that dominates Wall and Broad Streets. Boston claimed me also, and
Chicago; and in Philadelphia, New Orleans, St. Louis, San Francisco, in
the towns and rural districts tributary to the cities, thousands spoke of
Blacklock as their trusted adviser in matters of finance. My enemies--and
I had them, numerous and venomous enough to prove me a man worth while--my
enemies spoke of me as the “biggest bucket-shop gambler in the world.”

Gambler I was--like all the other manipulators of the markets.
But “bucket-shop” I never kept. As the kings of finance were the
representatives of the great merchants, manufacturers and investors, so was
I the representative of the masses, of those who wished their small savings
properly invested. The power of the big fellows was founded upon wealth and
the brains wealth buys or bullies or seduces into its service; my power was
founded upon the hearts and homes of the people, upon faith in my frank
honesty.

How had I built up my power? By recognizing the possibilities of publicity,
the chance which the broadcast sowing of newspapers and magazines put
within the reach of the individual man to impress himself upon the whole
country, upon the whole civilized world. The kings of finance relied upon
the assiduity and dexterity of sundry paid agents, operating through the
stealthy, clumsy, old-fashioned channels for the exercise of power. I
relied only upon myself; I had to trust to no fallible, perhaps traitorous,
understrappers; through the megaphone of the press I spoke directly to the
people.

My enemies charge that I always have been unscrupulous and dishonest. So?
Then how have I lived and thrived all these years in the glare and blare of
publicity?

It is true, I have used the “methods of the charlatan” in bringing myself
into wide public notice. The just way to put it would be that I have used
for honest purposes the methods of publicity that charlatans have shrewdly
appropriated, because by those means the public can be most widely and
most quickly reached. Does good become evil because hypocrites use it as a
cloak? It is also true that I have been “undignified.” Let the stupid cover
their stupidity with “dignity.” Let the swindler hide his schemings under
“dignity.” I am a man of the people, not afraid to be seen as the human
being that I am. I laugh when I feel like it. I have no sense of jar
when people call me “Matt.” I have a good time, and I shall stay young
as long as I stay alive. Wealth hasn't made me a solemn ass, fenced in
and unapproachable. The custom of receiving obedience and flattery and
admiration has not made me a turkey-cock. Life is a joke; and when the
joke's on me, I laugh as heartily as when it's on the other fellow.

It is half-past three o'clock on a May afternoon; a dismal, dreary rain
is being whirled through the streets by as nasty a wind as ever blew out
of the east. You are in the private office of that “king of kings,” Henry
J. Roebuck, philanthropist, eminent churchman, leading citizen and--in
business--as corrupt a creature as ever used the domino of respectability.
That office is on the twelfth floor of the Power Trust Building--and the
Power Trust is Roebuck, and Roebuck is the Power Trust. He is seated at his
desk and, thinking I do not see him, is looking at me with an expression of
benevolent and melancholy pity--the look with which he always regarded any
one whom the Roebuck God Almighty had commanded Roebuck to destroy. He and
his God were in constant communication; his God never did anything except
for his benefit, he never did anything except on the direct counsel or
command of his God. Just now his God is commanding him to destroy me, his
confidential agent in shaping many a vast industrial enterprise and in
inducing the public to buy by the million its bonds and stocks.

I invited the angry frown of the Roebuck God by saying: “And I bought in
the Manasquale mines on my own account.”

“On your own account!” said Roebuck. Then he hastily effaced his
involuntary air of the engineer startled by sight of an unexpected red
light.

“Yes,” replied I, as calm as if I were not realizing the tremendous
significance of what I had announced. “I look to you to let me participate
on equal terms.”

That is, I had decided that the time had come for me to take my place
among the kings of finance. I had decided to promote myself from agent to
principal, from prime minister to king--I must, myself, promote myself,
for in this world all promotion that is solid comes from within. And in
furtherance of my object I had bought this group of mines, control of which
was vital to the Roebuck-Langdon-Melville combine for a monopoly of the
coal of the country.

“Did not Mr. Langdon commission you to buy them for him and his friends?”
 inquired Roebuck, in that slow, placid tone which yet, for the attentive
ear, had a note in it like the scream of a jaguar that comes home and finds
its cub gone.

“But I couldn't get them for him,” I explained. “The owners wouldn't sell
until I engaged that the National Coal and Railway Company was not to have
them.”

“Oh, I see,” said Roebuck, sinking back relieved. “We must get Browne to
draw up some sort of perpetual, irrevocable power of attorney to us for you
to sign.”

“But I won't sign it,” said I.

Roebuck took up a sheet of paper and began to fold it upon itself with
great care to get the edges straight. He had grasped my meaning; he was
deliberating.

“For four years now,” I went on, “you people have been promising to take
me in as a principal in some one of your deals--to give me recognition by
making me president, or chairman of an executive or finance committee. I am
an impatient man, Mr. Roebuck. Life is short, and I have much to do. So I
have bought the Manasquale mines--and I shall hold them.”

Roebuck continued to fold the paper upon itself until he had reduced it
to a short, thick strip. This he slowly twisted between his cruel fingers
until it was in two pieces. He dropped them, one at a time, into the
waste-basket, then smiled benevolently at me. “You are right,” he said.
“You shall have what you want. You have seemed such a mere boy to me that,
in spite of your giving again and again proof of what you are, I have been
putting you off. Then, too--” He halted, and his look was that of one
surveying delicate ground.

“The bucket-shop?” suggested I.

“Exactly,” said he gratefully. “Your brokerage business has been invaluable
to us. But--well, I needn't tell you how people--the men of standing--look
on that sort of thing.”

“I never have paid any attention to pompous pretenses,” said I, “and I
never shall. My brokerage business must go on, and my daily letters to
investors. By advertising I rose; by advertising I am a power that even you
recognize; by advertising alone can I keep that power.”

“You forget that in the new circumstances, you won't need that sort of
power. Adapt yourself to your new surroundings. Overalls for the trench; a
business suit for the office.”

“I shall keep to my overalls for the present,” said I. “They're more
comfortable, and”--here I smiled significantly at him--“if I shed them, I
might have to go naked. The first principle of business is never to give up
what you have until your grip is tight on something better.”

“No doubt you're right,” agreed the white-haired old scoundrel, giving
no sign that I had fathomed his motive for trying to “hint” me out of my
stronghold. “I will talk the matter over with Langdon and Melville. Rest
assured, my boy, that you will be satisfied.” He got up, put his arm
affectionately round my shoulders. “We all like you. I have a feeling
toward you as if you were my own son. I am getting old, and I like to see
young men about me, growing up to assume the responsibilities of the Lord's
work whenever He shall call me to my reward.”

It will seem incredible that a man of my shrewdness and experience could
be taken in by such slimy stuff as that--I who knew Roebuck as only a
few insiders knew him, I who had seen him at work, as devoid of heart as
an empty spider in an empty web. Yet I was taken in to the extent that
I thought he really purposed to recognize my services, to yield to the
only persuasion that could affect him--force. I fancied he was actually
about to put me where I could be of the highest usefulness to him and his
associates, as well as to myself. As if an old man ever yielded power or
permitted another to gain power, even though it were to his own great
advantage. The avarice of age is not open to reason.

It was with tears in my eyes that I shook hands with him, thanking him
emotionally. It was with a high chin and a proud heart that I went back
to my offices. There wasn't a doubt in my mind that I was about to get my
deserts, was about to enter the charmed circle of “high finance.”

That small and exclusive circle, into which I was seeing myself admitted
without the usual arduous and unequal battle, was what may be called the
industrial ring--a loose, yet tight, combine of about a dozen men who
controlled in one way or another practically all the industries of the
country. They had no formal agreements; they held no official meetings.
They did not look upon themselves as an association. They often quarreled
among themselves, waged bitter wars upon each other over divisions of
power or plunder. But, in the broad sense, in the true sense, they were
an association--a band united by a common interest, to control finance,
commerce and therefore politics; a band united by a common purpose, to keep
that control in as few hands as possible. Whenever there was sign of peril
from without they flung away differences, pooled resources, marched in
full force to put down the insurrection. For they looked on any attempt
to interfere with them as a mutiny, as an outbreak of anarchy. This band
persisted, but membership in it changed, changed rapidly. Now, one would
be beaten to death and despoiled by a clique of fellows; again, weak or
rash ones would be cut off in strenuous battle. Often, most often, some
too-powerful or too-arrogant member would be secretly and stealthily
assassinated by a jealous associate or by a committee of internal safety.
Of course, I do not mean literally assassinated, but assassinated, cut off,
destroyed, in the sense that a man whose whole life is wealth and power is
dead when wealth and power are taken from him.

Actual assassination, the crime of murder--these “gentlemen” rarely did
anything which their lawyers did not advise them was legal or could be made
legal by bribery of one kind or another. Rarely, I say--not never. You will
see presently why I make that qualification.

I had my heart set upon membership in this band--and, as I confess now with
shame, my prejudices of self-interest had blinded me into regarding it
and its members as great and useful and honorable “captains of industry.”
 Honorable in the main; for, not even my prejudice could blind me to the
almost hair-raising atrocity of some of their doings. Still, morality is
largely a question of environment. I had been bred in that environment.
Even the atrocities I excused on the ground that he who goes forth to war
must be prepared to do and to tolerate many acts the church would have to
strain a point to bless. What was Columbus but a marauder, a buccaneer?
Was not Drake, in law and in fact, a pirate; Washington a traitor to his
soldier's oath of allegiance to King George? I had much to learn, and to
unlearn. I was to find out that whenever a Roebuck puts his arm round you,
it is invariably to get within your guard and nearer your fifth rib. I was
to trace the ugliest deformities of that conscience of his, hidden away
down inside him like a dwarfed, starved prisoner in an underground dungeon.
I was to be astounded by revelations of Langdon, who was not a believer,
like Roebuck, and so was not under the restraint of the feeling that he
must keep some sort of conscience ledgers against the inspection of the
angelic auditing committee in the day of wrath.

Much to learn--and to unlearn. It makes me laugh as I recall how, on that
May day, I looked into the first mirror I was alone with, smiled delighted,
as an idiot with myself and said: “Matt, you are of the kings now. Your
crown suits you and, as you've earned it, you know how to keep it. Now for
some fun with your subjects and your fellow sovereigns.”

A little premature, that preening!




III. CAME A WOMAN


In my suite in the Textile Building, just off the big main room with its
blackboards and tickers, I had a small office in which I spent a good deal
of time during Stock Exchange hours. It was there that Sam Ellersly found
me the next day but one after my talk with Roebuck.

“I want you to sell that Steel Common, Matt,” said he.

“It'll go several points higher,” said I. “Better let me hold it and use my
judgment on selling.”

“I need money--right away,” was his answer.

“That's all right,” said I. “Let me give you an order for what you need.”

“Thank you, thank you,” said he, so promptly that I knew I had done what he
had been hoping for, probably counting on.

I give this incident to show what our relations were. He was a young fellow
of good family, to whom I had taken a liking. He was a lazy dog, and as out
of place in business as a cat in a choir. I had been keeping him going for
four years at that time, by giving him tips on stocks and protecting him
against loss. This purely out of good nature and liking; for I hadn't the
remotest idea he could ever be of use to me beyond helping to liven things
up at a dinner or late supper, or down in the country, or on the yacht. In
fact, his principal use to me was that he knew how to “beat the box” well
enough to shake fairly good music out of it--and I am so fond of music that
I can fill in with my imagination when the performer isn't too bad.

They have charged that I deliberately ruined him. Ruined! The first time I
gave him a tip--and that was the second or third time I ever saw him--he
burst into tears and said: “You've saved my life, Blacklock. I'll never
tell you how much this windfall means to me now.” Nor did I with deep and
dark design keep him along on the ragged edge. He kept himself there.
How could I build up such a man with his hundred ways of wasting money,
including throwing it away on his own opinions of stocks--for he would
gamble on his own account in the bucket-shops, though I had shown him that
the Wall Street game is played always with marked cards, and that the only
hope of winning is to get the confidence of the card-markers, unless you
are big enough to become a card-marker yourself.

As soon as he got the money from my teller that day, he was rushing away. I
followed him to the door--that part of my suite opened out on the sidewalk,
for the convenience of my crowds of customers. “I'm just going to lunch,”
 said I. “Come with me.”

He looked uneasily toward a smart little one-horse brougham at the curb.
“Sorry--but I can't,” said he. “I've my sister with me. She brought me down
in her trap.”

“That's all right,” said I; “bring her along. We'll go to the Savarin.” And
I locked his arm in mine and started toward the brougham.

[Illustration]

He was turning all kinds of colors, and was acting in a way that puzzled
me--then. Despite all my years in New York I was ignorant of the elaborate
social distinctions that had grown up in its Fifth Avenue quarter. I knew,
of course, that there was a fashionable society and that some of the most
conspicuous of those in it seemed unable to get used to the idea of being
rich and were in a state of great agitation over their own importance.
Important they might be, but not to me. I knew nothing of their careful
gradations of snobbism--the people to know socially, the people to know in
a business way, the people to know in ways religious and philanthropic,
the people to know for the fun to be got out of them, the people to
pride oneself on not knowing at all; the nervousness, the hysteria
about preserving these disgusting gradations. All this, I say, was an
undreamed-of mystery to me who gave and took liking in the sensible,
self-respecting American fashion. So I didn't understand why Sam, as I
almost dragged him along, was stammering: “Thank you--but--I--she--the fact
is, we really must get up-town.”

By this time I was where I could look into the brougham. A glance--I can
see much at a glance, as can any man who spends every day of every year in
an all-day fight for his purse and his life, with the blows coming from all
sides. I can see much at a glance; I often have seen much; I never saw more
than just then. Instantly, I made up my mind that the Ellerslys would lunch
with me. “You've got to eat somewhere,” said I, in a tone that put an end
to his attempts to manufacture excuses. “I'll be delighted to have you.
Don't make up any more yarns.”

He slowly opened the door. “Anita,” said he, “Mr. Blacklock. He's invited
us to lunch.”

I lifted my hat, and bowed. I kept my eyes straight upon hers. And it
gave me more pleasure to look into them than I had ever before got out of
looking into anybody's. I am passionately fond of flowers, and of children;
and her face reminded me of both. Or, rather, it seemed to me that what
I had seen, with delight and longing, incomplete in their freshness and
beauty and charm, was now before me in the fullness. I felt like saying to
her, “I have heard of you often. The children and the flowers have told
me you were coming.” Perhaps my eyes did say it. At any rate, she looked
as straight at me as I at her, and I noticed that she paled a little and
shrank--yet continued to look, as if I were compelling her. But her voice,
beautifully clear, and lingering in the ears like the resonance of the
violin after the bow has swept its strings and lifted, was perfectly
self-possessed, as she said to her brother: “That will be delightful--if
you think we have time.”

I saw that she, uncertain whether he wished to accept, was giving him a
chance to take either course. “He has time--nothing but time,” said I. “His
engagements are always with people who want to get something out of him.
And they can wait.” I pretended to think he was expecting me to enter
the trap; I got in, seated myself beside her, said to Sam: “I've saved
the little seat for you. Tell your man to take us to the Equitable
Building--Nassau Street entrance.”

I talked a good deal during the first half of the nearly two hours we were
together--partly because both Sam and his sister seemed under some sort of
strain, chiefly because I was determined to make a good impression. I told
her about myself, my horses, my house in the country, my yacht. I tried to
show her I wasn't an ignoramus as to books and art, even if I hadn't been
to college. She listened, while Sam sat embarrassed. “You must bring your
sister down to visit me,” I said finally. “I'll see that you both have
the time of your lives. Make up a party of your friends, Sam, and come
down--when shall we say? Next Sunday? You know you were coming anyhow. I
can change the rest of the party.”

Sam grew as red as if he were going into apoplexy. I thought then he was
afraid I'd blurt out something about who were in the party I was proposing
to change. I was soon to know better.

“Thank you, Mr.--Blacklock,” said his sister. “But I have an engagement
next Sunday. I have a great many engagements just now. Without looking at
my book I couldn't say when I can go.” This easily and naturally. In her
set they certainly do learn thoroughly that branch of tact which plain
people call lying.

Sam gave her a grateful look, which he thought I didn't see, and which I
didn't rightly interpret--then.

“We'll fix it up later, Blacklock,” said he.

“All right,” said I. And from that minute I was almost silent. It was
something in her tone and manner that silenced me. I suddenly realized that
I wasn't making as good an impression as I had been flattering myself.

When a man has money and is willing to spend it, he can readily fool
himself into imagining he gets on grandly with women. But I had better
grounds than that for thinking myself not unattractive to them, as a rule.
Women had liked me when I had nothing; women had liked me when they didn't
know who I was. I felt that this woman did not like me. And yet, by the way
she looked at me in spite of her efforts not to do so, I could tell that
I had some sort of unusual interest for her. Why didn't she like me? She
made me feel the reason. I didn't belong to her world. My ways and my looks
offended her. She disliked me a good deal; she feared me a little. She
would have felt safer if she had been gratifying her curiosity, gazing in
at me through the bars of a cage.

Where I had been feeling and showing my usual assurance, I now became ill
at ease. I longed for them to be gone; at the same time I hated to let her
go--for, when and how would I see her again, would I get the chance to
remove her bad impression? It irritated me thus to be concerned about the
sister of a man into my liking for whom there was mixed much pity and some
contempt. But I am of the disposition that, whenever I see an obstacle of
whatever kind, I can not restrain myself from trying to jump it. Here was
an obstacle--a dislike. To clear it was of the smallest importance in the
world, was a silly waste of time. Yet I felt I could not maintain with
myself my boast that there were no obstacles I couldn't get over, if I
turned aside from this.

Sam--not without hesitation, as I recalled afterward--left me with her,
when I sent him to bring her brougham up to the Broadway entrance. As she
and I were standing there alone, waiting in silence, I turned on her
suddenly, and blurted out, “You don't like me.”

She reddened a little, smiled slightly. “What a quaint remark!” said she.

I looked straight at her. “But you shall.”

Our eyes met. Her chin came out a little, her eyebrows lifted. Then, in
scorn of herself as well as of me, she locked herself in behind a frozen
haughtiness that ignored me. “Ah, here is the carriage,” she said. I
followed her to the curb; she just touched my hand, just nodded her
fascinating little head.

“See you Saturday, old man,” called her brother friendlily. My lowering
face had alarmed him.

“That party is off,” said I curtly. And I lifted my hat and strode away.

As I had formed the habit of dismissing the disagreeable, I soon put her
out of my mind. But she took with her my joy in the taste of things. I
couldn't get back my former keen satisfaction in all I had done and was
doing. The luxury, the tangible evidences of my achievement, no longer gave
me pleasure; they seemed to add to my irritation.

That's the way it is in life. We load ourselves down with toys like so many
greedy children; then we see another toy and drop everything to be free to
seize it; and if we can not, we're wretched.

I worked myself up, or rather, down, to such a mood that when my office boy
told me Mr. Langdon would like me to come to his office as soon as it was
convenient, I snapped out: “The hell he does! Tell Mr. Langdon I'll be
glad to see him here whenever he calls.” That was stupidity, a premature
assertion of my right to be treated as an equal. I had always gone to
Langdon, and to any other of the rulers of finance, whenever I had got a
summons. For, while I was rich and powerful, I held both wealth and power,
in a sense, on sufferance; I knew that, so long as I had no absolute
control of any great department of industry, these rulers could destroy me
should they decide that they needed my holdings or were not satisfied with
my use of my power. There were a good many people who did not realize that
property rights had ceased to exist, that property had become a revocable
grant from the “plutocrats.” I was not of those misguided ones who had
failed to discover the new fact concealed in the old form. So I used to go
when I was summoned.

But not that day. However, no sooner was my boy gone than I repented the
imprudence, “But what of it?” said I to myself. “No matter how the thing
turns out, I shall be able to get some advantage.” For it was part of my
philosophy that a proper boat with proper sails and a proper steersman can
gain in any wind. I was surprised when Langdon appeared in my office a few
minutes later.

He was a tallish, slim man, carefully dressed, with a bored, weary look
and a slow, bored way of talking. I had always said that if I had not been
myself I should have wished to be Langdon. Men liked and admired him; women
loved and ran after him. Yet he exerted not the slightest effort to please
any one; on the contrary, he made it distinct and clear that he didn't
care a rap what any one thought of him or, for that matter, of anybody or
anything. He knew how to get, without sweat or snatching, all the good
there was in whatever fate threw in his way--and he was one of those men
into whose way fate seems to strive to put everything worth having. His
business judgment was shrewd, but he cared nothing for the big game he was
playing except as a game. Like myself, he was simply a sportsman--and, I
think, that is why we liked each other. He could have trusted almost any
one that came into contact with him; but he trusted nobody, and frankly
warned every one not to trust him--a safe frankness, for his charm caused
it to be forgotten or ignored. He would do anything to gain an object,
however trivial, which chanced to attract him; once it was his, he would
throw it aside as carelessly as an ill-fitting collar.

His expression, as he came into my office, was one of cynical amusement,
as if he were saying to himself: “Our friend Blacklock has caught the
swollen head at last.” Not a suggestion of ill humor, of resentment
at my impertinence--for, in the circumstances, I had been guilty of an
impertinence. Just languid, amused patience with the frailty of a friend.
“I see,” said he, “that you have got Textile up to eighty-five.”

He was the head of the Textile Trust which had been built by his
brother-in-law and had fallen to him in the confusion following his
brother-in-law's death. As he was just then needing some money for his
share in the National Coal undertaking, he had directed me to push Textile
up toward par and unload him of two or three hundred thousand shares--he,
of course, to repurchase the shares after he had taken profits and Textile
had dropped back to its normal fifty.

“I'll have it up to ninety-eight by the middle of next month,” said I. “And
there I think we'd better stop.”

“Stop at about ninety,” said he. “That will give me all I find I'll need
for this Coal business. I don't want to be bothered with hunting up an
investment.”

I shook my head. “I must put it up to within a point or two of par,” I
declared. “In my public letter I've been saying it would go above
ninety-five, and I never deceive my public.”

He smiled--my notion of honesty always amused him. “As you please,” he
said with a shrug. Then I saw a serious look--just a fleeting flash of
warning--behind his smiling mask; and he added carelessly: “Be careful
about your own personal play. I doubt if Textile can be put any higher.”

It must have been my mood that prevented those words from making the
impression on me they should have made. Instead of appreciating at once
and at its full value this characteristic and amazingly friendly signal
of caution, I showed how stupidly inattentive I was by saying: “Something
doing? Something new?”

But he had already gone further than his notion of friendship warranted. So
he replied: “Oh, no. Simply that everything's uncertain nowadays.”

My mind had been all this time on those Manasquale mining properties. I now
said: “Has Roebuck told you that I had to buy those mines on my own
account?”

“Yes,” he said. He hesitated, and again he gave me a look whose meaning
came to me only when it was too late. “I think, Blacklock, you'd better
turn them over to me.”

“I can't,” I answered. “I gave my word.”

“As you please,” said he.

Apparently the matter didn't interest him. He began to talk of the
performances of my little two-year-old, Beachcomber; and after twenty
minutes or so, he drifted away. “I envy you your enthusiasm,” he said,
pausing in my doorway. “Wherever I am, I wish I were somewhere else.
Whatever I'm doing, I wish I were doing something else. Where do you get
all this joy of the fight? What the devil are you fighting for?”

He didn't wait for a reply.

I thought over my situation steadily for several days. I went down to my
country place. I looked everywhere among all my belongings, searching,
searching, restless, impatient. At last I knew what ailed me--what the lack
was that yawned so gloomily from everything I had once thought beautiful,
had once found sufficient. I was in the midst of the splendid, terraced
pansy beds my gardeners had just set out; I stopped short and slapped my
thigh. “A woman!” I exclaimed. “That's what I need. A woman--the right sort
of woman--a wife!”




IV. A CANDIDATE FOR “RESPECTABILITY”


To handle this new business properly I must put myself in position
to look the whole field over. I must get in line and in touch with
“respectability.” When Sam Ellersly came in for his “rations,” I said:
“Sam, I want you to put me up at the Travelers Club.”

“The Travelers!” echoed he, with a blank look.

“The Travelers,” said I. “It's about the best of the big clubs, isn't it?
And it has as members most of the men I do business with and most of those
I want to get into touch with.”

He laughed. “It can't be done.”

“Why not?” I asked.

“Oh--I don't know. You see--the fact is--well, they're a lot of old fogies
up there. You don't want to bother with that push, Matt. Take my advice. Do
business with them, but avoid them socially.”

“I want to go in there,” I insisted. “I have my own reasons. You put me
up.”

“I tell you, it'd be no use,” he replied, in a tone that implied he wished
to hear no more of the matter.

“You put me up,” I repeated. “And if you do your best, I'll get in all
right. I've got lots of friends there. And you've got three relatives in
the committee on membership.”

At this he gave me a queer, sharp glance--a little fright in it.

I laughed. “You see, I've been looking into it, Sam. I never take a jump
till I've measured it.”

“You'd better wait a few years, until--” he began, then stopped and turned
red.

“Until what?” said I. “I want you to speak frankly.”

“Well, you've got a lot of enemies--a lot of fellows who've lost money in
deals you've engineered. And they'd say all sorts of things.”

“I'll take care of that,” said I, quite easy in mind. “Mowbray Langdon's
president, isn't he? Well, he's my closest friend.” I spoke quite honestly.
It shows how simple-minded I was in certain ways that I had never once
noted the important circumstance that this “closest friend” had never
invited me to his house, or anywhere where I'd meet his up-town associates
at introducing distance.

Sam looked surprised. “Oh, in that case,” he said, “I'll see what can be
done.” But his tone was not quite cordial enough to satisfy me.

To stimulate him and to give him an earnest of what I intended to do for
him, when our little social deal had been put through, I showed him how he
could win ten thousand dollars in the next three days. “And you needn't
bother about putting up margins,” said I, as I often had before. “I'll take
care of that.”

He stammered a refusal and went out; but he came back within an hour, and,
in a strained sort of way, accepted my tip and my offer.

“That's sensible,” said I. “When will you attend to the matter at the
Travelers? I want to be warned so I can pull my own set of wires in
concert.”

“I'll let you know,” he answered, hanging his head.

I didn't understand his queer actions then. Though I was an expert in
finance, I hadn't yet made a study of that other game--the game of
“gentleman.” And I didn't know how seriously the frauds and fakirs who play
it take it and themselves. I attributed his confusion to a ridiculous mock
modesty he had about accepting favors; it struck me as being particularly
silly on this occasion, because for once he was to give as well as to take.

He didn't call for his profits, but wrote asking me to mail him the check
for them. I did so, putting in the envelop with it a little jog to his
memory on the club matter. I didn't see him again for nearly a month; and
though I searched and sent, I couldn't get his trail. On opening day at
Morris Park, I was going along the passage behind the boxes in the grand
stand, on my way to the paddock. I wanted to see my horse that was about to
run for the Salmagundi Sweepstakes, and to tell my jockey that I'd give him
fifteen thousand, instead of ten thousand, if he won--for I had put quite a
bunch down. I was a figure at the tracks in those days. I went into racing
on my customary generous scale. I liked horses, just as I liked everything
that belonged out under the big sky; also I liked the advertising my string
of thoroughbreds gave me. I was rich enough to be beyond the stage at which
a man excites suspicion by frequenting race-tracks and gambling-houses; I
was at the height where prodigalities begin to be taken as evidences of
abounding superfluity, not of a dangerous profligacy. Jim Harkaway, who
failed at playing the same game I played and won, said to me with a sneer
one day: “You certainly do know how to get a dollar's worth of notoriety
out of a dollar's worth of advertising.”

“If I only knew that, Jim,” said I, “I'd have been long ago where you're
bound for. The trick is to get it back ten for one. The more _you_
advertise yourself, the more suspicious of you people become. The more
money I 'throw away' in advertising, the more convinced people are that I
can afford to do it.”

But, as I was about to say, in one of the boxes I spied my shy friend,
Sammy. He was looking better than I had ever seen him. Less heavy-eyed,
less pallid and pasty, less like a man who had been shirking bed and
keeping up on cocktails and cold baths. He was at the rear of the box,
talking with a lady and a gentleman. As soon as I saw that lady, I knew
what it was that had been hiding at the bottom of my mind and rankling
there.

Luckily I was alone; ever since that lunch I had been cutting loose from
the old crowd--from all its women, and from all its men except two or three
real friends who were good fellows straight through, in spite of their
having made the mistake of crossing the dead line between amateur “sport”
 and professional. I leaned over and tapped Sammy on the shoulder.

He glanced round, and when he saw me, looked as if I were a policeman who
had caught him in the act.

“Howdy, Sam?” said I. “It's been so long since I've seen you that I
couldn't resist the temptation to interrupt. Hope your friends'll excuse
me. Howdy do, Miss Ellersly?” And I put out my hand.

She took it reluctantly. She was giving me a very unpleasant look--as if
she were seeing, not somebody, but some _thing_ she didn't care to
see, or were seeing nothing at all. I liked that look; I liked the woman
who had it in her to give it. She made me feel that she was difficult and
therefore worth while, and that's what all we human beings are in business
for--to make each other feel that we're worth while.

“Just a moment,” said Sam, red as a cranberry and stuttering. And he made a
motion to come out of the box and join me. At the same time Miss Anita and
the other fellow began to turn away.

But I was not the man to be cheated in that fashion. I wanted to see
_her_, and I compelled her to see it and to feel it. “Don't let me
take you from your friends,” said I to Sammy. “Perhaps they'd like to come
with you and me down to look at my horse. I can give you a good tip--he's
bound to win. I've had my boys out on the rails every morning at the trials
of all the other possibilities. None of 'em's in it with Mowghli.”

“Mowghli!” said the young lady--she had begun to turn toward me as soon as
I spoke the magic word, “tip.” There may be men who can resist that word
“tip” at the race-track, but there never was a woman.

“My sister has to stay here,” said Sammy hurriedly. “I'll go with you,
Blacklock.”

All this time he was looking as if he were doing something he ought to be
ashamed of. I thought then he was ashamed because he, professing to be a
gentleman, had been neglecting his debt of honor. I now know he was ashamed
because he was responsible for his sister's being contaminated by contact
with such a man as I! I who hadn't a dollar that wasn't honestly earned;
I who had made a fortune by my own efforts, and was spending my millions
like a prince; I who had taste in art and music and in architecture and
furnishing and all the fine things of life. Above all, I who had been his
friend and benefactor. _He_ knew I was more of a gentleman than he
could ever hope to be, he with no ability at anything but spending money;
he a sponge and a cadger, yes, and a welcher--for wasn't he doing his best
to welch me? But just because a lot of his friends, jealous of my success
and angry that I refused to truckle to them and be like them instead of
like myself, sneered at me--behind my back--this poor-spirited creature
was daring to pretend to himself that I wasn't fit for the society of his
sister!

“Mowghli!” said Miss Ellersly. “What a quaint name!”

“My trainer gave it,” said I. “I've got a second son of one of those
broken-down English noblemen at the head of my stables. He's trying to get
money enough together to be able to show up at Newport and take a shy at an
heiress.”

At this the fellow who was fourth in our party, and who had been giving me
a nasty, glassy stare, got as red as was Sammy. Then I noticed that he was
an Englishman, and I all but chuckled with delight. However, I said, “No
offense intended,” and clapped him on the shoulder with a friendly smile.
“He's a good fellow, my man Monson, and knows a lot about horses.”

Miss Ellersly bit her lip and colored, but I noticed also that her eyes
were dancing.

Sam introduced the Englishman to me--Lord Somebody-or-other, I forget what,
as I never saw him again. I turned like a bulldog from a toy terrier and
was at Miss Ellersly again. “Let me put a little something on Mowghli for
you,” said I. “You're bound to win--and I'll see that you don't lose. I
know how you ladies hate to lose.”

That was a bit stiff, as I know well enough now. Indeed, my instinct
would have told me better then, if I hadn't been so used to the sort of
women that jump at such an offer, and if I hadn't been casting about so
desperately and in such confusion for some way to please her. At any rate,
I hardly deserved her sudden frozen look. “I beg pardon,” I stammered, and
I think my look at her must have been very humble--for me.

The others in the box were staring round at us. “Come on,” cried Sam,
dragging at my arm, “let's go.”

“Won't you come?” I said to his sister. I shouldn't have been able to keep
my state of mind out of my voice, if I had tried. And I didn't try.

Trust the right sort of woman to see the right sort of thing in a man
through any and all kinds of barriers of caste and manners and breeding.
Her voice was much softer as she said: “I think I must stay here. Thank
you, just the same.”

As soon as Sam and I were alone, I apologized. “I hope you'll tell your
sister I'm sorry for that break,” said I.

“Oh, that's all right,” he answered, easy again, now that we were away from
the others. “You meant well--and motive's the thing.”

“Motive--hell!” cried I in my anger at myself. “Nobody but a man's God
knows his motives; he doesn't even know them himself. I judge others by
what they do, and I expect to be judged in the same way. I see I've got a
lot to learn.” Then I suddenly remembered the Travelers Club, and asked him
what he'd done about it.

“I--I've been--thinking it over,” said he. “Are you _sure_ you want to
run the risk of an ugly cropper, Matt?”

I turned him round so that we were facing each other. “Do you want to do me
that favor, or don't you?” I demanded.

“I'll do whatever you say,” he replied. “I'm thinking only of your
interests.”

“Let _me_ take care of _them_,” said I. “You put me up at that
club to-morrow. I'll send you the name of a seconder not later than noon.”

“Up goes your name,” he said. “But don't blame me for the consequences.”

And my name went up, with Mowbray Langdon's brother, Tom, as seconder.
Every newspaper in town published the fact, most of them under big black
headlines. “The fun's about to begin,” thought I, as I read. And I was
right, though I hadn't the remotest idea how big a ball I had opened.




V. DANGER SIGNALS


At that time I did not myself go over the bills before the legislatures
of those states in which I had interests. I trusted that work to my
lawyers--and, like every man who ever absolutely trusted an important
division of his affairs to another, I was severely punished. One morning
my eye happened to light upon a minor paragraph in a newspaper--a list
of the “small bills yesterday approved by the governor.” In the list was
one “defining the power of sundry commissions.” Those words seemed to
me somehow to spell “joker.” But why did I call up my lawyers to ask
them about it? It's a mystery to me. All I know is that, busy as I was,
something inside me compelled me to drop everything else and hunt that
“joker” down.

I got Saxe--then senior partner in Browne, Saxe and Einstein--on the
'phone, and said: “Just see and tell me, will you, what is the 'bill
defining the power of sundry commissions'--the bill the governor signed
yesterday?”

“Certainly, Mr. Blacklock,” came the answer. My nerves are, and always have
been, on the watchout for the looks and the tones and the gestures that are
just a shade off the natural; and I feel that I do Saxe no injustice when I
say his tone was, not a shade, but a full color, off the natural. So I was
prepared for what he said when he returned to the telephone. “I'm sorry,
Mr. Blacklock, but we seem unable to lay our hands on that bill at this
moment.”

“Why not?” said I, in the tone that makes an employee jump as if a
whip-lash had cut him on the calves.

He had jumped all right, as his voice showed. “It's not in our file,” said
he. “It's House Bill No. 427, and it's apparently not here.”

“The hell you say!” I exclaimed. “Why?”

“I really can't explain,” he pleaded, and the frightened whine confirmed my
suspicion.

“I guess not,” said I, making the words significant and suggestive. “And
you're in my pay to look after such matters! But you'll have to explain, if
this turns out to be serious.”

“Apparently our file of bills is complete except that one,” he went on. “I
suppose it was lost in the mail, and I very stupidly didn't notice the gap
in the numbers.”

“Stupid isn't the word I'd use,” said I, with a laugh that wasn't of the
kind that cheers. And I rang off and asked for the state capitol on the
“long distance.”

Before I got my connection Saxe, whose office was only two blocks away,
came flustering in. “The boy has been discharged, Mr. Blacklock,” he began.

“What boy?” said I.

“The boy in charge of the bill file--the boy whose business it was to keep
the file complete.”

“Send him to me, you damned scoundrel,” said I. “I'll give him a job. What
do you take me for, anyway? And what kind of a cowardly hound are you to
disgrace an innocent boy as a cover for your own crooked work?”

“Really, Mr. Blacklock, this is most extraordinary,” he expostulated.

“Extraordinary? I call it criminal,” I retorted. “Listen to me. You look
after the legislation calendars for me, and for Langdon, and for Roebuck,
and for Melville, and for half a dozen others of the biggest financiers in
the country. It's the most important work you do for us. Yet you, as shrewd
and careful a lawyer as there is at the bar, want me to believe you trusted
that work to a boy! If you did, you're a damn fool. If you didn't, you're
a damn scoundrel. There's no more doubt in my mind than in yours which of
those horns has you sticking on it.”

“You are letting your quick temper get away with you, Mr. Blacklock,” he
deprecated.

“Stop lying!” I shouted, “I knew you had been doing some skulduggery when
I first heard your voice on the telephone. And if I needed any proof, the
meek way you've taken my abuse would furnish it, and to spare.”

Just then the telephone bell rang and I got the right department and asked
the clerk to read House Bill 427. It contained five short paragraphs. The
“joker” was in the third, which gave the State Canal Commission the right
“to institute condemnation proceedings, and to condemn, and to abolish, any
canal not exceeding thirty miles in length and not a part of the connected
canal system of the state.”

When I hung up the receiver I was so absorbed that I had forgotten Saxe was
waiting. He made some slight sound. I wheeled on him. I needed a vent. If
he hadn't been there I should have smashed a chair. But there was he--and I
kicked him out of my private office and would have kicked him out through
the anteroom into the outer hall, had he not gathered himself together and
run like a jack-rabbit.

Since that day I have done my own calendar watching.

By this incident I do not mean to suggest that there are not honorable men
in the legal profession. Most of them are men of the highest honor, as are
most business men, most persons of consequence in every department of life.
But you don't look for character in the proprietors, servants, customers
and hangers-on of dives. No more ought you to look for honor among any of
the people that have to do with the big gilded dive of the dollarocracy.
They are there to gamble, and to prostitute themselves. The fact that they
look like gentlemen and have the manners and the language of gentlemen
ought to deceive nobody but the callow chaps of the sort that believes the
swell gambler is “an honest fellow” and a “perfect gentleman otherwise,”
 because he wears a dress suit in the evening and is a judge of books and
pictures. Lawyers are the doorkeepers and the messengers of the big dive;
and these lawyers, though they stand the highest and get the biggest fees,
are just what you would expect human beings to be who expose themselves to
such temptations, and yield whenever they get an opportunity, as eager and
as compliant as a _cocotte_.

My lawyers had sold me out; I, fool that I was, had not guarded the only
weak plate in my armor against my companions--the plate over my back, to
shed assassin thrusts. Roebuck and Langdon between them owned the governor;
he owned the Canal Commission; my canal, which gave me access to tide-water
for the product of my Manasquale mines, was as good as closed. I no longer
had the whip-hand in National Coal. The others could sell me out and take
two-thirds of my fortune, whenever they liked--for of what use were my
mines with no outlet now to any market, except the outlets the coal crowd
owned?

As soon as I had thought the situation out in all its bearings, I realized
that there was no escape for me now, that whatever chance to escape I might
have had was closed by my uncovering to Saxe and kicking him. But I did not
regret; it was worth the money it would cost me. Besides, I thought I saw
how I could later on turn it to good account. A sensible man never makes
fatal errors. Whatever he does is at least experience, and can also be used
to advantage. If Napoleon hadn't been half dead at Waterloo, I don't doubt
he would have used its disaster as a means to a greater victory.

Was I downcast by the discovery that those bandits had me apparently at
their mercy? Not a bit. Never in my life have I been downcast over money
matters more than a few minutes. Why should I be? Why should any man be who
has made himself all that he is? As long as his brain is sound, his capital
is unimpaired. When I walked into Mowbray Langdon's office, I was like a
thoroughbred exercising on a clear frosty morning; and my smile was as
fresh as the flower in my buttonhole. I thrust out my hand at him. “I
congratulate you,” said I.

He took the proffered hand with a questioning look.

“On what?” said he. It is hard to tell from his face what is going on in
his head, but I think I guessed right when I decided that Saxe hadn't yet
warned him.

“I have just found out from Saxe,” I pursued, “about the Canal Bill.”

“What Canal Bill?” he asked.

“That puzzled look was a mistake, Langdon,” said I, laughing at him. “When
you don't know anything about a matter, you look merely blank. You overdid
it; you've given yourself away.”

He shrugged his shoulders. “As you please,” said he. As you please was his
favorite expression; a stereotyped irony, for in dealing with him, things
were never as _you_ pleased, but always as _he_ pleased.

“Next time you want to dig a mine under anybody,” I went on, “don't hire
Saxe. Really I feel sorry for you--to have such a clever scheme messed by
such an ass.”

“If you don't mind, I'd like to know what you're talking about,” said he,
with his patient, bored look.

“As you and Roebuck own the governor, I know your little law ends my little
canal.”

“Still I don't know what you're talking about,” drawled he. “You are always
suspecting everybody of double-dealing. I gather that this is another
instance of your infirmity. Really, Blacklock, the world isn't wholly made
up of scoundrels.”

“I know that,” said I. “And I will even admit that its scoundrels are
seldom made up wholly of scoundrelism. Even Roebuck would rather do the
decent thing, if he can do it without endangering his personal interests.
As for you--I regard you as one of the decentest men I ever knew--outside
of business. And even there, I believe you'd keep your word, as long as the
other fellow kept his.”

“Thank you,” said he, bowing ironically. “This flattery makes me suspect
you've come to get something.”

“On the contrary,” said I. “I want to give something. I want to give you my
coal mines.”

“I thought you'd see that our offer was fair,” said he. “And I'm glad you
have changed your mind about quarreling with your best friends. We can be
useful to you, you to us. A break would be silly.”

“That's the way it looks to me,” I assented. And I decided that my sharp
talk to Roebuck had set them to estimating my value to them.

“Sam Ellersly,” Langdon presently remarked, “tells me he's campaigning hard
for you at the Travelers. I hope you'll make it. We're rather a slow crowd;
a few men like you might stir things up.”

I am always more than willing to give others credit for good sense and good
motives. It was not vanity, but this disposition to credit others with
sincerity and sense, that led me to believe him, both as to the Coal matter
and as to the Travelers Club. “Thanks, Langdon,” I said; and that he might
look no further for my motive, I added: “I want to get into that club much
as the winner of a race wants the medal that belongs to him. I've built
myself up into a rich man, into one of the powers in finance, and I feel
I'm entitled to recognition.”

“I don't quite follow you,” he said. “I can't see that you'll be either
better or worse for getting into the Travelers.”

“No more I shall,” replied I. “No more is the winner of the race the better
or the worse for having the medal. But he wants it.”

He had a queer expression. I suppose he regarded it as a joke, my attaching
apparently so much importance to a thing he cared nothing about. “You've
always had that sort of thing,” said I, “and so you don't appreciate it.
You're like a respectable woman. She can't imagine what all the fuss over
women keeping a good reputation is about. Well, just let her lose it!”

“Perhaps,” said he.

“And,” I went on, “you can have the rule about the waiting list suspended,
and can move me up and get me in at once.”

“We don't do things in quite such a hurry at the Travelers,” said he,
laughing. “However, we'll try to comply with your commands.”

His generous, cordial offer made me half ashamed of the plot I had
underneath my submission about the coal mines--a plot to get into the coal
combine in order to gather the means to destroy it, and perhaps reconstruct
it with myself in control. I made up my mind that, if he continued to act
squarely, I would alter those plans.

“If you don't mind,” Langdon was going on, “I'll make a suggestion--merely
a suggestion. It might not be a bad idea for you to arrange to--to
eliminate some of the--the popular features from your--brokerage business.
There are several influential members of the Travelers who have a--a
prejudice--”

“I understand,” I interposed, to spare him the necessity of saying things
he thought I might regard as impertinent. “They look on me as a keeper of a
high-class bucket-shop.” “That's about the way they'd put it.”

“But the things they object to are, unfortunately, my 'strong hold,'” I
explained. “You other big fellows gather in the big investors by simply
announcing your projects in a dignified way. I haven't got the ear of that
class of people. I have to send out my letters, have to advertise in all
the cities and towns, have to catch the little fellows. You can afford to
send out engraved invitations; I have to gather in my people with brass
bands and megaphones. Don't forget that my people count in the totals
bigger than yours. And what's my chief value to you? Why, when you want to
unload, I furnish the crowd to unload on, the crowd that gives you and your
big customers cash for your water and wind. I don't see my way to letting
go of what I've got until I get hold of what I'm reaching for.” All this
with not a suspicion in my mind that he was at the same game that had
caused Roebuck to “hint” that same proposal. What a “con man” high finance
got when Mowbray Langdon became active down town!

“That's true,” he admitted, with a great air of frankness. “But the cry
that you're not a financier, but a bucket-shop man, might be fatal at the
Travelers. Of course, the sacrifice would be large for such a small object.
Still, you might have to make it--if you really want to get in.”

“I'll think it over,” said I. He thought I meant that I'd think over
dropping my power--thought I was as big a snob as he and his friends of the
Travelers, willing to make any sacrifice to be “in the push.” But, while
Matthew Blacklock has the streak of snob in him that's natural to all
human beings and to most animals, he is not quite insane. No, the thing
I intended to think over was how to stay in the “bucket-shop” business,
but wash myself of its odium. Bucket-shop! What snobbery! Yet it's human
nature, too. The wholesale merchant looks down on the retailer, the big
retailer on the little; the burglar despises the pickpocket; the financier,
the small promoter; the man who works with his brain, the man who works
with his hands. A silly lot we are--silly to look down, sillier to feel
badly when we're looked down upon.




VI. OF “GENTLEMEN”


When I got back to my office and was settling in to the proofs of the
“Letter to Investors,” which I published in sixty newspapers throughout the
country and which daily reached upward of five million people, Sam Ellersly
came in. His manner was certainly different from what it had ever been
before; a difference so subtle that I couldn't describe it more nearly than
to say it made me feel as if he had not until then been treating me as of
the same class with himself. I smiled to myself and made an entry in my
mental ledger to the credit of Mowbray Langdon.

“That club business is going nicely,” said Sam. “Langdon is enthusiastic,
and I find you've got good friends on the committee.”

I knew that well enough. Hadn't I been carrying them on my books at a good
round loss for two years?

“If it wasn't for--for some features of this business of yours,” he went
on, “I'd say there wouldn't be the slightest trouble.”

“Bucket-shop?” said I with an easy laugh, though this nagging was beginning
to get on my nerves.

“Exactly,” said he. “And, you know, you advertise yourself like--like--”

“Like everybody else, only more successfully than most,” said I. “Everybody
advertises, each one adapting his advertising to the needs of his
enterprises, as far as he knows how.”

“That's true enough,” he confessed. “But there are enterprises and
enterprises, you know.”

“You can tell 'em, Sam,” said I, “that I never put out a statement I don't
believe to be true, and that when any of my followers lose on one of my
tips, I've lost on it, too. For I play my own tips--and that's more than
can be said of any 'financier' in this town.”

“It'd be no use to tell 'em that,” said he. “Character's something of
a consideration in social matters, of course. But it isn't the chief
consideration by a long shot, and the absence of it isn't necessarily
fatal.”

“I'm the biggest single operator in the country,” I went on. “And it's my
methods that give me success--because I know how to advertise--how to keep
my name before the country, and how to make men say, whenever they hear
it: 'There's a shrewd, honest fellow.' That and the people it brings me,
in flocks, are my stock in trade. Honesty's a bluff with most of the big
respectables; under cover of their respectability, of their 'old and
honored names,' of their social connections, of their church-going and
that, they do all sorts of queer work.”

“To hear you talk,” put in Sam, with a grin, “one would think you didn't
shove off millions of dollars of suspicious stuff on the public through
those damn clever letters of yours.”

“There's where you didn't stop to think, Sam,” said I. “When I say a
stock's going to rise, it rises. When I stop talking about it, it may go on
rising or it may fall. But I never advise anybody to buy except when I have
every reason to believe it's a good thing. If they hold on too long, that's
their own lookout.”

“But they invest--”

“You use words too carelessly,” I said. “When I say buy, I don't mean
_invest_. When I mean invest, I say invest.” There I laughed. “It's a
word I don't often use.”

“And that's what you call honesty!” jeered he.

“That's what I call honesty,” I retorted, “and that _is_ honesty.” And
I thought so then.

“Well--every man has a right to his own notion of what's honest,” he said.
“But no man's got a right to complain if a fellow with a different notion
criticizes him.”

“None in the world,” I assented. “Do _you_ criticize me?”

“No, no, no, indeed!” he answered, nervous, and taking seriously what I had
intended as a joke.

After a while I dragged in _the_ subject. “One thing I can and will
do to get myself in line for that club,” I said, like a seal on promenade.
“I'm sick of the crowd I travel with--the men and the women. I feel it's
about time I settled down. I've got a fortune and establishment that needs
a woman to set it off. I can make some woman happy. You don't happen to
know any nice girls--the right sort, I mean?”

“Not many.” said Sam. “You'd better go back to the country where you came
from, and get her there. She'd be eternally grateful, and her head wouldn't
be full of mercenary nonsense.”

“Excuse me!” exclaimed I. “It'd turn her head. She'd go clean crazy. She'd
plunge in up to her neck--and not being used to these waters, she'd make
a show of herself, and probably drown, dragging me down with her, if
possible.”

Sam laughed. “Keep out of marriage, Matt,” he advised, not so obtuse to my
real point as he wanted me to believe. “I know the kind of girl you've got
in mind. She'd marry you for your money, and she'd never appreciate you.
She'd see in you only the lack of the things she's been taught to lay
stress on.”

“For instance?”

“I couldn't tell you any more than I could enable you to recognize a person
you'd never seen by describing him.”

“Ain't I a gentleman?” I inquired.

He laughed, as if the idea tickled him. “Of course,” he said. “Of course.”

“Ain't I got as proper a country place as there is a-going? Ain't my
apartment in the Willoughby a peach? Don't I give as elegant dinners as you
ever sat down to? Don't I dress right up to the Piccadilly latest? Don't
I act all right--know enough to keep my feet off the table and my knife
out of my mouth?” All true enough; and I so crude then that I hadn't a
suspicion what a flat contradiction of my pretensions and beliefs about
myself the very words and phrases were.

“You're right in it, Matt,” said Sam. “But--well--you haven't traveled with
our crowd, and they're shy of strangers, especially as--as energetic a sort
of stranger as you are. You're too sudden, Matt--too dazzling--too--”

“Too shiny and new?” said I, beginning to catch his drift. “That'll be
looked after. What I want is you to take me round a bit.”

“I can't ask you to people's houses,” protested he, knowing I'd not realize
what a flimsy pretense that was.

While we were talking I had been thinking--working out the proposition
along lines he had indicated to me without knowing it. “Look here, Sam,” I
said. “You imagine I'm trying to butt in with a lot of people that don't
know me and don't want to know me. But that ain't my point of view. Those
people can be useful to me. I need 'em. What do I care whether they want to
be useful to me or not? The machine'd have run down and rusted out long ago
if you and your friends' idea of a gentleman had been taken seriously by
anybody who had anything to do and knew how to do it. In this world you've
got to _make_ people do what's for your good and their own. Your
idea of a gentleman was put forward by lazy fakirs who were living off of
what their ungentlemanly ancestors had annexed, and who didn't want to be
disturbed. So they 'fixed' the game by passing these rules you and your
kind are fools enough to abide by--that is, you are fools, unless you
haven't got brains enough to get on in a free-and-fair-for-all.”

Sam laughed.. “There's a lot of truth in what you say,” he admitted.

“However,” I ended, “my plans don't call for hurry just there. When I get
ready to go round, I'll let you know.”




VII. BLACKLOCK GOES INTO TRAINING


This brings me to the ugliest story my enemies have concocted against me.
No one appreciates more thoroughly than I that, to rise high, a man must
have his own efforts seconded by the flood of vituperation that his enemies
send to overwhelm him, and which washes him far higher than he could hope
to lift himself. So I do not here refer to any attack on me in the public
prints; I think of them only with amusement and gratitude. The story that
rankles is the one these foes of mine set creeping, like a snake under the
fallen leaves, everywhere, anywhere, unseen, without a trail. It has been
whispered into every ear--and it is, no doubt, widely believed--that I
deliberately put old Bromwell Ellersly “in a hole,” and there tortured him
until he consented to try to compel his daughter to marry me.

It is possible that, if I had thought of such a devilish device, I might
have tried it--is not all fair in love? But there was no need for my
cudgeling my brains to carry that particular fortification on my way to
what I had fixed my will upon. _Bromwell Ellersly came to me of his own
accord_.

I suppose the Ellerslys must have talked me over in the family circle.
However this may be, my acquaintance with her father began with Sam's
asking me to lunch with him. “The governor has heard me talk of you so
much,” said he, “that he is anxious to meet you.”

I found him a dried-up, conventional old gentleman, very proud of his
ancestors, none of whom I had ever heard of, and very positive that a great
deal of deference was due him--though on what grounds I could not then,
and can not now, make out. I soon discovered that it was the scent of my
stock-tip generosity, wafted to him by Sammy, that had put him hot upon my
trail. I hadn't gone far into his affairs before I learned that he had been
speculating, mortgaging, kiting notes, doing what he called, and thought,
“business” on a large scale. He regarded business as beneath the dignity
and the intellect of a “gentleman”--how my gorge does rise at that word! So
he put his great mind on it only for a few hours now and then; he reserved
the rest of his time for what he regarded as the proper concerns of a
gentleman--attending to social “duties,” reading pretentious books, looking
at the pictures and listening to the music decreed fashionable.

They charge that I put him “in a hole.” In fact, I found him at the bottom
of a deep pit he had dug for himself; and when he first met me he was,
without having the sense to realize it, just about to go smash, with not a
penny for his old age. As soon as I had got this fact clear of the tangle,
I showed it to him.

“My God, what is to become of _me_?” he said, That was his only
thought--not, what is to become of my wife and daughter; but, what is to
become of “_me_!” I do not blame him for this. Naturally enough,
people who have always been used to everything become, unconsciously,
monsters of egotism and selfishness; it is natural, too, that they should
imagine themselves liberal and generous if they give away occasionally
something that costs them, at most, nothing more serious than the foregoing
of some extravagant luxury or other. I recite his remark simply to show
what manner of man he was, what sort of creature I had to deal with.

I offered to help him, and I did help him. Is there any one, knowing
anything of the facts of life, who will censure me when I admit that
I--with deliberation--simply tided him over, did not make for him and
present to him a fortune? What chance should I have had, if I had been so
absurdly generous to a man who deserved nothing but punishment for his
selfish and bigoted mode of life? I took away his worst burdens; but I left
him more than he could carry without my help. And it was not until he had
appealed, in vain to all his social friends to relieve him of the necessity
of my aid, not until he realized that I was his only hope of escaping a
sharp comedown from luxury to very modest comfort in a flat somewhere--not
until then did his wife send me an invitation to dinner. And I had not so
much as hinted that I wanted it.

I shall never forget the smallest detail of that dinner--it was a purely
“family” affair, only the Ellerslys and I. I can feel now the oppressive
atmosphere, the look as of impending sacrilege upon the faces of the old
servants; I can see Mrs. Ellersly trying to condescend to be “gracious,”
 and treating me as if I were some sort of museum freak or menagerie
exhibit. I can see Anita. She was like a statue of snow; she spoke not
a word; if she lifted her eyes, I failed to note it. And when I was
leaving--I with my collar wilted from the fierce, nervous strain I had been
enduring--Mrs. Ellersly, in that voice of hers into which I don't believe
any shade of a real human emotion ever penetrated, said: “You must come to
see us, Mr. Blacklock. We are always at home after five.”

I looked at Miss Ellersly. She was white to the lips now, and the spangles
on her white dress seemed bits of ice glittering there. She said nothing;
but I knew she felt my look, and that it froze the ice the more closely in
around her heart. “Thank you,” I muttered.

I stumbled in the hall; I almost fell down the broad steps. I stopped at
the first bar and took three drinks in quick succession. I went on down the
avenue, breathing like an exhausted swimmer. “I'll give her up!” I cried
aloud, so upset was I.

I am a man of impulse; but I have trained myself not to be a
_creature_ of impulse, at least not in matters of importance. Without
that patient and painful schooling, I shouldn't have got where I now am;
probably I'd still be blacking boots, or sheet-writing for some bookmaker,
or clerking it for some broker. Before I got to my rooms, the night air and
my habit of the “sober second thought” had cooled me back to rationality.

“I want her, I need her,” I was saying to myself. “I am worthier of her
than are those mincing manikins she has been bred to regard as men. She is
for me--she belongs to me. I'll abandon her to no smirking puppet who'd
wear her as a donkey would a diamond. Why should I do myself and her an
injury simply because she has been too badly brought up to know her own
interest?”

And now I see all the smooth frauds, all the weak people who never have
purposes or passions worthy of the name, all the finicky, finger-dusting
gentry with the “fine souls,” who flatter themselves that their timidity is
the squeamishness of superior sensibilities--I see all these feeble folk
fluttering their feeble fingers in horror of me. “The brute!” they cry;
“the bounder!” Well, I accept the names quite cheerfully. Those are the
epithets the wishy-washy always hurl at the strong; they put me in the
small and truly aristocratic class of men who _do_. I proudly avow
myself no subscriber to the code that was made by the shearers to encourage
the sheep to keep on being nice docile animals, trotting meekly up to
be shorn or slaughtered as their masters may decide. I harm no man, and
no woman; but neither do I pause to weep over any man or any woman who
flings himself or herself upon my steady spear. I try to be courteous and
considerate to all; but I do not stop when some fellow who has something
that belongs to me shouts “Rude!” at me to sheer me off.

At the same time, her delicate beauty, her quiet, distinctive, high-bred
manner, had thrust it home to me that in certain respects I was ignorant
and crude--as who would not have been, brought up as was I? I knew there
was, somewhere between my roughness of the uncut individuality and the
smoothness of the planed and sand-papered nonentity of her “set,” a mean,
better than either, better because more efficient.

When this was clear to me I sent for my trainer. He was one of those spare,
wiry Englishmen, with skin like tanned and painted hide--brown except
where the bones seem about to push their sharp angles through, and there
a frosty, winter-apple red. He dressed like a Deadwood gambler, he talked
like a stable boy; but for all that, you couldn't fail to see he was a
gentleman born and bred. Yes, he was a gentleman, though he mixed profanity
into his ordinary flow of conversation more liberally than did I when in a
rage.

I stood up before him, threw my coat back, thrust my thumbs into my
trousers pockets and slowly turned about like a ready-made tailor's dummy.
“Monson,” said I, “what do you think of me?”

He looked me over as if I were a horse he was about to buy. “Sound, I'd
say,” was his verdict. “Good wind--uncommon good wind. A goer, and a
stayer. Not a lump. Not a hair out of place.” He laughed. “Action a bit
high perhaps--for the track. But a grand reach.”

“I know all that,” said I. “You miss my point. Suppose you wanted to enter
me for--say, the Society Sweepstakes--what then?”

“Um--um,” he muttered reflectively. “That's different.”

“Don't I look--sort of--new--as if the varnish was still sticky and might
come off on the ladies' dresses and on the fine furniture?”

“Oh--that!” said he dubiously. “But all those kinds of things are matters
of taste.”

“Out with it!” I commanded. “Don't be afraid. I'm not one of those damn
fools that ask for criticism when they want only flattery, as you ought
to know by this time. I'm aware of my good points, know how good they are
better than anybody else in the world. And I suspect my weak points--always
did. I've got on chiefly because I made people tell me to my face what
they'd rather have grinned over behind my back.”

“What's your game?” asked Monson. “I'm in the dark.”

“I'll tell you, Monson. I hired you to train horses. Now I want to hire you
to train me, too. As it's double work, it's double pay.”

“Say on,” said he, “and say it slow.”

“I want to marry,” I explained. “I want to inspect all the offerings before
I decide. You are to train me so that I can go among the herds that'd shy
off from me if I wasn't on to their little ways.”

He looked suspiciously at me, doubtless thinking this some new development
of “American humor.”

“I mean it,” I assured him. “I'm going to train, and train hard. I've got
no time to lose. I must be on my way down the aisle inside of three months.
I give you a free hand. I'll do just what you say.”

“The job's out of my line,” he protested.

“I know better,” said I. “I've always seen the parlor under the stable in
you. We'll begin right away. What do you think of these clothes?”

“Well--they're not exactly noisy,” he said. “But--they're far from silent.
That waistcoat--” He stopped and gave me another nervous, timid look. He
found it hard to believe a man of my sort, so self-assured, would stand the
truth from a man of his second-fiddle sort.

“Go on!” I commanded. “Speak out! Mowbray Langdon had on one twice as loud
the other day at the track.”

“But, perhaps you'll remember, it was only his waistcoat that was loud--not
he himself. Now, a man of your manner and voice and--you've got a look out
of the eyes that'd wake the dead all by itself. People can feel you coming
before they hear you. When they feel and hear and see all together--it's
like a brass band in scarlet uniform, with a seven-foot, sky-blue drum
major. If your hair wasn't so black and your eyes so steel-blue and sharp,
and your teeth so big and strong and white, and your jaw such a--such
a--_jaw_--”

“I see the point,” said I. And I did. “You'll find you won't need to tell
me many things twice. I've got a busy day before me here; so we'll have
to suspend this until you come to dine with me at eight--at my rooms.
I want you to put in the time well. Go to my house in the country and
then up to my apartment; take my valet with you; look through all my
belongings--shirts, ties, socks, trousers, waistcoats, clothes of every
kind. Throw out every rag you think doesn't fit in with what I want to be.
How's my grammar?”

I was proud of it; I had been taking more or less pains with my mode of
speech for a dozen years. “Rather too good,” said he. “But that's better
than making the breaks that aren't regarded as good form.”

“Good form!” I exclaimed. “That's it! That's what I want! What does 'good
form' mean?”

He laughed. “You can search me,” said he. “I could easier tell
you--anything else. It's what everybody recognizes on sight, and nobody
knows how to describe. It's like the difference between a cultivated
'jimson' weed and a wild one.”

“Like the difference between Mowbray Langdon and me,” I suggested
good-naturedly. “How about my manners?”

“Not so bad,” said he. “Not so rotten bad. But--when you're polite, you're
a little too polite; when you're not polite, you--”

“Show where I came from too plainly?” said I. “Speak right out--hit good
and hard. Am I too frank for 'good form'?”

“You needn't bother about that,” he assured me. “Say whatever comes into
your head--only, be sure the right sort of thing comes into your head.
Don't talk too much about yourself, for instance. It's good form to think
about yourself all the time; it's bad form to let people see it--in your
talk. Say as little as possible about your business and about what you've
got. Don't be lavish with the I's and the my's.”

“That's harder,” said I. “I'm a man who has always minded his own business,
and cared for nothing else. What could I talk about, except myself?”

“Blest if I know,” replied he. “Where you want to go, the last thing people
mind is their own business--in talk, at least. But you'll get on all right
if you don't worry too much about it. You've got natural independence, and
an original way of putting things, and common sense. Don't be afraid.”

“Afraid!” said I. “I never knew what it was to be afraid.”

“Your nerve'll carry you through,” he assured me. “Nerve'll take a man
anywhere.”

“You never said a truer thing in your life,” said I. “It'll take him
wherever he wants, and, after he's there, it'll get him whatever he wants.”

And with that, I, thinking of my plans and of how sure I was of success,
began to march up and down the office with my chest thrown out--until I
caught myself at it. That stopped me, set me off in a laugh at my own
expense, he joining in with a kind of heartiness I did not like, though I
did not venture to check him.

So ended the first lesson--the first of a long series. I soon saw that
Monson was being most useful to me--far more useful than if he were a
“perfect gentleman” with nothing of the track and stable and back stairs
about him. Being a sort of betwixt and between, he could appreciate my
needs as they could not have been appreciated by a fellow who had never
lived in the rough-and-tumble I had fought my way up through. And being
at bottom a real gentleman, and not one of those nervous, snobbish
make-believes, he wasn't so busy trying to hide his own deficiencies
from me that he couldn't teach me anything. He wasn't afraid of being
found out, as Sam--or perhaps, even Langdon--would have been in the same
circumstances. I wonder if there is another country where so many gentlemen
and ladies are born, or another where so many of them have their natural
gentility educated out of them.




VIII. ON THE TRAIL OF LANGDON


I had Monson with me twice each week-day--early in the morning and again
after business hours until bed-time. Also he spent the whole of every
Saturday and Sunday with me. He developed astonishing dexterity as a
teacher, and as soon as he realized that I had no false pride and was
thoroughly in earnest, he handled me without gloves--like a boxing teacher
who finds that his pupil has the grit of a professional. It was easy enough
for me to grasp the theory of my new business--it was nothing more than “Be
natural.” But the rub came in making myself naturally of the right sort.
I had--as I suppose every man of intelligence and decent instincts has--a
disposition to be friendly and simple. But my manner was by nature what you
might call abrupt. My not very easy task was to learn the subtle difference
between the abrupt that injects a tonic into social intercourse, and the
abrupt that makes the other person shut up with a feeling of having been
insulted.

Then, there was the matter of good taste in conversation. Monson found,
as I soon saw, that my everlasting self-assertiveness was beyond cure. As
I said to him: “I'm afraid you might easier succeed in reducing my chest
measure.” But we worked away at it, and perhaps my readers may discover
even in this narrative, though it is necessarily egotistic, evidence of at
least an honest effort not to be baldly boastful. Monson would have liked
to make of me a self-deprecating sort of person--such as he was himself,
with the result that the other fellow always got the prize and he got left.
But I would have none of it.

“How are people to know about you, if you don't tell 'em?” I argued. “Don't
you yourself admit that men take a man at his own valuation less a slight
discount, and that women take him at his own valuation plus an allowance
for his supposed modesty?”

“Cracking yourself up is vulgar, nevertheless,” declared the Englishman.
“It's the chief reason why we on the other side look on you Americans as a
lot of vulgarians--”

“And are in awe of our superior cleverness,” I put in.

He laughed.

“Well, do the best you can,” said he. “Only, you really must not brag and
swagger, and you must get out of the habit of talking louder than any one
else.”

In the matter of dress, our task was easy. I had a fancy for bright
colors and for strong contrasts; but I know I never indulged in clashes
and discords. It was simply that in clothes I had the same taste as in
pictures--the taste that made me prefer Rubens to Rembrandt. We cast out of
my wardrobe everything in the least doubtful; and I gave away my jeweled
canes, my pins and links and buttons for shirts and waistcoats except plain
gold and pearls. I even left off the magnificent diamond I had worn for
years on my little finger--but I didn't give away that stone; I put it
by for resetting into an engagement ring. However, when I was as quietly
dressed as it was possible for a gentleman to be, he still studied me
dubiously, when he thought I wasn't seeing him. And I recall that he said
once: “It's your face, Blacklock. If you could only manage to look less
like a Spanish bull dashing into the ring, gazing joyfully about for
somebody to gore and toss!”

“But I can't,” said I. “And I wouldn't if I could--because that's
_me_!”

One Saturday he brought a dancing master down to my country place--Dawn
Hill, which I bought of the Dumont estate and completely remodeled. I saw
what the man's business was the instant I looked at him. I left him in the
hall and took Monson into my den.

“Not for me!” I protested. “There's where I draw the line.”

“You don't understand,” he urged. “This fellow, this Alphonse Lynch, out in
the hall there, isn't going to teach you dancing so that you may dance, but
so that you shall be less awkward in strange company.”

“My walk suits me,” said I. “And I don't fall over furniture or trip people
up.”

“True enough,” he answered. “But you haven't the complete control of your
body that'll make you unconscious of it when you're suddenly shot by a
butler into a room full of people you suspect of being unfriendly and
critical.”

Not until he used his authority as trainer-in-full-charge, did I yield. It
may seem absurd to some for a serious man like me solemnly to caper about
in imitation of a scraping, grimacing French-Irishman; but Monson was
right, and I haven't in the least minded the ridicule he has brought on me
by tattling this and the other things everywhere, since he turned against
me. It's nothing new under the sun for the crowds of chuckleheads to laugh
where they ought to applaud; their habit is to laugh and to applaud in the
wrong places. There's no part of my career that I'm prouder of than the
whole of this thorough course of education in the trifles that are yet not
trifles. To have been ignorant is no disgrace; the disgrace comes when one
persists in ignorance and glories in it.

Yet those who make the most pretensions in this topsy-turvy of a world
regard it as a disgrace to have been obscure and ignorant, and pride
themselves upon their persistence in their own kind of obscurity and
ignorance! No wonder the few strong men do about as they please with such a
race of nincompoopery. If they didn't grow old and tired, what would they
not do?

All this time I was giving myself--or thought I was giving myself--chiefly
to my business, as usual. I know now that the new interests had in fact
crowded the things down town far into the background, had impaired my
judgment, had suspended my common sense; but I had no inkling of this then,
The most important matter that was occupying me down town was pushing
Textile up toward par. Langdon's doubts, little though they influenced me,
still made enough of an impression to cause me to test the market. I sold
for him at ninety, as he had directed; I sold in quantity every day. But no
matter how much I unloaded, the price showed no tendency to break.

“This,” said I to myself, “is a testimonial to the skill with which I
prepared for my bull campaign.” And that seemed to me--all unsuspicious as
I then was--a sufficient explanation of the steadiness of the stock which I
had worked to establish in the public confidence.

I felt that, if my matrimonial plans should turn out as I confidently
expected, I should need a much larger fortune than I had--for I was
determined that my wife should have an establishment second to none.
Accordingly, I enlarged my original plan. I had intended to keep close
to Langdon in that plunge; I believed I controlled the market, but I
hadn't been in Wall Street twenty years without learning that the worst
thunderbolts fall from cloudless skies. Without being in the least
suspicious of Langdon, and simply acting on the general principle that
surprise and treachery are part of the code of high finance, I had prepared
to guard, first, against being taken in the rear by a secret change of plan
on Langdon's part, and second, against being involved and overwhelmed by a
sudden secret attack on him from some associate of his who might think he
had laid himself open to successful raiding.

The market is especially dangerous toward Christmas and in the
spring--toward Christmas the big fellows often juggle the stocks to get the
money for their big Christmas gifts and alms; toward spring the motive is,
of course, the extra summer expenses of their families and the commencement
gifts to colleges. It was now late in the spring.

I say, I had intended to be cautious. I abandoned caution and rushed in
boldly, feeling that the market was, in general, safe and that Textile was
under my control--and that I was one of the kings of high finance, with
my lucky star in the zenith. I decided to continue my bull campaign on my
own account for two weeks after I had unloaded for Langdon, to continue
it until the stock was at par. I had no difficulty in pushing it to
ninety-seven, and I was not alarmed when I found myself loaded up with
it, quoted at ninety-eight for the preferred and thirty for the common. I
assumed that I was practically its only supporter and that it would slowly
settle back as I slowly withdrew my support.

To my surprise, the stock did not yield immediately under my efforts to
depress it. I sold more heavily; Textile continued to show a tendency to
rise. I sold still more heavily; it broke a point or two, then steadied
and rose again. Instead of sending out along my secret lines for inside
information, as I should have done, and would have done had I not been in
a state of hypnotized judgment--I went to Langdon! I who had been studying
those scoundrels for twenty-odd years, and dealing directly with and for
them for ten years!

He wasn't at his office; they told me there that they didn't know whether
he was at his town house or at his place in the country--“probably in the
country,” said his down-town secretary, with elaborate carelessness. “He
wouldn't be likely to stay away from the office or not to send for me, if
he were in town, would he?”

It takes an uncommon good liar to lie to me when I'm on the alert. As I was
determined to see Langdon, I was in so far on the alert. And I felt the
fellow was lying. “That's reasonable,” said I. “Call me up, if you hear
from him. I want to see him--important, but not immediate.” And I went
away, having left the impression that I would make no further effort.

Incredible though it may seem, especially to those who know how careful I
am to guard every point and to see in every friend a possible foe, I still
did not suspect that smooth, that profound scoundrel. I do not use these
epithets with heat. I flatter myself I am a connoisseur of finesse and can
look even at my own affairs with judicial impartiality. And Langdon was,
and is now, such a past master of finesse that he compels the admiration
even of his victims. He's like one of those fabled Damascus blades. When
he takes a leg off, the victim forgets to suffer in his amazement at the
cleanness of the wound, in his incredulity that the leg is no longer
part of him. “Langdon,” said I to myself, “is a sly dog. No doubt he's
busy about some woman, and has covered his tracks.” Yet I ought, in the
circumstances, instantly to have suspected that I was the person he was
dodging.

I went up to his house. You, no doubt, have often seen and often admired
its beautiful façade, so simple that it hides its own magnificence from
all but experienced eyes, so perfect in its proportions that it hides the
vastness of the palace of which it is the face. I have heard men say: “I'd
like to have a house--a moderate-sized house--one about the size of Mowbray
Langdon's--though perhaps a little more elegant, not so plain.”

That's typical of the man. You have to look closely at him, to study him,
before you appreciate how he has combined a thousand details of manner and
dress into an appearance which, while it can not but impress the ordinary
man with its distinction, suggests to all but the very observant the most
modest plainness and simplicity. How few realize that simplicity must be
profound, complex, studied, not to be and to appear crude and coarse. In
those days that truth had just begun to dawn on me.

“Mr. Langdon isn't at home,” said the servant.

I had been at his house once before; I knew he occupied the left side--the
whole of the second floor, so shut off that it not only had a separate
entrance, but also could not be reached by those in the right side of
the house without descending to the entrance hall and ascending the left
stairway.

“Just take my card to his private secretary, to Mr. Rathburn,” said I. “Mr.
Langdon has doubtless left a message for me.”

The butler hesitated, yielded, showed me into the reception-room off the
entrance hall. I waited a few seconds, then adventured the stairway to
the left, up which he had disappeared. I entered the small salon in which
Langdon had received me on my other visit. From the direction of an open
door, I heard his voice--he was saying: “I am not at home. There's no
message.”

And still I did not realize that it was I he was avoiding!

“It's no use now, Langdon,” I called cheerfully. “Beg pardon for seeming to
intrude. I misunderstood--or didn't hear where the servant said I was to
wait. However, no harm done. So long! I'm off.” But I made no move toward
the door by which I had entered; instead, I advanced a few feet nearer the
door from which his voice had come.

After a brief--a very brief--pause, there came in Langdon's
voice--laughing, not a trace of annoyance: “I might have known! Come in,
Matt!”




IX. LANGDON AT HOME


I entered, with an amused glance at the butler, who was giving over his
heavy countenance to a delightful exhibition of disgust and discomfiture.
It was Langdon's sitting-room. He had had the carved antique oak interior
of a room in an old French palace torn out and transported to New York
and set up for him. I had made a study of that sort of thing, and at Dawn
Hill had done something toward realizing my own ideas of the splendid.
But a glance showed me that I was far surpassed. What I had done seemed
in comparison like the composition of a school-boy beside an essay by
Goldsmith or Hazlitt.

And in the midst of this quiet splendor sat, or rather lounged, Langdon,
reading the newspapers. He was dressed in a dark blue velvet house-suit
with facings and cords of blue silk a shade or so lighter than the suit. I
had always thought him handsome; he looked now like a god. He was smoking
a cigarette in an oriental holder nearly a foot long; but the air of
the room, so perfect was the ventilation, instead of being scented with
tobacco, had the odor of some fresh, clean, slightly saline perfume.

I think what was in my mind must have shown in my face, must have subtly
flattered him, for, when I looked at him, he was giving me a look of
genuine friendly kindliness. “This is--perfect, Langdon,” said I. “And I
think I'm a judge.”

“Glad you like it,” said he, trying to dissemble his satisfaction in so
strongly impressing me.

“You must take me through your house sometime,” I went on. “I'm going to
build soon. No--don't be afraid I'll imitate. I'm too vain for that. But I
want suggestions. I'm not ashamed to go to school to a master--to anybody,
for that matter.”

“Why do you build?” said he. “A town house is a nuisance. If I could induce
my wife to take the children to the country to live, I'd dispose of this.”

“That's it--the wife,” said I.

“But you have no wife. At least--”

“No,” I replied with a laugh. “Not yet. But I'm going to have.”

I interpreted his expression then as amused cynicism. But I see a different
meaning in it now. And I can recall his tone, can find a strained note
which then escaped me in his usual mocking drawl.

“To marry?” said he. “I haven't heard of that.”

“Nor no one else,” said I.

“Except her,” said he.

“Not even except her,” said I. “But I've got my eye on her--and you know
what that means with me.”

“Yes, I know,” drawled he. Then he added, with a curious twinkle which I do
not now misunderstand: “We have somewhat the same weakness.”

“I shouldn't call it a weakness,” said I. “It's the quality that makes the
chief difference between us and the common run--the fellows that have no
purposes beyond getting comfortably through each day--”

“And getting real happiness,” he interrupted, with just a tinge of
bitterness.

“We wouldn't think it happiness,” was my answer.

“The worse for us,” he replied. “We're under the tyranny of to-morrow--and
happiness is impossible.”

“May I look at your bedroom?” I asked.

“Certainly,” he assented.

I pushed open the door he indicated. At first glimpse I was disappointed.
The big room looked like a section of a hospital ward. It wasn't until
I had taken a second and very careful look at the tiled floor, walls,
ceiling, that I noted that those plain smooth tiles were of the very
finest, were probably of his own designing, certainly had been imported
from some great Dutch or German kiln. Not an inch of drapery, not a
picture, nothing that could hold dust or germs anywhere; a square of
sanitary matting by the bed; another square opposite an elaborate
exercising machine. The bed was of the simplest metallic construction--but
I noted that the metal was the finest bronze. On it was a thin, hard
mattress. You could wash the big room down and out with the hose, without
doing any damage.

“Quite a contrast,” said I, glancing from the one room to the other.

“My architect is a crank on sanitation,” he explained, from his lounge.

I noted that the windows were huge--to admit floods of light--and that
they were hermetically sealed so that the air should be only the pure air
supplied from the ventilating apparatus. To many people that room would
have seemed a cheaply got together cell; to me, once I had examined it, it
was evidently built at enormous cost and represented an extravagance of
common-sense luxury which was more than princely or royal.

Suddenly my mind reverted to my business. “How do you account for the
steadiness of Textile, Langdon?” I asked, returning to the carved
sitting-room and trying to put those surroundings out of my mind.

“I don't account for it,” was his languid, uninterested reply.

“Any of your people under the market?”

“It isn't to my interest to have it supported, is it?” he replied.

“I know that,” I admitted. “But why doesn't it drop?”

“Those letters of yours may have overeducated the public in confidence,”
 suggested he. “Your followers have the habit of believing implicitly
whatever you say.”

“Yes, but I haven't written a line about Textile for nearly a month now,” I
pretended to object, my vanity fairly purring with pleasure.

“That's the only reason I can give,” said he.

“You are sure none of your people is supporting the stock?” I asked, as a
form and not for information; for I thought I knew they weren't--I trusted
him to have seen to that.

“I'd like to get my holdings back,” said he. “I can't buy until it's down.
And I know none of my people would dare support it.”

You will notice he did not say directly that he was not himself supporting
the market; he simply so answered me that I, not suspecting him, would
think he reassured me. There is another of those mysteries of conscience.
Had it been necessary, Langdon would have told me the lie flat and direct,
would have told it without a tremor of the voice or a blink of the eye,
would have lied to me as I have heard him, and almost all the big fellows,
lie under oath before courts and legislative committees; yet, so long as it
was possible, he would thus lie to me with lies that were not lies. As if
negative lies are not falser and more cowardly than positive lies, because
securer and more deceptive.

“Well, then, the price must break,” said I, “It won't be many days before
the public begins to realize that there isn't anybody under Textile.”

“No sharp break!” he said carelessly. “No panic!”

“I'll see to that,” replied I, with not a shadow of a notion of the
subtlety behind his warning.

“I hope it will break soon,” he then said, adding in his friendliest voice
with what I now know was malignant treachery: “You owe it to me to bring it
down.” That meant that he wished me to increase my already far too heavy
and dangerous line of shorts.

Just then a voice--a woman's voice--came from the salon. “May I come in? Do
I interrupt?” it said, and its tone struck me as having in it something of
plaintive appeal.

“Excuse me a moment, Blacklock,” said he, rising with what was for him
haste.

But he was too late. The woman entered, searching the room with a piercing,
suspicious gaze. At once I saw, behind that look, a jealousy that pounced
on every object that came into its view, and studied it with a hope that
feared and a fear that hoped. When her eyes had toured the room, they
paused upon him, seemed to be saying: “You've baffled me again, but I'm not
discouraged. I shall catch you yet.”

“Well, my dear?” said Langdon, whom she seemed faintly to amuse. “It's only
Mr. Blacklock. Mr. Blacklock, my wife.”

I bowed; she looked coldly at me, and her slight nod was more than a hint
that she wished to be left alone with her husband.

I said to him: “Well, I'll be off. Thank you for--”

“One moment,” he interrupted. Then to his wife: “Anything special?”

She flushed. “No--nothing special. I just came to see you. But if I am
disturbing you--as usual--”

“Not at all,” said he. “When Blacklock and I have finished, I'll come to
you. It won't be longer than an hour--or so.”

“Is that all?” she said almost savagely. Evidently she was one of those
women who dare not make “scenes” with their husbands in private and so are
compelled to take advantage of the presence of strangers to ease their
minds. She was an extremely pretty woman, would have been beautiful but for
the worn, strained, nervous look that probably came from her jealousy. She
was small in stature; her figure was approaching that stage at which a
woman is called “well rounded” by the charitable, fat by the frank and
accurate. A few years more and she would be hunting down and destroying
early photographs. There was in the arrangement of her hair and in the
details of her toilet--as well as in her giving way to her tendency to
fat--that carelessness that so many women allow themselves, once they are
safely married to a man they care for.

“Curious,” thought I, “that being married to him should make her feel
secure enough of him to let herself go, although her instinct is warning
her all the time that she isn't in the least sure of him. Her laziness must
be stronger than her love--her laziness or her vanity.”

While I was thus sizing her up, she was reluctantly leaving. She didn't
even give me the courtesy of a bow--whether from self-absorption or from
haughtiness I don't know; probably from both. She was a Western woman,
and when those Western women do become perverts to New York's gospel of
snobbishness, they are the worst snobs in the push. Langdon, regardless of
my presence, looked after her with a faintly amused, faintly contemptuous
expression that--well, it didn't fit in with _my_ notion of what
constitutes a gentleman. In fact, I didn't know which of them had come off
the worse in that brief encounter in my presence. It was my first glimpse
of a fashionable behind-the-scenes, and it made a profound impression upon
me--an impression that has grown deeper as I have learned how much of the
typical there was in it. Dirt looks worse in the midst of finery than where
one naturally expects to find it--looks worse, and is worse.

When we were seated again, Langdon, after a few reflective puffs at his
cigarette, said: “So you're about to marry?”

“I hope so,” said I. “But as I haven't asked her yet, I can't be quite
sure.” For obvious reasons I wasn't so enamored of the idea of matrimony as
I had been a few minutes before.

“I trust you're making a sensible marriage,” said he. “If the part that may
be glamour should by chance rub clean away, there ought to be something to
make one feel he wasn't wholly an ass.”

“Very sensible,” I replied with emphasis. “I want the woman. I need her.”

He inspected the coal of his cigarette, lifting his eyebrows at it.
Presently he said: “And she?”

“I don't know how she feels about it--as I told you,” I replied curtly. In
spite of myself, my eyes shifted and my skin began to burn. “By the way,
Langdon, what's the name of your architect?”

“Wilder and Marcy,” said he. “They're fairly satisfactory, if you tell
'em exactly what you want and watch 'em all the time. They're perfectly
conventional and so can't distinguish between originality that's artistic
and originality that's only bizarre. They're like most people--they keep to
the beaten track and fight tooth and nail against being drawn out of it and
against those who do go out of it.”

“I'll have a talk with Marcy this very day,” said I.

“Oh, you're in a hurry!” He laughed. “And you haven't asked her. You remind
me of that Greek philosopher who was in love with Lais. They asked him:
'But does she love you?' And he said: 'One does not inquire of the fish one
likes whether it likes one.'”

I flushed. “You'll pardon me, Langdon,” said I, “but I don't like that. It
isn't my attitude at all toward--the right sort of women.”

He looked half-quizzical, half-apologetic. “Ah, to be sure,” said he. “I
forgot you weren't a married man.”

“I don't think I'll ever lose the belief that there's a quality in a good
woman for a man to--to respect and look up to.”

“I envy you,” said he, but his eyes were mocking still. I saw he was a
little disdainful of my rebuking _him_--and angry at me, too.

“Woman's a subject of conversation that men ought to avoid,” said I
easily--for, having set myself right, I felt I could afford to smooth him
down.

“Well, good-by--good luck--or, if I may be permitted to say it to one so
touchy, the kind of luck you're bent on having, whether it's good or bad.”

“If my luck ain't good, I'll make it good,” said I with a laugh.

And so I left him, with a look in his eyes that came back to me long
afterward when I realized the full meaning of that apparently almost
commonplace interview.

That same day I began to plunge on Textile, watching the market closely,
that I might go more slowly should there be signs of a dangerous break--for
no more than Langdon did I want a sudden panicky slump. The price held
steady, however; but I, fool that I was, certain the fall must come,
plunged on, digging the pit for my own destruction deeper and deeper.




X. TWO “PILLARS OF SOCIETY”


I was neither seeing nor hearing from the Ellerslys, father or son; but,
as I knew why, I was not disquieted. I had made them temporarily easy in
their finances just before that dinner, and they, being fatuous, incurable
optimists, were probably imagining they would never need me again. I did
not disturb them until Monson and I had got my education so well under
way that even I, always severe in self-criticism and now merciless, was
compelled to admit to myself a distinct change for the better. You know
how it is with a boy at the “growing age”--how he bursts out of clothes
and ideas of life almost as fast as they are supplied him, so swiftly is
he transforming into a man. Well, I think it is much that way with us
Americans all our lives; we continue on and on at the growing age. And
if one of us puts his or her mind hard upon growth in some particular
direction, you see almost overnight a development fledged to the last
tail-feathers and tip of top-knot where there was nothing at all. What
miracles can be wrought by an open mind and a keen sense of the cumulative
power of the unwasted minute! All this apropos of a very trivial matter,
you may be thinking. But, be careful how you judge what is trivial and what
important in a universe built up of atoms.

However--When my education seemed far enough advanced, I sent for Sam.
He, after his footless fashion, didn't bother to acknowledge my note. His
margin account with me was at the moment straight; I turned to his father.
I had my cashier send him a formal, type-written letter signed Blacklock &
Co., informing him that his account was overdrawn and that we “would be
obliged if he would give the matter his immediate attention.” The note must
have reached him the following morning; but he did not come until, after
waiting three days, “we” sent him a sharp demand for a check for the
balance due us.

A pleasing, aristocratic-looking figure he made as he entered my office,
with his air of the man whose hands have never known the stains of toil,
with his manner of having always received deferential treatment. There
was no pretense in my curt greeting, my tone of “despatch your business,
sir, and be gone”; for I was both busy and much irritated against him.
“I guess you want to see our cashier,” said I, after giving him a hasty,
absent-minded hand-shake. “My boy out there will take you to him.”

The old do-nothing's face lost its confident, condescending expression. His
lip quivered, and I think there were tears in his bad, dim, gray-green
eyes. I suppose he thought his a profoundly pathetic case; no doubt he
hadn't the remotest conception what he really was--and no doubt, also,
there are many who would honestly take his view. As if the fact that he
was born with all possible advantages did not make him and his plight
inexcusable. It passes my comprehension why people of his sort, when
suffering from the calamities they have deliberately brought upon
themselves by laziness and self-indulgence and extravagance, should get
a sympathy that is withheld from those of the honest human rank and file
falling into far more real misfortunes not of their own making.

“No, my dear Blacklock,” said he, cringing now as easily as he had
condescended--how to cringe and how to condescend are taught at the same
school, the one he had gone to all his life. “It is you I want to talk
with. And, first, I owe you my apologies. I know you'll make allowances
for one who was never trained to business methods. I've always been like a
child in those matters.”

“You frighten me,” said I. “The last 'gentleman' who came throwing me off
my guard with that plea was shrewd enough to get away with a very large
sum of my hard-earned money. Besides”--and I was laughing, though not too
good-naturedly--“I've noticed that you 'gentlemen' become vague about
business only when the balance is against you. When it's in your favor, you
manage to get your minds on business long enough to collect to the last
fraction of a cent.”

He heartily echoed my laugh. “I only wish I _were_ clever,” said he.
“However, I've come to ask your indulgence. I'd have been here before,
but those who owe me have been putting me off. And they're of the sort of
people whom it's impossible to press.”

“I'd like to accommodate you further,” said I, shedding that last little
hint as a cliff sheds rain, “but your account has been in an unsatisfactory
state for nearly a month now.”

“I'm sure you'll give me a few days longer,” was his easy reply, as if we
were discussing a trifle. “By the way, you haven't been to see us yet. Only
this morning my wife was wondering when you'd come. You quite captivated
her, Blacklock. Can't you dine with us to-morrow night--no, Sunday--at
eight? We're having in a few people I think you'd like to meet.”

If any one imagines that this bald, businesslike way of putting it set
my teeth on edge, let him dismiss the idea; my nerves had been too long
accustomed to the feel of the harsh facts of life. It is evidence of the
shrewdness of the old fellow at character-reading that he wasted none of
his silk and velvet pretenses upon me, and so saved his time and mine.
Probably he wished me to see that I need have no timidity or false shame in
dealing with him, that when the time came to talk business I was free to
talk it in my own straight fashion.

“Glad to come,” said I, wishing to be rid of him, now that my point was
gained. “We'll let the account stand open for the present--I rather think
your stocks are going up. Give my regards to--the ladies, please,
especially to Miss Anita.”

He winced, but thanked me graciously; gave me his soft, fine hand to shake
and departed, as eager to be off as I to be rid of him. “Sunday next--at
eight,” were his last words. “Don't fail us”--that in the tone of a king
addressing some obscure person whom he had commanded to court. It may be
that old Ellersly was wholly unconscious of his superciliousness, fancied
he was treating me as if I were almost an equal; but I suspect he rather
accentuated his natural manner, with the idea of impressing upon me that
in our deal he was giving at least as much as I.

I recall that I thought about him for several minutes after he was
gone--philosophized on the folly of a man's deliberately weaving a net to
entangle himself. As if any man was ever caught in any net not of his own
weaving and setting; as if I myself were not just then working at the last
row of meshes of a net in which I was to ensnare myself.

My petty and inevitable success with that helpless creature added
amazingly, ludicrously, to that dangerous elation which, as I can now see,
had been growing in me ever since the day Roebuck yielded so readily to my
demands as to National Coal. The whole trouble with me was that up to that
time I had won all my victories by the plainest kind of straightaway hard
work. I was imagining myself victor in contests of wit against wit, when,
in fact, no one with any especial equipment of brains had ever opposed me;
all the really strong men had been helping me because they found me useful.
Too easy success--there is the clue to the wild folly of my performances in
those days, a folly that seems utterly inconsistent with the reputation for
shrewdness I had, and seemed to have earned.

I can find a certain small amount of legitimate excuse for my falling under
Langdon's spell. He had, and has, fascinations, through personal magnetism,
which it is hardly in human nature to resist. But for my self-hypnotism in
the case of Roebuck, I find no excuse whatever for myself.

He sent for me and told me what share in National Coal they had decided to
give me for my Manasquale mines. “Langdon and Melville,” said he, “think me
too liberal; far too liberal, my boy. But I insisted--in your case I felt
we could afford to be generous as well as just.” All this with an air that
was a combination of the pastor and the parent.

I can't even offer the excuse of not having seen that he was a hypocrite.
I felt his hypocrisy at once, and my first impulse was to jump for my
breastworks. But instantly my vanity got behind me, held me in the open,
pushed me on toward him. If you will notice, almost all “confidence” games
rely for success chiefly upon enlisting a man's vanity to play the traitor
to his judgment. So, instead of reading his liberality as plain proof of
intended treachery, I read it as plain proof of my own greatness, and of
the fear it had inspired in old Roebuck. Laugh _with_ me if you like;
but, before you laugh _at_ me, think carefully--those of you who have
ever put yourselves to the test on the field of action--think carefully
whether you have never found that your head decoration which you thought a
crown was in reality the peaked and belled cap of the fool.

But my vanity was not done with me. Led on by it, I proceeded to have one
of those ridiculous “generous impulses”--I persuaded myself that there must
be some decency in this liberality, in addition to the prudence which I
flattered myself was the chief cause. “I have been unjust to Roebuck,” I
thought. “I have been misjudging his character.” And incredible though it
seems, I said to him with a good deal of genuine emotion: “I don't know
how to thank you, Mr. Roebuck. And, instead of trying, I want to apologize
to you. I have thought many hard things against you; have spoken some of
them. I had better have been attending to my own conscience, instead of
criticizing yours.”

I had often thought his face about the most repulsive, hypocrisy-glozed
concourse of evil passions that ever fronted a fiend in the flesh. It had
seemed to me the fitting result of a long career which, according to common
report, was stained with murder, with rapacity and heartless cruelty, with
the most brutal secret sensuality, and which had left in its wake the ruins
of lives and hearts and fortunes innumerable. I had looked on the vast
wealth he had heaped mountain high as a monument to devil-daring--other men
had, no doubt, dreamed of doing the ferocious things he had done, but their
weak, human hearts failed when it came to executing such horrible acts, and
they had to be content with smaller fortunes, with the comparatively small
fruits of their comparatively small infamies. He had dared all, had won;
the most powerful bowed with quaking knees before him, and trembled lest
they might, by a blundering look or word, excite his anger and cause him to
snatch their possessions from them.

Thus I had regarded him, accepting the universal judgment, believing the
thousand and one stories. But as his eyes, softened by his hugely generous
act, beamed upon me now, I was amazed that I had so misjudged him. In that
face which I had thought frightful there was, to my hypnotized gaze, the
look of strong, sincere--yes, holy--beauty and power--the look of an
archangel.

“Thank you, Blacklock,” said he, in a voice that made me feel as if I were
a little boy in the crossroads church, believing I could almost see the
angels floating above the heads of the singers in the choir behind the
preacher. “Thank you. I am not surprised that you have misjudged me. God
has given me a great work to do, and those who do His will in this wicked
world must expect martyrdom. I should never have had the courage to do what
I have done, what He has done through me, had He not guided my every step.
You are not a religious man?”

“I try to do what's square,” said I. “But I'd prefer not to talk about it.”

“That's right! That's right!” he approved earnestly. “A man's religion is
a matter between himself and his God. But I hope, Matthew, you will never
forget that, unless you have daily, hourly communion with Almighty God,
you will never be able to bear the great burdens, to do the great work
fearlessly, disregarding the lies of the wicked, and, hardest of all to
endure, the honestly-mistaken judgments of honest men.”

“I'll look into it,” said I. And I don't know to what lengths of foolish
speech I should have gone had I not been saved by an office boy
interrupting with a card for him.

“Ah, here's Walters now,” said he. Then to the boy: “Bring him in when I
ring.”

I rose to go.

“No, sit down, Blacklock,” he insisted. “You are in with us now, and you
may learn something by seeing how I deal with the larger problems that face
men in these large undertakings, the problems that have faced me in each
new enterprise I have inaugurated to the glory of God.”

Naturally, I accepted with enthusiasm.

You would not believe what a mood I had by this time been worked into by my
rampant and raging vanity and emotionalism and by his snake-like charming.
“Thank you,” I said, with an energetic warmth that must have secretly
amused him mightily.

“When my reorganization of the iron industry proved such a great success,
and God rewarded my labors with large returns,” he went on, “I looked
about me to see what new work He wished me to undertake, how He wished me
to invest His profits. And I saw the coal industry and the coal-carrying
railroads in confusion, with waste on every side, and godless competition.
Thousands of widows and orphans who had invested in coal railways and mines
were getting no returns. Labor was fitfully employed, owing to alternations
of over-production and no production at all. I saw my work ready for my
hand. And now we are bringing order out of chaos. This man Walters, useful
up to a certain point, has become insolent, corrupt, a stumbling-block in
our way.” Here he pressed the button of his electric bell.




XI. WHEN A MAN IS NOT A MAN


Walters entered. He was one of the great railway presidents, was
universally regarded as a power, though I, of course, knew that he, like so
many other presidents of railways, of individual corporations, of banks,
of insurance companies, and high political officials in cities, states
and the nation, was little more than a figurehead put up and used by the
inside financial ring. As he shifted from leg to leg, holding his hat and
trying to steady his twitching upper lip, he looked as one of his smallest
section-bosses would have looked, if called up for a wigging.

Roebuck shook hands cordially with him, responded to his nervous glance at
me with:

“Blacklock is practically in our directory.” We all sat, then Roebuck began
in his kindliest tone:

“We have decided, Walters, that we must give your place to a stronger man.
Your gross receipts, outside of coal, have fallen rapidly and steadily for
the past three quarters. You were put into the presidency to bring them
up. They have shown no change beyond what might have been expected in the
natural fluctuations of freight. We calculated on resuming dividends a year
ago. We have barely been able to meet the interest on our bonds.”

“But, Mr. Roebuck,” pleaded Walters, “you doubled the bonded indebtedness
of the road just before I took charge.”

“The money went into improvements, into increasing your facilities, did it
not?” inquired Roebuck, his paw as soft as a playful tiger's.

“Part of it,” said Walters. “But you remember the reorganizing syndicate
got five millions, and then the contracts for the new work had to be given
to construction companies in which directors of the road were silent
partners. Then they are interested in the supply companies from which I
must buy. You know what all that means, Mr. Roebuck.”

“No doubt,” said Roebuck, still smooth and soft. “But if there was waste,
you should have reported--”

“To whom?” demanded Walters. “Every one of our directors, including
yourself, Mr. Roebuck, is a stock-holder--a large stock-holder--in one or
more of those companies.”

“Have you proof of this, Walters?” asked Roebuck, looking profoundly
shocked. “It's a very grave charge--a criminal charge.”

“Proof?” said Walters, “You know how that is. The real books of all big
companies are kept in the memories of the directors--and mighty treacherous
memories they are.” This with a nervous laugh. “As for the holdings of
directors in construction and supply companies--most of those holdings are
in other names--all of them are disguised where the connection is direct.”

Roebuck shook his head sadly. “You admit, then, that you have allowed
millions of the road's money to be wasted, that you made no complaint, no
effort to stop the waste; and your only defense is that you _suspect_
the directors of fraud. And you accuse them to excuse yourself--accuse them
with no proof. Were you in any of those companies, Walters?”

“No,” he said, his eyes shifting.

Roebuck's face grew stern. “You bought two hundred thousand dollars of the
last issue of government bonds, they tell me, with your two years' profits
from the Western Railway Construction Company.”

“I bought no bonds,” blustered Walters. “What money I have I made out of
speculating in the stock of my road--on legitimate inside information.”

“Your uncle in Wilkesbarre, I meant,” pursued Roebuck.

Walters reddened, looked straight at Roebuck without speaking.

“Do you still deny?” demanded Roebuck.

“I saw everybody--_everybody_--grafting,” said Walters boldly, “and
I thought I might as well take my share. It's part of the business.” Then
he added cynically: “That's the way it is nowadays. The lower ones see
the higher ones raking off, and they rake off, too--down to conductors
and brakemen. We caught some trackwalkers in a conspiracy to dispose
of the discarded ties and rails the other day.” He laughed. “We jailed
_them_.”

“If you can show that any director has taken anything that did not belong
to him, if you can show that a single contract you let to a construction or
a supply company--except, of course, the contracts you let to yourself--of
them I know nothing, suspect much--if you can show one instance of these
criminal doings, Mr. Walters, I shall back you up with all my power in
prosecution.”

“Of course I can't show it,” cried Walters. “If I tried, wouldn't they ruin
and disgrace me, perhaps send me to the penitentiary? Wasn't I the one that
passed on and signed their contracts? And wouldn't they--wouldn't you, Mr.
Roebuck--have fired me if I had refused to sign?”

“Excuses, excuses, Walters,” was Roebuck's answer, with a sad, disappointed
look, as if he had hoped Walters would make a brighter showing for himself.
“How many times have you yourself talked to me of this eternal excuse habit
of men who fail? And if I expended my limited brain-power in looking into
all the excuses and explanations, what energy or time would I have for
constructive work? All I can do is to select a man for a position and to
judge him by results. You were put in charge to produce dividends. You
haven't produced them. I'm sorry, and I venture to hope that things are not
so bad as you make out in your eagerness to excuse yourself. For the sake
of old times, Tom, I ignore your angry insinuations against me. I try to be
just, and to be just one must always be impersonal.”

“Well,” said Walters with an air of desperation, “give me another year, Mr.
Roebuck, and I'll produce results all right. I'll break the agreements and
cut rates. I'll freeze out the branch roads and our minority stock-holders,
I'll keep the books so that all the expert accountants in New York couldn't
untangle them. I'll wink at and commit and order committed all the
necessary crimes. I don't know why I've been so squeamish, when there were
so many penitentiary offenses that I did consent to, and, for that matter,
commit, without a quiver. I thought I ought to draw the line somewhere--and
I drew it at keeping my personal word and at keeping the books reasonably
straight. But I'll go the limit.”

I'll never forget Roebuck's expression; it was perfect, simply perfect--a
great and good man outraged beyond endurance, but a Christian still. “You
have made it impossible for me to temper justice with mercy, Walters,” said
he. “If it were not for the long years of association, for the affection
for you which has grown up in me, I should hand you over to the fate you
have earned. You tell me you have been committing crimes in my service. You
tell me you will commit more and greater crimes. I can scarcely believe my
own ears.”

Walters laughed scornfully--the reckless laugh of a man who suddenly sees
that he is cornered and must fight for his life. “Rot!” he jeered. “Rot!
You always have been a wonder at juggling with your conscience. But do
you expect me to believe you think yourself innocent because you do not
yourself execute the orders you issue--orders that can be carried out only
by committing crimes?” Walters was now beside himself with rage. He gave
the reins to that high horse he had been riding ever since he was promoted
to the presidency of the great coal road. He began to lay on whip and spur.
“Do you think,” he cried to Roebuck, “the blood of those five hundred men
drowned in the Pequot mine is not on _your_ hands--_your_ head?
You, who ordered John Wilkinson to suppress the competition the Pequot was
giving you, ordered him in such a way that he knew the alternative was his
own ruin? He shot himself--yet he had as good an excuse as you, for he,
too, passed on the order until it got to the poor fireman--that wretched
fellow they sent to the penitentiary for life? And as sure as there is
a God in Heaven, you will some day do a long, long sentence in whatever
hell there is, for letting that wretch rot in prison--yes, and for John
Wilkinson's suicide, and for the lives of those five hundred drowned. Your
pensions to the widows and orphans can't save you.”

I listened to this tirade astounded. Used as I was to men losing their
heads through vanity, I could not credit my own ears and eyes when they
reported to me this insane exhibition. I looked at Roebuck. He was wearing
an expression of beatific patience; he would have made a fine study for a
picture of the martyr at the stake.

“I forgive you, Tom,” he said, when Walters stopped for breath. “Your own
sinful heart makes you see the black of sin upon everything. I had heard
that you were going about making loud boasts of your power over your
employers, but I tried not to believe it. I see now that you have, indeed,
lost your senses. Your prosperity has been too much for your good sense.”
 He sighed mournfully. “I shall not interfere to prevent your getting a
position elsewhere,” he continued. “But after what you have confessed,
after your slanders, how can I put you back in your old place out West, as
I intended? How can I continue the interest in you and care for your career
that I have had, in spite of all your shortcomings? I who raised you up
from a clerk.”

“Raised me up as you fellows always raise men up--because you find them
clever at doing your dirty work. I was a decent, honest fellow when you
first took notice of me and tempted me. But, by God, Mr. Roebuck, if I've
sold out beyond hope of living decent again, I'll have my price--to the
last cent. You've got to leave me where I am or give me a place and salary
equally as good.” This Walters said blusteringly, but beneath I could
detect the beginnings of a whine.

“You are angry, Tom,” said Roebuck soothingly. “I have hurt your vanity--it
is one of the heaviest crosses I have to bear, that I must be continually
hurting the vanity of men. Go away and--and calm down. Think the situation
over coolly; then come and apologize to me, and I will do what I can to
help you. As for your threats--when you are calm, you will see how idle
they are.”

Walters gave a sort of groan; and though I, blinded by my prejudices in
favor of Roebuck and of the crowd with whom my interests lay, had been
feeling that he was an impudent and crazy ingrate, I pitied him.

“What proofs have I got?” he said desperately. “If I show up the things I
know about, I show up myself, and everybody will say I'm lying about you
and the others in the effort to save myself. The newspapers would denounce
me as a treacherous liar--you fellows own or control or foozle them in
one way and another. And if I was believed, who'd prosecute you and what
court'd condemn you? Don't you own both political parties and make all the
tickets, and can't you ruin any office-holders who lifted a finger against
you? What a hell of a state of affairs!”

A swifter or a weaker descent I never witnessed. My pity changed to
contempt. “This fellow, with his great reputation,” thought I, “is a fool
and a knave, and a weak one at that.”

“Go away now, Tom,” said Roebuck.

“When you're master of yourself again, come to see me.”

“Master of myself!” cried Walters bitterly. “Who that's got anything to
lose is master of himself in this country?” With shoulders sagging and a
sort of stumble in his gait, he went toward the door. He paused there to
say: “I've served too long, Mr. Roebuck. There's no fight in me. I thought
there was, but there ain't. Do the best you can for me.” And he took
himself out of our sight.

You will wonder how I was ever able to blind myself to the reality of this
frightful scene. But please remember that in this world every thought and
every act is a mixture of the good and the bad; and the one or the other
shows the more prominently according to one's point of view. There probably
isn't a criminal in any cell, anywhere, no matter what he may say in
sniveling pretense in the hope of lighter sentence, who doesn't at the
bottom of his heart believe his crime or crimes somehow justifiable--and
who couldn't make out a plausible case for himself.

At that time I was stuffed with the arrogance of my fancied membership in
the caste of directing financial geniuses; I was looking at everything
from the viewpoint of the brotherhood of which Roebuck was the strongest
brother, and of which I imagined myself a full and equal member. I did not,
I could not, blind myself to the vivid reminders of his relentlessness; but
I knew too well how necessary the iron hand and the fixed purpose are to
great affairs to judge him as infuriated Walters, with his vanity savagely
wounded, was judging him. I'd as soon have thought of describing General
Grant as a murderer, because he ordered the battles in which men were
killed or because he planned and led the campaigns in which subordinates
committed rapine and pillage and assassination. I did not then see the
radical difference--did not realize that while Grant's work was at the
command of patriotism and necessity, there was no necessity whatever
for Roebuck's getting rich but the command of his own greedy and cruel
appetites.

Don't misunderstand me. My morals are practical, not theoretical. Men must
die, old customs embodied in law must be broken, the venal must be bribed
and the weak cowed and compelled, in order that civilization may advance.
You can't establish a railway or a great industrial system by rose-water
morality. But I shall show, before I finish, that Roebuck and his gang of
so-called “organizers of industry” bear about the same relation to industry
that the boll weevil bears to the cotton crop.

I'll withdraw this, if any one can show me that, as the result of the
activities of those parasites, anybody anywhere is using or is able to
use a single pound or bushel or yard more of any commodity whatsoever.
I'll withdraw it, if I can not show that but for those parasites, bearing
precisely the same relation to our society that the kings and nobles
and priests bore to France before the Revolution, everybody except them
would have more goods and more money than they have under the system that
enables these parasites to overshadow the highways of commerce with their
strongholds and to clog them with their toll-gates. They know little about
producing, about manufacturing, about distributing, about any process of
industry. Their skill is in temptation, in trickery and in terror.

On that day, however, I sided--honestly, as I thought--with Roebuck. What
I saw and heard increased my admiration of the man, my already profound
respect for his master mind. And when, just after Walters went out, he
leaned back in his chair and sat silent with closed eyes and moving lips,
I--yes, I, Matt Blacklock, “Black Matt,” as they call me--was awed in the
presence of this great and good man at prayer!

How he and that God of his must have laughed at me! So infatuated was I
that, clear as it is that he'd never have let me be present at such a scene
without a strong ulterior motive, not until he himself long afterward
made it impossible for me to deceive myself did I penetrate to his real
purpose--that he wished to fill me with a prudent dread and fear of him,
with a sense of the absoluteness of his power and of the hopelessness of
trying to combat it. But at the time I thought--imbecile that my vanity
had made me--at the time I thought he had let me be present because he
genuinely liked, admired and trusted me!

Is it not amazing that one who could fall into such colossal blunders
should survive to tell of them? I would not have survived had not Roebuck
and his crowd been at the same time making an even more colossal
misestimate of me than I was making of them. My attack of vanity was
violent, but temporary; theirs was equally violent, and chronic and
incurable to boot.




XII. ANITA


On my first day in long trousers I may have been more ill at ease than I
was that Sunday evening at the Ellerslys'; but I doubt it.

When I came into their big drawing-room and took a look round at the
assembled guests, I never felt more at home in my life. “Yes,” said I
to myself, as Mrs. Ellersly was greeting me and as I noted the friendly
interest in the glances of the women, “this is where I belong. I'm
beginning to come into my own.”

As I look back on it now, I can't refrain from smiling at my own
simplicity--and snobbishness. For, so determined was I to believe what
I was working for was worth while, that I actually fancied there were
upon these in reality ordinary people, ordinary in looks, ordinary in
intelligence, some subtle marks of superiority, that made them at a glance
superior to the common run. This ecstasy of snobbishness deluded me as to
the women only--for, as I looked at the men, I at once felt myself their
superior. They were an inconsequential, patterned lot. I even was better
dressed than any of them, except possibly Mowbray Langdon; and, if he
showed to more advantage than I, it was because of his manner, which, as I
have probably said before, is superior to that of any human being I've ever
seen--man or woman.

“You are to take Anita in,” said Mrs. Ellersly. With a laughable sense that
I was doing myself proud, I crossed the room easily and took my stand in
front of her. She shook hands with me politely enough. Langdon was sitting
beside her; I had interrupted their conversation.

“Hello, Blacklock!” said Langdon, with a quizzical, satirical smile with
the eyes only. “It seems strange to see you at such peaceful pursuits.”
 His glance traveled over me critically--and that was the beginning of my
trouble. Presently, he rose, left me alone with her.

“You know Mr. Langdon?” she said, obviously because she felt she must say
something.

“Oh, yes,” I replied. “We are old friends. What a tremendous swell he
is--really a swell.” This with enthusiasm.

She made no comment. I debated with myself whether to go on talking of
Langdon. I decided against it because all I knew of him had to do with
matters down town--and Monson had impressed it upon me that down town was
taboo in the drawing-room. I rummaged my brain in vain for another and
suitable topic.

She sat, and I stood--she tranquil and beautiful and cold, I every instant
more miserably self-conscious. When the start for the dining-room was
made I offered her my left arm, though I had carefully planned beforehand
just what I would do. She--without hesitation and, as I know now, out of
sympathy for me in my suffering--was taking my wrong arm, when it flashed
on me like a blinding blow in the face that I ought to be on the other side
of her. I got red, tripped in the far-sprawling train of Mrs. Langdon, tore
it slightly, tried to get to the other side of Miss Ellersly by walking in
front of her, recovered myself somehow, stumbled round behind her, walked
on her train and finally arrived at her left side, conscious in every
red-hot atom of me that I was making a spectacle of myself and that the
whole company was enjoying it. I must have seemed to them an ignorant
boor; in fact, I had been about a great deal among people who knew how to
behave, and had I never given the matter of how to conduct myself on that
particular occasion an instant's thought, I should have got on without the
least trouble.

It was with a sigh of profound relief that I sank upon the chair between
Miss Ellersly and Mrs. Langdon, safe from danger of making “breaks,”
 so I hoped, for the rest of the evening. But within a very few minutes
I realized that my little misadventure had unnerved me. My hands were
trembling so that I could scarcely lift the soup spoon to my lips, and my
throat had got so far beyond control that I had difficulty in swallowing.
Miss Ellersly and Mrs. Langdon were each busy with the man on the other
side of her; I was left to my own reflections, and I was not sure whether
this made me more or less uncomfortable. To add to my torment, I grew
angry, furiously angry, with myself. I looked up and down and across the
big table noted all these self-satisfied people perfectly at their ease;
and I said to myself: “What's the matter with you, Matt? They're only men
and women, and by no means the best specimens of the breed. You've got more
brains than all of 'em put together, probably; is there one of the lot that
could get a job at good wages if thrown on the world? What do you care
what they think of you? It's a damn sight more important what you think of
them; as it won't be many years before you'll hold everything they value,
everything that makes them of consequence, in the hollow of your hand.”

But it was of no use. When Miss Ellersly finally turned her face toward
me to indicate that she would be graciously pleased to listen if I had
anything to communicate, I felt as if I were slowly wilting, felt my throat
contracting into a dry twist. What was the matter with me? Partly, of
course, my own snobbishness, which led me to attach the same importance to
those people that the snobbishness of the small and silly had got them in
the way of attaching to themselves. But the chief cause of my inability
was Monson and his lessons. I had thought I was estimating at its proper
value what he was teaching. But so earnest and serious am I by nature,
and so earnest and serious was he about those trivialities that he had
been brought up to regard as the whole of life, that I had unconsciously
absorbed his attitude; I was like a fellow who, after cramming hard for
an examination, finds that all the questions put to him are on things he
hasn't looked at. I had been making an ass of myself, and that evening
I got the first instalment of my sound and just punishment. I who had
prided myself on being ready for anything or anybody, I who had laughed
contemptuously when I read how men and women, presented at European courts,
made fools of themselves--I was made ridiculous by these people who, as I
well know, had nothing to back their pretensions to superiority but a
barefaced bluff.

Perhaps, had I thought this out at the table, I should have got back to
myself and my normal ease; but I didn't, and that long and terrible dinner
was one long and terrible agony of stage fright. When the ladies withdrew,
the other men drew together, talking of people I did not know and of
things I did not care about--I thought then that they were avoiding me
deliberately as a flock of tame ducks avoids a wild one that some wind has
accidentally blown down among them. I know now that my forbidding aspect
must have been responsible for my isolations, However, I sat alone,
sullenly resisting old Ellersly's constrained efforts to get me into
the conversation, and angrily suspicious that Langdon was enjoying my
discomfiture more than the cigarette he was apparently absorbed in.

Old Ellersly, growing more and more nervous before my dark and sullen look,
finally seated himself beside me. “I hope you'll stay after the others have
gone,” said he. “They'll leave early, and we can have a quiet smoke and
talk.”

All unstrung though I was, I yet had the desperate courage to resolve that
I'd not leave, defeated in the eyes of the one person whose opinion I
really cared about. “Very well,” said I, in reply to him.

He and I did not follow the others to the drawing-room, but turned into
the library adjoining. From where I seated myself I could see part of the
drawing-room--saw the others leaving, saw Langdon lingering, ignoring
the impatient glances of his wife, while he talked on and on with Miss
Ellersly. Her face was full toward me; she was not aware that I was
looking at her, I am sure, for she did not once lift her eyes. As I sat
studying her, everything else was crowded out of my mind. She was indeed
wonderful--too wonderful and fine and fragile, it seemed to me at that
moment, for one so plain and rough as I. “Incredible,” thought I, “that she
is the child of such a pair as Ellersly and his wife--but again, has she
any less in common with them than she'd have with any other pair of human
creatures?” Her slender white arms, her slender white shoulders, the bloom
on her skin, the graceful, careless way her hair grew round her forehead
and at the nape of her neck, the rather haughty expression of her small
face softened into sweetness and even tenderness, now that she was talking
at her ease with one whom she regarded as of her own kind--“but he isn't!”
 I protested to myself. “Langdon--none of these men--none of these women,
is fit to associate with her. They can't appreciate her. She belongs to me
who can.” And I had a mad impulse then and there to seize her and bear her
away--home--to the home she could make for me out of what I would shower
upon her.

At last Langdon rose. It irritated me to see her color under that
indifferent fascinating smile of his. It irritated me to note that he held
her hand all the time he was saying good-by, and the fact that he held it
as if he'd as lief not be holding it hardly lessened my longing to rush in
and knock him down. What he did was all in the way of perfect good manners,
and would have jarred no one not supersensitive, like me--and like his
wife. I saw that she, too, was frowning. She looked beautiful that evening,
in spite of her too great breadth for her height--her stoutness was not
altogether a defect when she was wearing evening dress. While she seemed
friendly and smiling to Miss Ellersly, I saw, whether others saw it or not,
that she quivered with apprehension at his mildly flirtatious ways. He
acted toward any and every attractive woman as if he were free and were
regarding her as a possibility, and didn't mind if she flattered herself
that he regarded her as a probability.

In an aimless sort of way Miss Ellersly, after the Langdons had
disappeared, left the drawing-room by the same door. Still aimlessly
wandering, she drifted into the library by the hall door. As I rose, she
lifted her eyes, saw me, and drove away the frown of annoyance which came
over her face like the faintest haze. In fact, it may have existed only in
my imagination. She opened a large, square silver box on the table, took
out a cigarette, lighted it and holding it, with the smoke lazily curling
up from it, between the long slender first and second fingers of her white
hand, stood idly turning the leaves of a magazine. I threw my cigar into
the fireplace. The slight sound as it struck made her jump, and I saw that,
underneath her surface of perfect calm, she was in a nervous state full as
tense as my own.

“You smoke?” said I.

“Sometimes,” she replied. “It is soothing and distracting. I don't know how
it is with others, but when I smoke, my mind is quite empty.”

“It's a nasty habit--smoking,” said I.

“Do you think so?” said she, with the slightest lift to her tone and her
eyebrows.

“Especially for a woman,” I went on, because I could think of nothing else
to say, and would not, at any cost, let this conversation, so hard to
begin, die out.

“You are one of those men who have one code for themselves and another for
women,” she replied.

“I'm a man,” said I. “All men have the two codes.”

“Not all,” said she after a pause.

“All men of decent ideas,” said I with emphasis.

“Really?” said she, in a tone that irritated me by suggesting that what I
said was both absurd and unimportant.

“It is the first time I've ever seen a respectable woman smoke,” I went on,
powerless to change the subject, though conscious I was getting tedious.
“I've read of such things, but I didn't believe.”

“That is interesting,” said she, her tone suggesting the reverse.

“I've offended you by saying frankly what I think,” said I. “Of course,
it's none of my business.”

“Oh, no,” replied she carelessly. “I'm not in the least offended.
Prejudices always interest me.”

I saw Ellersly and his wife sitting in the drawing-room, pretending to
talk to each other. I understood that they were leaving me alone with her
deliberately, and I began to suspect she was in the plot. I smiled, and my
courage and self-possession returned as summarily as they had fled.

“I'm glad of this chance to get better acquainted with you,” said I. “I've
wanted it ever since I first saw you.”

As I put this to her directly, she dropped her eyes and murmured something
she probably wished me to think vaguely pleasant.

“You are the first woman I ever knew,” I went on, “with whom it was hard
for me to get on any sort of terms. I suppose it's my fault. I don't know
this game yet. But I'll learn it, if you'll be a little patient; and when I
do, I think I'll be able to keep up my end.”

She looked at me--just looked. I couldn't begin to guess what was going on
in that gracefully-poised head of hers.

“Will you try to be friends with me?” said I with directness.

She continued to look at me in that same steady, puzzling way.

“Will you?” I repeated.

“I have no choice,” said she slowly.

I flushed. “What does that mean?” I demanded.

She threw a hurried and, it seemed to me, frightened glance toward the
drawing-room. “I didn't intend to offend you,” she said in a low voice.
“You have been such a good friend to papa--I've no right to feel anything
but friendship for you.”

“I'm glad to hear you say that,” said I. And I was; for those words of hers
were the first expression of appreciation and gratitude I had ever got from
any member of that family which I was holding up from ruin. I put out my
hand, and she laid hers in it.

“There isn't anything I wouldn't do to earn your friendship, Miss Anita,” I
said, holding her hand tightly, feeling how lifeless it was, yet feeling,
too, as if a flaming torch were being borne through me, were lighting a
fire in every vein.

The scarlet poured into her face and neck, wave on wave, until I thought
it would never cease to come. She snatched her hand away and from her face
streamed proud resentment. God, how I loved her at that moment!

“Anita! Mr. Blacklock!” came from the other room, in her mother's voice.
“Come in here and save us old people from boring each other to sleep.”

She turned swiftly and went into the other room, I following. There were a
few minutes of conversation--a monologue by her mother. Then I ceased to
disregard Ellersly's less and less covert yawns, and rose to take leave. I
could not look directly at Anita, but I was seeing that her eyes were fixed
on me, as if by some compulsion, some sinister compulsion. I left in high
spirits. “No matter why or how she looks at you,” said I to myself. “All
that is necessary is to get yourself noticed. After that, the rest is easy.
You must keep cool enough always to remember that under this glamour that
intoxicates you, she's a woman, just a woman, waiting for a man.”




XIII. “UNTIL TO-MORROW”


On the following Tuesday afternoon, toward five o'clock, I descended from
my apartment on my way to my brougham. In the entrance hall I met Monson
coming in.

“Hello, you!” said he. “Slipping away to get married?”

“No, I'm only making a call,” replied I, taking alarm instantly.

“Oh, is _that_ all?” said he with a sly grin. “It must be a mighty
serious matter.”

“I'm in no hurry,” said I. “Come up with me for a few minutes.”

As soon as we were alone in my sitting-room, I demanded: “What's wrong with
me?”

“Nothing--not a thing,” was his answer, in a tone I had a struggle with
myself not to resent. “I've never seen any one quite so grand--top
hat, latest style, long coat ditto, white buckskin waistcoat,
twenty-thousand-dollar pearl in pale blue scarf, white spats, spotless
varnish boots just from the varnishers, cream-colored gloves. You
_will_ make a hit! My eye, I'll bet she won't be able to resist you.”

I began to shed my plumage. “I thought this was the thing when you're
calling on people you hardly know.”

“I should say you'd have to know 'em uncommon well to give 'em such a
treat. Rather!”

“What shall I wear?” I asked. “You certainly told me the other day that
this was proper.”

“Proper--so it is--too damn proper,” was his answer. “That'd be all right
for a bridegroom or a best man or an usher--or perhaps for a wedding guest.
It wouldn't do any particular harm even to call in it, if the people were
used to you. But--”

“I look dressed up?”

“Like a fashion plate--like a tailor--like a society actor.”

“What shall I wear?”

“Oh, just throw yourself together any old way. Business suit's good
enough.”

“But I barely know these people--socially. I never called there,” I
objected.

“Then don't call,” he advised. “Send your valet in a cab to leave a card
at the door. Calling has gone clean out--unless a man's got something very
especial in mind. Never show that you're eager. Keep your hand hid.”

“They'd know I had something especial in mind if I called?”

“Certainly, and if you'd gone in those togs, they'd have assumed you had
come to--to ask the old man for his daughter--or something like that.”

I lost no time in getting back into a business suit.

A week passed and, just as I was within sight of my limit of patience,
Bromwell Ellersly appeared at my office. “I can't put my hand on the
necessary cash, Mr. Blacklock--at least, not for a few days. Can I count
on your further indulgence?” This in his best exhibit of old-fashioned
courtliness--the “gentleman” through and through, ignorant of anything
useful.

“Don't let that matter worry you, Ellersly,” said I, friendly, for I wanted
to be on a somewhat less business-like basis with that family. “The
market's steady, and will go up before it goes down.”

“Good!” said he. “By the way, you haven't kept your promise to call.”

“I'm a busy man,” said I. “You must make my excuses to your wife. But--in
the evenings. Couldn't we get up a little theater-party--Mrs. Ellersly and
your daughter and you and I--Sam, too, if he cares to come?”

“Delightful!” cried he.

“Whichever one of the next five evenings you say,” I said. “Let me know
by to-morrow morning, will you?” And we talked no more of the neglected
margins; we understood each other. When he left he had negotiated a three
months' loan of twenty thousand dollars.

       *       *       *       *       *

They were so surprised that they couldn't conceal it, when they were
ushered into my apartment on the Wednesday evening they had fixed upon. If
my taste in dress was somewhat too pronounced, my taste in my surroundings
was not. I suppose the same instinct that made me like the music and the
pictures and the books that were the products of superior minds had guided
me right in architecture, decoration and furniture. I know I am one of
those who are born with the instinct for the best. Once Monson got in
the way of free criticism, he indulged himself without stint, after the
customary human fashion; in fact, so free did he become that had I not
feared to frighten him and so bring about the defeat of my purposes, I
should have sat on him hard very soon after we made our bargain. As it was,
I stood his worst impudences without flinching, and partly consoled myself
with the amusement I got out of watching his vanity lead him on into
thinking his knowledge the most vital matter in the world--just as you
sometimes see a waiter or a clerk with the air of sharing the care of the
universe with the Almighty.

But even Monson could find nothing to criticize either in my apartment
or in my country house. And, by the way, he showed his limitations by
remarking, after he had inspected: “I must say, Blacklock, your architects
and decorators have done well by you.” As if a man's surroundings were not
the unfailing index to himself, no matter how much money he spends or how
good architects and the like he hires. As if a man could ever buy good
taste.

I was pleased out of all proportion to its value by what Ellersly and his
wife looked and said. But, though I watched Miss Ellersly closely, though I
tried to draw from her some comment on my belongings--on my pictures, on my
superb tapestries, on the beautiful carving of my furniture--I got nothing
from her beyond that first look of surprise and pleasure. Her face resumed
its statuelike calm, her eyes did not wander; her lips, like a crimson bow
painted upon her clear, white skin, remained closed. She spoke only when
she was spoken to, and then as briefly as possible. The dinner--and a
mighty good dinner it was--would have been memorable for strain and silence
had not Mrs. Ellersly kept up her incessant chatter. I can't recall a word
she said, but I admired her for being able to talk at all. I knew she was
in the same state as the rest of us, yet she acted perfectly at her ease;
and not until I thought it over afterward did I realize that she had done
all the talking, except answers to her occasional and cleverly-sprinkled
direct questions.

Ellersly sat opposite me, and I was irritated, and thrown into confusion,
too, every time I lifted my eyes, by the crushed, criminal expression of
his face. He ate and drank hugely--and extremely bad manners it would
have been regarded in me had I made as much noise as he, or lifted such
quantities at a time into my mouth. But through his noisy gluttony he
managed somehow to maintain that hang-dog air--like a thief who has gone
through the house and, on his way out, has paused at the pantry, with the
sack of plunder beside him, to gorge himself.

I looked at Anita several times, each time with a carefully-framed remark
ready; each time I found her gaze on me--and I could say nothing, could
only look away in a sort of panic. Her eyes were strangely variable. I have
seen them of a gray, so pale that it was almost silver--like the steely
light of the snow-line at the edge of the horizon; again, and they were
so that evening, they shone with the deepest, softest blue, and made one
think, as one looked at her, of a fresh violet frozen in a block of clear
ice.

I sat behind her in the box at the theater. During the first and
second intermissions several men dropped in to speak to her mother and
her--fellows who didn't ever come down town, but I could tell they knew who
I was by the way they ignored me. It exasperated me to a pitch of fury,
that coldly insolent air of theirs--a jerky nod at me without so much as a
glance, and no notice of me when they were leaving _my_ box beyond a
faint, supercilious smile as they passed with eyes straight ahead. I knew
what it meant, what they were thinking--that the “Bucket-Shop King,” as the
newspapers had dubbed me, was trying to use old Ellersly's necessities as a
“jimmy” and “break into society.” When the curtain went down for the last
intermission, two young men appeared; I did not get up as I had before, but
stuck to my seat--I had reached that point at which courtesy has become
cowardice.

They craned and strained at her round me and over me, presently gave up
and retired, disguising their anger as contempt for the bad manners of a
bounder. But that disturbed me not a ripple, the more as I was delighting
in a consoling discovery. Listening and watching as she talked with these
young men, whom she evidently knew well, I noted that she was distant and
only politely friendly in manner habitually, that while the ice might
thicken for me, it was there always. I knew enough about women to know
that, if the woman who can thaw only for one man is the most difficult, she
is also the most constant. “Once she thaws toward me!” I said to myself.

When the young men had gone, I leaned forward until my head was close to
hers, to her hair--fine, soft, abundant, electric hair. Like the infatuated
fool that I was, I tore out all the pigeon-holes of my brain in search of
something to say to her, something that would start her to thinking well
of me. She must have felt my breath upon her neck, for she moved away
slightly, and it seemed to me a shiver visibly passed over that wonderful
white skin of hers.

I drew back and involuntarily said, “Beg pardon.” I glanced at her mother
and it was my turn to shudder. I can't hope to give an accurate impression
of that stony, mercenary, mean face. There are looks that paint upon the
human countenance the whole of a life, as a flash of lightning paints upon
the blackness of the night miles on miles of landscape. That look of Mrs.
Ellersly's--stern disapproval at her daughter, stern command that she be
more civil, that she unbend--showed me the old woman's soul. And I say that
no old harpy presiding over a dive is more full of the venom of the hideous
calculations of the market for flesh and blood than is a woman whose life
is wrapped up in wealth and show.

“If you wish it,” I said, on impulse, to Miss Ellersly in a low voice, “I
shall never try to see you again.”

I could feel rather than see the blood suddenly beating in her skin, and
there was in her voice a nervousness very like fright as she answered: “I'm
sure mama and I shall be glad to see you whenever you come.”

“You?” I persisted.

“Yes,” she said, after a brief hesitation.

“Glad?” I persisted.

She smiled--the faintest change in the perfect curve of her lips. “You are
very persistent, aren't you?”

“Very,” I answered. “That is why I have always got whatever I wanted.”

“I admire it,” said she.

“No, you don't,” I replied. “You think it is vulgar, and you think I am
vulgar because I have that quality--that and some others.”

She did not contradict me.

“Well, I _am_ vulgar--from your standpoint,” I went on. “I have
purposes and passions. And I pursue them. For instance, you.”

“I?” she said tranquilly.

“You,” I repeated. “I made up my mind the first day I saw you that I'd make
you like me. And--you will.”

“That is very flattering,” said she. “And a little terrifying. For”--she
faltered, then went bravely on--“I suppose there isn't anything you'd stop
at in order to gain your end.”

“Nothing,” said I, and I compelled her to meet my gaze.

She drew a long breath, and I thought there was a sob in it--like a
frightened child.

“But I repeat,” I went on, “that if you wish it, I shall never try to see
you again. Do you wish it?”

“I--don't--know,” she answered slowly. “I think--not.”

As she spoke the last word, she lifted her eyes to mine with a look of
forced friendliness in them that I'd rather not have seen there. I wished
to be blind to her defects, to the stains and smutches with which her
surroundings must have sullied her. And that friendly look seemed to me
an unmistakable hypocrisy in obedience to her mother. However, it had the
effect of bringing her nearer to my own earthy level, of putting me at ease
with her; and for the few remaining minutes we talked freely, I indifferent
whether my manners and conversation were correct. As I helped her into
their carriage, I pressed her arm slightly, and said in a voice for her
only, “Until to-morrow.”




XIV. FRESH AIR IN A GREENHOUSE


At five the next day I rang the Ellerslys' bell, was taken through the
drawing-room into that same library. The curtains over the double doorway
between the two rooms were almost drawn. She presently entered from the
hall. I admired the picture she made in the doorway--her big hat, her
embroidered dress of white cloth, and that small, sweet, cold face of hers.
And as I looked, I knew that nothing, nothing--no, not even her wish, her
command--could stop me from trying to make her my own. That resolve must
have shown in my face--it or the passion that inspired it--for she paused
and paled.

“What is it?” I asked. “Are you afraid of me?”

She came forward proudly, a fine scorn in her eyes. “No,” she said. “But if
you knew, you might be afraid of me.”

“I am,” I confessed. “I am afraid of you because you inspire in me a
feeling that is beyond my control. I've committed many follies in my
life--I have moods in which it amuses me to defy fate. But those follies
have always been of my own willing. You”--I laughed--“you are a folly for
me. But one that compels me.”

She smiled--not discouragingly--and seated herself on a tiny sofa in the
corner, a curiously impregnable intrenchment, as I noted--for my impulse
was to carry her by storm. I was astonished at my own audacity; I was
wondering where my fear of her had gone, my awe of her superior fineness
and breeding. “Mama will be down in a few minutes,” she said.

“I didn't come to see your mother,” replied I. “I came to see you.”

She flushed, then froze--and I thought I had once more “got upon” her
nerves with my rude directness. How eagerly sensitive our nerves are to bad
impressions of one we don't like, and how coarsely insensible to bad
impressions of one we do like!

[Illustration]

“I see I've offended again, as usual,” said I. “You attach so much
importance to petty little dancing-master tricks and caperings. You
live--always have lived--in an artificial atmosphere. Real things act on
you like fresh air on a hothouse flower.”

“You are--fresh air?” she inquired, with laughing sarcasm.

“I am that,” retorted I. “And good for you--as you'll find when you get
used to me.”

I heard voices in the next room--her mother's and some man's. We waited
until it was evident we were not to be disturbed. As I realized that fact
and surmised its meaning, I looked triumphantly at her. She drew further
back into her corner, and the almost stern firmness of her contour told me
she had set her teeth.

“I see you are nerving yourself,” said I with a laugh. “You are perfectly
certain I am going to propose to you.”

She flamed scarlet and half-started up.

“Your mother--in the next room--expects it, too,” I went on, laughing even
more disagreeably. “Your parents need money--they have decided to sell you,
their only large income-producing asset. And I am willing to buy. What do
you say?”

I was blocking her way out of the room. She was standing, her breath coming
fast, her eyes blazing. “You are--_frightful_!” she exclaimed in a low
voice.

“Because I am frank, because I am honest? Because I want to put things on
a sound basis? I suppose, if I came lying and pretending, and let you lie
and pretend, and let your parents and Sam lie and pretend, you would find
me--almost tolerable. Well, I'm not that kind. When there's no especial
reason one way or the other, I'm willing to smirk and grimace and dodder
and drivel, like the rest of your friends, those ladies and gentlemen. But
when there's business to be transacted, I am business-like. Let's not begin
with your thinking you are deceiving me, and so hating me and despising me
and trying to keep up the deception. Let's begin right.”

She was listening; she was no longer longing to fly from the room; she was
curious. I knew I had scored.

“In any event,” I continued, “you would have married for money. You've been
brought up to it, like all these girls of your set. You'd be miserable
without luxury. If you had your choice between love without luxury and
luxury without love, it'd be as easy to foretell which you'd do as to
foretell how a starving poet would choose between a loaf of bread and a
volume of poems. You may love love; but you love life--your kind of
life--better!”

She lowered her head. “It is true,” she said. “It is low and vile, but it
is true.”

“Your parents need money--” I began.

She stopped me with a gesture. “Don't blame them,” she pleaded. “I am more
guilty than they.”

I was proud of her as she made that confession. “You have the making of a
real woman in you,” said I. “I should have wanted you even if you hadn't.
But what I now see makes what I thought a folly of mine look more like
wisdom.”

“I must warn you,” she said, and now she was looking directly at me, “I
shall never love you.”

“Never is a long time,” replied I. “I'm old enough to be cynical about
prophecy.”

“I shall never love you,” she repeated. “For many reasons you wouldn't
understand. For one you will understand.”

“I understand the 'many reasons' you say are beyond me,” said I. “For,
dear young lady, under this coarse exterior I assure you there's hidden
a rather sharp outlook on human nature--and--well, nerves that respond
to the faintest changes in you as do mine can't be altogether without
sensitiveness. What's the other reason--_the_ reason? That you think
you love some one else?”

“Thank you for saying it for me,” she replied.

You can't imagine how pleased I was at having earned her gratitude, even
in so little a matter. “I have thought of that,” said I. “It is of no
consequence.”

“But you don't understand,” she pleaded earnestly.

“On the contrary, I understand perfectly,” I assured her. “And the reason I
am not disturbed is--you are here, you are not with him.”

She lowered her head so that I had no view of her face.

“You and he do not marry,” I went on, “because you are both poor?”

“No,” she replied.

“Because he does not care for you?”

“No--not that,” she said.

“Because you thought he hadn't enough for two?”

A long pause, then--very faintly: “No--not that.”

“Then it must be because he hasn't as much money as he'd like, and must
find a girl who'll bring him--what he _most_ wants.”

She was silent.

“That is, while he loves you dearly, he loves money more. And he's willing
to see you go to another man, be the wife of another man, be--everything to
another man.” I laughed. “I'll take my chances against love of that sort.”

“You don't understand,” she murmured. “You don't realize--there are many
things that mean nothing to you and that mean--oh, so much to people
brought up as we are.”

“Nonsense!” said I. “What do you mean by 'we'? Nature has been bringing
us up for a thousand thousand years. A few years of silly false training
doesn't undo her work. If you and he had cared for each other, you wouldn't
be here, apologizing for his selfish vanity.”

“No matter about him,” she cried impatiently, lifting her head haughtily.
“The point is, I love him--and always shall. I warn you.”

“And I take you at my own risk?”

Her look answered “Yes!”

“Well,”--and I took her hand--“then, we are engaged.”

Her whole body grew tense, and her hand chilled as it lay in mine.
“Don't--please don't,” I said gently. “I'm not so bad as all that. If you
will be as generous with me as I shall be with you, neither of us will ever
regret this.”

There were tears on her cheeks as I slowly released her hand.

“I shall ask nothing of you that you are not ready freely to give,” I said.

Impulsively she stood and put out her hand, and the eyes she lifted to mine
were shining and friendly. I caught her in my arms and kissed her--not once
but many times. And it was not until the chill of her ice-like face had
cooled me that I released her, drew back red and ashamed and stammering
apologies. But her impulse of friendliness had been killed; she once more,
as I saw only too plainly, felt for me that sense of repulsion, felt for
herself that sense of self-degradation.

“I _can not_ marry you!” she muttered.

“You can--and will--and must,” I cried, infuriated by her look.

There was a long silence. I could easily guess what was being fought out in
her mind. At last she slowly drew herself up. “I can not refuse,” she said,
and her eyes sparkled with defiance that had hate in it. “You have the
power to compel me. Use it, like the brute you refuse to let me forget that
you are.” She looked so young, so beautiful, so angry--and so tempting.

“So I shall!” I answered. “Children have to be taught what is good for
them. Call in your mother, and we'll tell her the news.”

Instead, she went into the next room. I followed, saw Mrs. Ellersly seated
at the tea-table in the corner farthest from the library where her daughter
and I had been negotiating. She was reading a letter, holding her lorgnon
up to her painted eyes.

“Won't you give us tea, mother?” said Anita, on her surface not a trace of
the cyclone that must still have been raging hi her.

“Congratulate me, Mrs. Ellersly,” said I. “Your daughter has consented to
marry me.”

Instead of speaking, Mrs. Ellersly began to cry--real tears. And for a
moment I thought there was a real heart inside of her somewhere. But when
she spoke, that delusion vanished.

“You must forgive me, Mr. Blacklock,” she said in her hard, smooth, politic
voice. “It is the shock of realizing I'm about to lose my daughter.” And
I knew that her tears were from joy and relief--Anita had “come up to the
scratch;” the hideous menace of “genteel poverty” had been averted.

“Do give us tea, mama,” said Anita. Her cold, sarcastic tone cut my nerves
and her mother's like a razor blade. I looked sharply at her, and wondered
whether I was not making a bargain vastly different from that my passion
was picturing.




XV. SOME STRANGE LAPSES OF A LOVER


But before there was time for me to get a distinct impression, that ugly
shape of cynicism had disappeared.

“It was a shadow I myself cast upon her,” I assured myself; and once more
she seemed to me like a clear, calm lake of melted snow from the mountains.
“I can see to the pure white sand of the very bottom,” thought I. Mystery
there was, but only the mystery of wonder at the apparition of such beauty
and purity in such a world as mine. True, from time to time, there showed
at the surface or vaguely outlined in the depths, forms strangely out of
place in those unsullied waters. But I either refused to see or refused to
trust my senses. I had a fixed ideal of what a woman should be; this girl
embodied that ideal.

“If you'd only give up your cigarettes,” I remember saying to her when we
were a little better acquainted, “you'd be perfect.”

She made an impatient gesture. “Don't!” she commanded almost angrily. “You
make me feel like a hypocrite. You tempt me to be a hypocrite. Why not be
content with woman as she is--a human being? And--how could I--any woman
not an idiot--be alive for twenty-five years without learning--a thing or
two? Why should any man want it?”

“Because to know is to be spattered and stained,” said I. “I get enough of
people who know, down-town. Up-town--I want a change of air. Of course,
you think you know the world, but you haven't the remotest conception of
what it's really like. Sometimes when I'm with you, I begin to feel mean
and--and unclean. And the feeling grows on me until it's all I can do to
restrain myself from rushing away.”

She looked at me critically.

“You've never had much to do with women, have you?” she finally said slowly
in a musing tone.

“I wish that were true--almost,” replied I, on my mettle as a man, and
resisting not without effort the impulse to make some vague
“confessions”--boastings disguised as penitential admissions--after the
customary masculine fashion.

She smiled--and one of those disquieting shapes seemed to me to be floating
lazily and repellently downward, out of sight. “A man and a woman can be a
great deal to each other, I believe,” said she; “can be--married, and all
that--and remain as strange to each other as if they had never met--more
hopelessly strangers.”

“There's always a sort of mystery,” I conceded. “I suppose that's one of
the things that keep married people interested.”

She shrugged her shoulders--she was in evening dress, I recall, and there
was on her white skin that intense, transparent, bluish tinge one sees on
the new snow when the sun comes out.

“Mystery!” she said impatiently. “There's no mystery except what we
ourselves make. It's useless--perfectly useless,” she went on absently.
“You're the sort of man who, if a woman cared for him, or even showed
friendship for him by being frank and human and natural with him, he'd
punish her for it by--by despising her.”

I smiled, much as one smiles at the efforts of a precocious child to prove
that it is a Methuselah in experience.

“If you weren't like an angel in comparison with the others I've known,”
 said I, “do you suppose I could care for you as I do?”

I saw my remark irritated her, and I fancied it was her vanity that was
offended by my disbelief in her knowledge of life. I hadn't a suspicion
that I had hurt and alienated her by slamming in her very face the door of
friendship and frankness her honesty was forcing her to try to open for me.

In my stupidity of imagining her not human like the other women and the
men I had known, but a creature apart and in a class apart, I stood day
after day gaping at that very door, and wondering how I could open it,
how penetrate even to the courtyard of that vestal citadel. So long as my
old-fashioned belief that good women were more than human and bad women
less than human had influenced me only to a sharper lookout in dealing
with the one species of woman I then came in contact with, no harm to me
resulted, but on the contrary good--whoever got into trouble through
walking the world with sword and sword arm free? But when, under the spell
of Anita Ellersly, I dragged the “superhuman goodness” part of my theory
down out of the clouds and made it my guardian and guide--really, it's a
miracle that I escaped from the pit into which that lunacy pitched me
headlong. I was not content with idealizing only her; I went on to seeing
good, and only good, in everybody! The millennium was at hand; all Wall
Street was my friend; whatever I wanted would happen. And when Roebuck,
with an air like a benediction from a bishop backed by a cathedral organ
and full choir, gave me the tip to buy coal stocks, I canonized him on the
spot. Never did a Jersey “jay” in Sunday clothes and tallowed boots respond
to a bunco steerer's greeting with a gladder smile than mine to that pious
old past-master of craft.

I will say, in justice to myself, though it is also in excuse, that if I
had known him intimately a few years earlier, I should have found it all
but impossible to fool myself. For he had not long been in a position where
he could keep wholly detached from the crimes committed for his benefit
and by his order, and where he could disclaim responsibility and even
knowledge. The great lawyers of the country have been most ingenious in
developing corporate law in the direction of making the corporation a
complete and secure shield between the beneficiary of a crime and its
consequences; but before a great financier can use this shield perfectly,
he must build up a system--he must find lieutenants with the necessary
coolness, courage and cunning; he must teach them to understand his hints;
he must educate them, not to point out to him the disagreeable things
involved in his orders, but to execute unquestioningly, to efface
completely the trail between him and them, whether or not they succeed in
covering the roundabout and faint trail between themselves and the tools
that nominally commit the crimes.

As nearly as I can get at it, when Roebuck was luring me into National Coal
he had not for nine years been open to attack, but had so far hedged
himself in that, had his closest lieutenants been trapped and frightened
into “squealing,” he would not have been involved; without fear of exposure
and with a clear conscience he could--and would!--have joined in the
denunciation of the man who had been caught, and could--and would!--have
helped send him to the penitentiary or to the scaffold. With the security
of an honest man and the serenity of a Christian he planned his colossal
thefts and reaped their benefits; and whenever he was accused, he could
have explained everything, could have got his accuser's sympathy and
admiration. I say, could have explained; but he would not. Early in his
career, he had learned the first principle of successful crime--silence. No
matter what the provocation or the seeming advantage, he uttered only a few
generous general phrases, such as “those misguided men,” or “the Master
teaches us to bear with meekness the calumnies of the wicked,” or “let him
that is without sin cast the first stone.” As to the crime itself--silence,
and the dividends.

A great man, Roebuck! I doff my hat to him. Of all the dealers in stolen
goods under police protection, who so shrewd as he?

Wilmot was the instrument he employed to put the coal industry into
condition for “reorganization.” He bought control of one of the coal
railroads and made Wilmot president of it. Wilmot, taught by twenty years
of his service, knew what was expected of him, and proceeded to do it. He
put in a “loyal” general freight agent who also needed no instructions,
but busied himself at destroying his own and all the other coal roads by a
system of secret rebates and rate cuttings. As the other roads, one by one,
descended toward bankruptcy, Roebuck bought the comparatively small blocks
of stock necessary to give him control of them. When he had power over
enough of them to establish a partial monopoly of transportation in and out
of the coal districts, he was ready for his lieutenant to attack the mining
properties. Probably his orders to Wilmot were nothing more definite or
less innocent than: “Wilmot, my boy, don't you think you and I and some
others of our friends ought to buy some of those mines, if they come on the
market at a fair price? Let me know when you hear of any attractive
investments of that sort.”

That would have been quite enough to “tip it off” to Wilmot that the time
had come for reaching out from control of railway to control of mine. He
lost no time; he easily forced one mining property after another into a
position where its owners were glad--were eager--to sell all or part of the
wreck of it “at a fair price” to him and Roebuck and “our friends.” It was
as the result of one of these moves that the great Manasquale mines were
so hemmed in by ruinous freight rates, by strike troubles, by floods from
broken machinery and mysteriously leaky dams, that I was able to buy them
“at a fair price”--that is, at less than one-fifth their value. But at the
time--and for a long time afterward--I did not know, on my honor did not
suspect, what was the cause, the sole cause, of the change of the coal
region from a place of peaceful industry, content with fair profits, to an
industrial chaos with ruin impending.

Once the railways and mining companies were all on the verge of bankruptcy,
Roebuck and his “friends” were ready to buy, here control for purposes of
speculation, there ownership for purposes of permanent investment. This
is what is known as the reorganizing stage. The processes of high finance
are very simple--first, buy the comparatively small holdings necessary
to create confusion and disaster; second, create confusion and disaster,
buying up more and more wreckage; third, reorganize; fourth, offer the
new stocks and bonds to the public with a mighty blare of trumpets which
produces a boom market; fifth, unload on the public, pass dividends, issue
unfavorable statements, depress prices, buy back cheap what you have sold
dear. Repeat ad infinitum, for the law is for the laughter of the strong,
and the public is an eager ass. To keep up the fiction of “respectability,”
 the inside ring divides into two parties for its campaigns--one party to
break down, the other to build up. One takes the profits from destruction
and departs, perhaps to construct elsewhere; the other takes the profits
from construction and departs, perhaps to destroy elsewhere. As their
collusion is merely tacit, no conscience need twitch. I must add that, at
the time of which I am writing, I did not realize the existence of this
conspiracy. I knew, of course, that many lawless and savage things were
done, that there were rascals among the high financiers, and that almost
all financiers now and then did things that were more or less rascally; but
I did not know, did not suspect, that high finance was through and through
brigandage, and that the high financier, by long and unmolested practice of
brigandage, had come to look on it as legitimate, lawful business, and on
laws forbidding or hampering it as outrageous, socialistic, anarchistic,
“attacks upon the social order!”

I was sufficiently infected with the spirit of the financier, I frankly
confess, to look on the public as a sort of cow to milk and send out to
grass that it might get itself ready to be driven in and milked again. Does
not the cow produce milk not for her own use but for the use of him who
looks after her, provides her with pasturage and shelter and saves her from
the calamities in which her lack of foresight and of other intelligence
would involve her, were she not looked after? And is not the fact that the
public--beg pardon, the cow--meekly and even cheerfully submits to the
milking proof that God intended her to be the servant of the Roebucks--beg
pardon again, of man?

Plausible, isn't it?

Roebuck had given me the impression that it would be six months, at least,
before what I was in those fatuous days thinking of as “_our_” plan
for “putting the coal industry on a sound business basis” would be ready
for the public. So, when he sent for me shortly after I became engaged to
Miss Ellersly, and said: “Melville will publish the plan on the first of
next month and will open the subscription books on the third--a Thursday,”
 I was taken by surprise and was anything but pleased. His words meant that,
if I wished to make a great fortune, now was the time to buy coal stocks,
and buy heavily--for on the very day of the publication of the plan every
coal stock would surely soar. Buy I must; not to buy was to throw away a
fortune. Yet how could I buy when I was gambling in Textile up to my limit
of safety, if not beyond?

I did not dare confess to Roebuck what I was doing in Textile. He was
bitterly opposed to stock gambling, denouncing it as both immoral and
unbusinesslike. No gambling for him! When his business sagacity and
foresight(?) informed him a certain stock was going to be worth a great
deal more than it was then quoted at, he would buy outright in large
quantities; when that same sagacity and foresight of the fellow who has
himself marked the cards warned him that a stock was about to fall, he sold
outright. But gamble--never! And I felt that, if he should learn that I had
staked a large part of my entire fortune on a single gambling operation, he
would straightway cut me off from his confidence, would look on me as too
deeply tainted by my long career as a “bucket-shop” man to be worthy of
full rank and power as a financier. Financiers do not gamble. Their only
vice is grand larceny.

All this was flashing through my mind while I was thanking him.

“I am glad to have such a long forewarning,” I was saying. “Can I be of use
to you? You know my machinery is perfect--I can buy anything and in any
quantity without starting rumors and drawing the crowd.”

“No thank you, Matthew,” was his answer. “I have all of those stocks I
wish--at present.”

Whether it is peculiar to me, I don't know--probably not--but my memory
is so constituted that it takes an indelible and complete impression of
whatever is sent to it by my eyes and ears; and just as by looking closely
you can find in a photographic plate a hundred details that escape your
glance, so on those memory plates of mine I often find long afterward many
and many a detail that escaped me when my eyes and ears were taking the
impression. On my memory plate of that moment in my interview with Roebuck,
I find details so significant that my failing to note them at the time
shows how unfit I then was to guard my interests. For instance, I find
that just before he spoke those words declining my assistance and implying
that he had already increased his holdings, he opened and closed his hands
several times, finally closed and clinched them--a sure sign of energetic
nervous action, and in that particular instance a sign of deception,
because there was no energy in his remark and no reason for energy. I am
not superstitious, but I believe in palmistry to a certain extent. Even
more than the face are the hands a sensitive recorder of what is passing in
the mind.

But I was then too intent upon my dilemma carefully to study a man who had
already lulled me into absolute confidence in him. I left him as soon as
he would let me go. His last words were, “No gambling, Matthew! No abuse
of the opportunity God is giving us. Be content with the just profits from
investment. I have seen gamblers come and go, many of them able men--very
able men. But they have melted away, and where are they? And I have
remained and have increased, blessed be God who has saved me from the
temptations to try to reap where I had not sown! I feel that I can trust
you. You began as a speculator, but success has steadied you, and you have
put yourself on the firm ground where we see the solid men into whose hands
God has given the development of the abounding resources of this beloved
country of ours.”

Do you wonder that I went away with a heart full of shame for the gambling
projects my head was planning upon the information that good man had given
me?

I shut myself in my private office for several hours of hard thinking--as
I can now see, the first real attention I had given my business in two
months. It soon became clear enough that my Textile plunge was a folly;
but it was too late to retrace. The only question was, could and should I
assume additional burdens? I looked at the National Coal problem from
every standpoint--so I thought. And I could see no possible risk. Did not
Roebuck's statement make it certain as sunrise that, as soon as the
reorganization was announced, all coal stocks would rise? Yes, I should
be risking nothing; I could with absolute safety stake my credit; to make
contracts to buy coal stocks at present prices for future delivery was no
more of a gamble than depositing cash in the United States Treasury.

“You've gone back to gambling lately, Matt,” said I to myself. “You've
been on a bender, with your head afire. You must get out of this Textile
business as soon as possible. But it's good sound sense to plunge on
the coal stocks. In fact, your profits there would save you if by some
mischance Textile should rise instead of fall. Acting on Roebuck's tip
isn't gambling, it's insurance.”

I emerged to issue orders that soon threw into the National Coal venture
all I had not staked on a falling market for Textiles. I was not
content--as the pious gambling-hater, Roebuck, had begged me to be--with
buying only what stock I could pay for; I went plunging on, contracting for
many times the amount I could have bought outright.

The next time I saw Langdon I was full of enthusiasm for Roebuck. I can see
his smile as he listened.

“I had no idea you were an expert on the trumpets of praise, Blacklock,”
 said he finally. “A very showy accomplishment,” he added, “but rather
dangerous, don't you think? The player may become enchanted by his own
music.”

“I try to look on the bright side of things.” said I, “even of human
nature.”

“Since when?” drawled he.

I laughed--a good, hearty laugh, for this shy reference to my affair of the
heart tickled me. I enjoyed to the full only in long retrospect the look he
gave me.

“As soon as a man falls in love,” said he, “trustees should be appointed to
take charge of his estate.”

“You're wrong there, old man,” I replied. “I've never worked harder or with
a clearer head than since I learned that there are”--I hesitated, and ended
lamely--“other things in life.”

Langdon's handsome face suddenly darkened, and I thought I saw in his eyes
a look of savage pain. “I envy you,” said he with an effort at his wonted
lightness and cynicism. But that look touched my heart; I talked no more of
my own happiness. To do so, I felt would be like bringing laughter into the
house of grief.




XVI. TRAPPED AND TRIMMED


There are two kinds of dangerous temptations--those that tempt us, and
those that don't. Those that don't, give us a false notion of our resisting
power, and so make us easy victims to the others. I thought I knew myself
pretty thoroughly, and I believed there was nothing that could tempt me
to neglect my business. With this delusion of my strength firmly in mind,
when Anita became a temptation to neglect business, I said to myself: “To
go up-town during business hours for long lunches, to spend the mornings
selecting flowers and presents for her--these things _look_ like
neglect of business, and would be so in some men. But _I_ couldn't
neglect business. I do them because my affairs are so well ordered that a
few hours of absence now and then make no difference--probably send me back
fresher and clearer.”

When I left the office at half-past twelve on that fateful Wednesday in
June, my business was never in better shape. Textile Common had dropped a
point and a quarter in two days--evidently it was at last on its way slowly
down toward where I could free myself and take profits. As for the Coal
enterprise nothing could possibly happen to disturb it; I was all ready for
the first of July announcement and boom. Never did I have a lighter heart
than when I joined Anita and her friends at Sherry's. It seemed to me her
friendliness was less perfunctory, less a matter of appearances. And the
sun was bright, the air delicious, my health perfect. It took all the
strength of all the straps Monson had put on my natural spirits to keep me
from being exuberant.

I had fully intended to be back at my office half an hour before the
Exchange closed--this in addition to the obvious precaution of leaving
orders that they were to telephone me if anything should occur about which
they had the least doubt. But so comfortable did my vanity make me that
I forgot to look at my watch until a quarter to three. I had a momentary
qualm; then, reassured, I asked Anita to take a walk with me. Before we set
out I telephoned my right-hand man and partner, Ball. As I had thought,
everything was quiet; the Exchange was closing with Textile sluggish and
down a quarter. Anita and I took a car to the park.

As we strolled about there, it seemed to me I was making more headway with
her than in all the times I had seen her since we became engaged. At each
meeting I had had to begin at the beginning once more, almost as if we
had never met; for I found that she had in the meanwhile taken on all, or
almost all, her original reserve. It was as if she forgot me the instant I
left her--not very flattering, that!

“You accuse me of refusing to get acquainted with you,” said I, “of
refusing to see that you're a different person from what I imagine. But how
about you? Why do you still stick to your first notion of me? Whatever I am
or am not, I'm not the person you condemned on sight.”

“You _have_ changed,” she conceded. “The way you dress--and sometimes
the way you act. Or, is it because I'm getting used to you?”

“No--it's--” I began, but stopped there. Some day I would confess about
Monson, but not yet. Also, I hoped the change wasn't altogether due to
Monson and the dancing-master and my imitation of the tricks of speech and
manner of the people in her set.

She did not notice my abrupt halt. Indeed, I often caught her at not
listening to me. I saw that she wasn't listening now.

“You didn't hear what I said,” I accused somewhat sharply, for I was
irritated--as who would not have been?

She started, gave me that hurried, apologetic look that was bitterer to me
than the most savage insult would have been.

“I beg your pardon,” she said. “We were talking of--of changes, weren't
we?”

“We were talking of _me_” I answered. “Of the subject that interests
you not at all.”

She looked at me in a forlorn sort of way that softened my irritation with
sympathy. “I've told you how it is with me,” she said. “I do my best to
please you. I--”

“Damn your best!” I cried. “Don't try to please _me_. Be yourself. I'm
no slave-driver. I don't have to be conciliated. Can't you ever see that
I'm not your tyrant? Do I treat you as any other man would feel he had the
right to treat the girl who had engaged herself to him? Do I ever thrust my
feelings or wishes--or--longings on you? And do you think repression easy
for a man of my temperament?”

“You have been very good,” she said humbly.

“Don't you ever say that to me again,” I half commanded, half pleaded. “I
won't have you always putting me in the position of a kind and indulgent
master.”

She halted and faced me.

“Why do you want me, anyhow?” she cried. Then she noticed several loungers
on a bench staring at us and grinning; she flushed and walked on.

“I don't know,” said I. “Because I'm a fool, probably. My common sense
tells me I can't hope to break through that shell of self-complacence
you've been cased in by your family and your associates. Sometimes I think
I'm mistaken in you, think there isn't any real, human blood left in your
veins, that you're like the rest of them--a human body whose heart and mind
have been taken out and a machine substituted--a machine that can say and
do only a narrow little range of conventional things--like one of those
French dolls.”

“You mustn't blame me for that,” she said gently. “I realize it, too--and
I'm ashamed of it. But--if you could know how I've been educated. They've
treated me as the Flathead Indian women treat their babies--keep their
skulls in a press--isn't that it?--until their heads and brains grow of
the Flathead pattern. Only, somehow, in my case--the process wasn't quite
complete. And so, instead of being contented like the other Flathead girls,
I'm--almost a rebel, at times. I'm neither the one thing nor the other--not
natural and not Flathead, not enough natural to grow away from Flathead,
not enough Flathead to get rid of the natural.”

“I take back what I said about not knowing why I--I want you, Anita,” I
said. “I do know why--and--well, as I told you before, you'll never regret
marrying me.”

“If you won't misunderstand me,” she answered, “I'll confess to you my
instinct has been telling me that, too. I'm not so bad as you must think.
I did bargain to sell myself, but I'd have thrown up the bargain if you
had been as--as you seemed at first.” For some reason--perhaps it was her
dress, or hat--she was looking particularly girlish that day, and her
skin was even more transparent than usual. “You're different from the men
I've been used to all my life,” she went on, and--smiling in a friendly
way--“you often give me a terrifying sense of your being a--a wild man on
his good behavior. But I've come to feel that you're generous and unselfish
and that you'll be kind to me--won't you? And I must make a life for
myself--I must--I must! Oh, I can't explain to you, but--” She turned her
little head toward me, and I was looking into those eyes that the flowers
were like.

I thought she meant her home life. “You needn't tell me,” I said, and I'll
have to confess my voice was anything but steady. “And, I repeat, you'll
never regret.”

She evidently feared that 

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