"I like you; you're all right," she said, surveying him with her head on one side like Romp, the terrier, who came sniffing up to him in the friendliest way. "You're not like a lot of these fashion plates that come in on tiptoes. Say, that was a bully tackle you made in that Harvard game."
He was down on one knee rubbing the shaggy coat of the terrier. He looked up.
"Oh you saw that, did you?"
"Yep! I guess there wasn't much left of that fellow! Dad said that was the finest tackle he ever saw."
"It shook me up all right," he said, grinning.
"Well, if Dad likes you and Romp likes you, you must be some account," she continued, camping on the rug and seizing triumphantly the stubby tail. "Dad's strong for you!"
Bojo settled on the edge of the sofa, watching the furious encounter which took place for the possession of the strategic point.
"I suppose you're going to marry Doris," she said in a moment of calm, while Romp made good his escape.
Bojo felt himself flushing under the direct child-like gaze.
"I should be very flattered if Doris—"
"Oh, don't talk that way," she said with a fling of her shoulders. "That's like all the others. Tell me, are all New York men such hopeless ninnies? Lord, I'm going to have a dreary time of it." She looked at him critically. "One thing I like about you; you don't wear spats."
"I suppose you're home for the wedding," he asked curiously, "or are you through with the boarding-school?"
"Didn't you hear about this?" she said with a touch to her shortened hair. "They wanted me to come out and I said I wouldn't come out. And when they said I should come out, I said to myself, I'll just fix them so I can't come out, and I hacked off all my hair. That's why they sent me off to Coventry for the summer. I'd have hacked it offagain, but Dad cut up so I let it grow, and now the plaguey old fashion has gotten around to bobbed hair. What do you think of that?"
"So you don't want to come out?" he answered.
"What for? To be nice to a lot of old frumps you don't like, to dress up and drink tea and lean up against a wall and have a crowd of mechanical toys tell you that your eyes are like evening stars and all that rot. I should saynot."
"Well, what would you like to do?"
"I'd like to go riding and hunting with Dad, live in a great country house, with lots of snow in winter and tobogganing—" She broke off with a sudden suspicion. "Say, am I boring you?"
"You are not," he said with emphasis.
"'Say, you're a judge of muscle, aren't you?'""'Say, you're a judge of muscle, aren't you?'"
"You don't like that society flub-dub either, do you?" she continued confidentially. "Lord, these dolled up women make me tired. I'd like to jounce them ten miles over the hills. Say, you're a judge of muscle, aren't you?"
"In a way."
"What do you think of that?" She held out a cool firm forearm for his inspection and he was in this intimate position when Doris came down the great stairway, with her willowy, trailing elegance. She gave a quick glance of her dark eyes at the unconventional group, with Romp in the middle an interested spectator, and said:
"Have I been keeping you hours? I hope this child's been amusing you."
The child, being at this moment perfectly screened, retorted by a roguish wink which almost upset Bojo'sequanimity. The two sisters were an absolute contrast. In her two seasons Doris had been converted into a complete woman of the world; she had the grace that was the grace of art, yet undeniably effective; stunning was the term applied to her. Her features were delicate, thinly turned, and a quality of precious fragility was about her whole person, even to the conscious moods of her smile, her enthusiasm, her serious poising for an instant of the eyes, which were deep and black and lustrous as the artfully pleasing masses of her hair. But the charm that was gone was the charm that looked up at him from the unconscious twilight eyes of the younger sister!
"Patsie, you terrible tomboy—will you ever grow up!" she said reprovingly. "Look at your dress and your hair. I never saw such a little rowdy. Now run along like a dear. Mother's waiting."
But Patsie maliciously declined to hurry. She insisted that she had promised to show off Romp and, abetted by Bojo in this deception, she kept her sister waiting while she put the dog through his tricks and—to cap the climax went off with a bombshell.
"My, you two don't look a bit glad to see each other—you look as conventional as Dolly and the Duke."
"Heavens," said Doris with a sigh, "I shall have my hands full this winter. What they'll think of her in society the Lord knows."
"I wouldn't worry about her," said Bojo pensively. "I don't think she's going to have as much trouble as you fear."
"Oh, you think so?" said Doris, glancing up. Then she laid her hand over his with a little pressure. "I'm awfully glad to see you, Bojo."
"I'm awfully glad to see you," he returned with accented enthusiasm.
"Just as glad as ever?"
"Of course."
"We shall have to use the Mercedes; Dolly's off with the Reynier. You don't mind?" she said, flitting past the military footman. "Where are we lunching?"
He named a fashionable restaurant.
"Oh, dear, no; you never see any one you know there. Let's go to the Ritz." And without waiting for his answer she added: "Duncan, the Ritz."
At the restaurant all the personelle seemed to know her. The head waiter himself showed her to a favorite corner, and advised with her solicitously as to the selection of the menu, while Bojo, who had still to eat ten thousand such luncheons, furtively compared his elegant companion with the brilliant women who were grouped about him like rare hot-house plants in a perfumed conservatory. The little shell hat she wore suited her admirably, concealing her forehead and half of her eyes with the same provoking mystery that the eastern veil lends to the women of the Orient. Everything about her dress was soft and beguilingly luxurious. All at once she turned from a fluttered welcome to a distant group and, assuming a serious air, said:
"Have you seen Dad yet? Oh, of course not—you haven't had time. You must right away. He's taken a real fancy to you, and he's promised me tosee that you make a lot of money—" she looked up in his eyes and then down at the table with a shy smile, adding emphatically—"soon!"
"So you've made up your mind to that?"
"Yes, indeed. I'm going to make you!"
She nodded, laughing and favoring him with a long contemplation.
"You dress awfully well," she said approvingly. "Clothes seem to hang on you just right—"
"But—" he said, laughing.
"Well, there are one or two things I'd like you to do," she admitted, a little confused. "I wish you'd wear a mustache, just a little one like the Duke. You'd look stunning."
He laughed in a way that disconcerted her, and an impulse came into his mind to try her, for he began to resent the assumption of possession which she had assumed.
"How do you think that would go in a mill town with overalls and a lunch can?"
"What do you mean?
"In a week I expect to be shipped to New England, to a little town, with ten thousand inhabitants; nice, cheery place with two moving-picture houses and rows on rows of factory homes for society."
"For how long?"
"For four or five years."
"Bojo, how horrible! You're not serious!"
"I may be. How would you like to keep house up there?" He caught at the disconsolate look in her face and added: "Don't worry, I know better than to ask that of you. Now listen, Doris, we've been good chums too long to fool ourselves. You'vechanged and you're going to change a lot more. Do you really like this sort of life?"
"I adore it!"
"Dressing up, parading yourself, tearing around from one function to another." She nodded, her face suddenly clouded over. "Then why in the world do you want me? There are fifty—a hundred men you'll find will play this game better than I can."
He had dropped his tone of sarcasm and was looking at her earnestly, but the questions he put were put to his own conscience.
"Why do you act this way just when you've come back?" she said, frightened at his sudden ascendency.
"Because I sometimes think that we both know that nothing is going to happen," he said directly; "only it's hard to face the truth. Isn't that it?"
"No, that isn't it. I love to be admired, I love pretty things and society and all that. Why shouldn't I? But I do care for you, Bojo; you've always brought out—" she was going to say, "the best in me," but changed her mind and instead added: "I am very proud of you— I always would be. Don't look at me like that. What have I done?"
"Nothing," he said, drawing a breath. "You can't help being what you are. Really, Doris, in the whole room you're the loveliest here. No one has your style or a smile as bewitching as yours. There is a fascination about you."
She was only half reassured.
"Well, then, don't talk so idiotically."
"Idiotic is exactly the word," he said with a laugh,and the compliments he had paid her in a spirit of self-raillery awakened a little feeling of tenderness after his teasing had shown him that, according to her lights, she cared more than he had thought.
All the same when he rose to hurry downtown, he was under no illusions: if opportunity permitted him to fit into the social scheme of things, well and good; if not— His thoughts recurred to Fred DeLancy's words:
"There are three ways of making money: to have it left to you, to earn it, and to marry it."
He broke off angrily, troubled with doubts, and for the hundredth time he found himself asking:
"Now why the deuce can't I be mad in love with a girl who cares for me, who's a beauty and has everything in the world! What is it?"
For he had once been very much in love when he was a schoolboy and Doris had been just a schoolgirl, with open eyes and impulsive direct ways, like a certain young lady, with breathless, laughing lips who had come sliding into his life on the comical tail of a scampering terrier.
The offices of the Associated Woolen Mills were on the sixteenth floor of a modern office building in the lower city, which towered above the surrounding squalid brownstone houses given over to pedlers and delicatessen shops like a gleaming stork ankle deep in a pool of murky water.
Bojo wandered through long mathematical rooms with mathematical young men perched high on desk stools all with the same mathematical curve of the back, past squadrons of clicking typewriters, clicking endlessly as though each human unit had been surrendered into the cogs of a universal machine. He passed one by one a row of glassed-in rooms with names of minor officers displayed, marking them solemnly as though already he saw the long slow future ahead: Mr. Pelton, treasurer; Mr. Spinny, general secretary; Mr. Colton, second vice-president; Mr. Horton, vice-president; Mr. Rhoemer, general manager, until he arrived at the outer waiting-room with its faded red leather sofas and polished brass spittoons, where he had come first as a boy in need of money.
Richardson, an old young man, who walked as though he had never been in a hurry and spoke in a whisper, showed him into the inner office of Jotham B. Crocker, explaining that his father would return presently. Everything was in order; chairs preciselyplaced, the window shades at the same level, bookcases with filed memoranda, even to the desk, where letters to be read and letters to be signed were arranged in neat packages side by side.
On the wall was extended an immense oil painting fifteen feet by ten, of Niagara Falls in frothy eruption, with a large and brilliant rainbow lost in the mist and several figures in the foreground representing the noble Indians gazing with feelings of awe upon the spectacle of nature. Behind the desk hung a large black and white engraving of Abraham Lincoln, with one hand resting on the Proclamation of Emancipation, flanked by smaller portraits of Henry Ward Beecher and the author of the McKinley tariff. Opposite was an old-time family group done in crayons, representing Mr. and Mrs. Crocker standing side by side, with Jack in long trousers and Tom in short, while on the shining desk amid the papers was a daguerrotype mounted in a worn leather frame, of the wife who had been dead fifteen years.
Bojo selected a cigar from the visitors box and strode up and down, rehearsing in his mind the arguments he would bring to bear against the expected ultimatum. From the window the lower bay expanded below him with its steam insects crawling across the blue-gray surface, its wharf-crowded shores, beyond the ledges on ledges of factories trailing cotton streamers against the brittle sky. Everywhere the empire of industry extended its stone barracks without loveliness or pomp, smoke-grimed, implacable prisons, where multitudes herded under artificial light that humanity might live in terms of millions.
As he looked, he seemed already to have surrendered his individuality, swallowed up in the army of labor, and the revolt arose in him anew. What was the use of money if it could not bring a wider horizon and greater opportunities? And a sort of dull anger moved in him against the parental ambition which limited him to unnecessary drudgery.
Of all the persons he had met the greatest stranger to him was his father. Since his mother's death, when he was but eight years of age, his life had been spent in boarding school and college, in summer camps or on visits to chums. Their relations had been formal. At the beginning and end of each summer he had come down the long avenue of desks, past the glass doors into the private office, to report, to receive money, and to be sped with a few appropriate words of advice. Several times during the year his father would appear on a short warning, stay a few hours, and hurry off. On such occasions Tom had always felt that he was being surveyed and estimated as a lumberman watches the growth of a young forest.
His father was always in a hurry, always in good health, matter of fact, and generous. That his business had prospered and extended he knew, though to what extent his father's activities had multiplied he still was ignorant. Conversation between them had always been difficult in those tours of inspection; but Bojo, instinctively, censored the lithographs on the wall (harmless though they were) and the choice of novels which his father would be sure to examine with a critical eye.
Klondike, the sweep, arranged the room in militaryorder and Fred DeLancy was enjoined to observe a bread-and-milk diet. Bojo had an idea that his father was very stern, rigid, and exact, with the unrelenting attitude toward folly and leisure which had characterized the Crocker family in the days of their seven celebrated divines.
"How are you, Tom?" said a chest-voice behind him. "Turn around. You look in first-class shape. Glad to see you."
"Glad to see you, father," he said hastily, taking the stubby, powerful hand.
"Just a moment—go on with your cigar. Let me straighten out this desk. Train was ten minutes late."
"Now it comes," thought Bojo to himself as he gripped his hands and assumed a determined frown.
As they faced each other they were astonishingly alike and unlike. They had the same squaring of the brows, the same obstinate rise of the head at the back, and the prominent undershot jaw. Years had thickened the frame of the father and written characteristic lines about the mouth and the eyes. He had become so integral a part of the machine he had created that in the process all the finer youthful shades of expression had faded away.
Concentration on a fixed idea, indomitable purpose, decision, self-discipline were there in the strongly sculptured chin and maxillary muscles, under the sparse, close-cropped beard shot with gray; courage and tenacity in the deep eyes, which, like Bojo's, had the disconcerting fixity of the mastiff's; but the quality of dreams which so keenly qualified the tempestuous obstinacy of the son had been discarded as so muchsuperfluous baggage. Life to him was a succession of immediate necessities, a military progress, and his imagination went with difficulty beyond the demands of the hour. He dressed in a pepper-and-salt business suit made of his own product, wore a made-up tie and comfortable square-toed shoes, with a certain aggressive disdain for the fashions as a quality of pretentiousness.
He ran through his correspondence in five minutes while Bojo pricked up his ears at the sums which he flung off without hesitation. Richardson faded from the room, the father shifted a package of memoranda, turned the face of his desk clock so he could follow the time, drew back in his chair, and helped himself to a cigar, shooting a glance at the embattled figure of the son.
"You look all primed up—ready to jump in the ring," he said with a smile, and without waiting for Bojo's embarrassed answer he continued, caging his fingers and adopting a quick, incisive tone.
"Well, Tom, you have now arrived at man's estate and it is right that I should discuss with you your future course in life. But before we come to that I wish to say several things. You've finished your college course very creditably. You have engaged a good deal in different sports, it is true; but you have not allowed it to interfere with your serious work, and I believe on the whole your experience in athletics has been valuable. It has taught you qualities of self-restraint and discipline, and it has given you a sound body. Your record in your studies, while it has not been brilliant, has been creditable. You've kept out of bad company, chosen the rightfriends— I am particularly impressed with Mr. Granning—and you've not gone in for dissipation. You've done well and I have no complaint. You've worked hard and you've played hard. You will take a serious view of life."
This discourse annoyed Bojo. It seemed to fling a barrier of conventionality between them, driving them further apart.
"Why the deuce doesn't he talk in a natural way?" he thought moodily. And he felt with a sudden depression the futility of arguing his case. "We're in for a row. There's no way out."
"Now, Tom, lets talk about the future."
"Here it comes," said Bojo to himself, bracing himself to resist.
"What would you like to do?"
"What wouldIlike?" said Tom, completely off his guard.
"Yes, what are your ideas?"
The turn was so unexpected that he could not for the moment assemble his thoughts. He rose, making a pretext of seeking an ash-tray, and returned.
"Why, to tell the truth, sir, I came here expecting that you would demand that I go into this—into the mills."
"I see, and you don't want to do what your father's done. You want something else, something better."
The tone in which this was said aroused the obstinacy in the young man, but he repressed the first answer.
"Well?"
"I don't know, sir, that there's any use of my explaining myself; I don't know what good it'll do," he said slowly.
"On the contrary, I am not making demands on you. I am here to discuss with you." (Bojo repressed a smile at this.) "You've thought about this. What do you suggest?"
"I don't think you'll understand it at all, but I want time."
"Time to do what?"
"To get out and see the world, to meet men who are doing things, to get a chance to develop, to get my ideas straightened out a bit."
"Is that all?"
"No, that's not quite honest," said Bojo suddenly. "The truth is, sir, I don't see why I should begin all over again, the drudgery and the isolation and all. If you wanted me to do only that why did you send me to college? I've made friends and it's only right I should have the opportunity to lead as big a life as they. Money isn't everything, it's what you get out of life, and besides I've got opportunities, unusual opportunities to get ahead here."
"Have you made up your mind, Tom?" said the father slowly.
"I'm afraid I have, sir."
"Let me talk to you. You may see it in a different light. First you speak of opportunities—what opportunities?"
"Mr. Drake has been kind enough—"
"That means Wall Street."
"Yes, sir."
The father thought a moment.
"What is the situation between you and Miss Drake?"
"We are very good friends."
"Would you marry her if you didn't have a cent?"
"I would not."
"I am glad to hear you say that. Very glad. So you re going into Wall Street," he said, after a moment. "Are you going into the banking business?"
"Why, no."
"Or into railroads or any creative industry?"
"Not exactly."
"You're going into Wall Street," said Crocker, "like a great many young men, who've been having an easy, luxurious time at college and who want to go on with it. You're going there as a gambler, hoping to get the inside track through some influence and make a hundred thousand dollars of other people's money in a lucky year."
"That's rather a hard way to put it, sir."
"You don't pretend to be able to earn a hundred thousand dollars in one year or in five, do you, Tom?"
"Let me put it in another way," said Bojo after a moment's indecision. "What you have made and what you have been able to give me have put me in the way of acquiring friends that others can't make, and friends are assets. The higher up you go in society the easier it is to make money; isn't it so? Opportunities are assets also. If I have the opportunity to make a lot of money in a short time, what is the sense of turning my back on the easiest way and taking up the hardest?"
"Tom, do you young fellows ever stop to think that there is such a thing as your own country, and that if you've got advantages you've also got responsibilities?" said Crocker, senior, shaking his head. "You want money like all the rest. What good do you want to do in return? What usefulness do you accomplish in the scheme of things here? You talk of opportunity—you don't know what a real opportunity and a privilege is. Now let me say my say."
Richardson came sliding into the room at this moment and he paused to deny the card, with a curt order against further interruptions. When he resumed it was on a quieter note, with a touch of sadness.
"The trouble is, our points of view are too far apart for us to come together at present. You want something that isn't going to satisfy you and I know isn't going to satisfy you. But I can't make you see it, there's the pity of it. You've got to get your hard knocks yourself. You've got real ambition in you. Now let me tell you something about the mills and you think it over. There's some bigger things in this world than you think, and the biggest is to create something, something useful to the community; to make a monument of it and to pass it down for your son to carry on—family pride. You think there's only drudgery in it. Did you ever think there were thousands and thousands of people depending on how you run your business? Do you realize that every great business to-day means the protection of those thousands; that you've got to study out how to protect them at every point in order to make them efficient; that there's nothing unimportant?You've got to watch over their health and their happiness, see that they get amusement, relaxation; that they're encouraged to buy homes and taught to save money. You've got to see that they get education to keep them out of the hands of ignorant agitators. You've got to make them self-respecting and able intelligently to understand your own business, so that they'll perceive they're getting their just share. Add to that the other side, the competition, the watching of every new invention, the calculating to the last cent, the study of local and foreign conditions of supply and demand, the habits and tastes of different communities. Add also the biggest thing that you've got, a mixed population, that's got to be turned into intelligent, useful American citizens, and you've got as big an opportunity and responsibility as you can place before any young fellow I know. What do you say?"
Bojo had nothing to say—not that he had surrendered, but that his own arguments seemed petty besides these.
The father rose and laid his hands on his son's shoulders.
"Why, Tom, don't you know it's been the dream of my life to hand you down this thing that I've built myself? Don't you know there's a sentiment about it? Why, it isn't dollars and cents: I've got ten times what I want; it's pride. I'm proud of every bit of it. There isn't a new turn, mechanical or social, has come up over the world but what I've adopted it there. I haven't had a strike in fifteen years. I've done things there would open your eyes. You'd be proud. Well, what are you thinking?"
"You make it very hard, sir," he said slowly. He had not expected this sort of appeal. "If I were older, I don't know—but it's hard now." He could not tell him all the surrender would mean, and though his deeper nature had been reached he still fought on. "I'm not starting where you started, sir; that's the trouble. You went to work when you were twelve. It would be easier if I had, and, if you'll forgive me, it's your fault too that I want what I want now. I suppose I do want to begin on top, but I've been on top all these years, that's all. I couldn't do it now; perhaps later—I don't know. If I went up to the mills now I should eat my heart out. I'm sorry to have to say this to you, but it's the truth."
The father left him abruptly and seated himself at his desk without speaking.
"If I insisted you would refuse," he said slowly.
"I'm afraid I'd have to, sir," said Bojo, with a feeling of dread.
There was another silence, at the end of which Mr. Crocker drew out his check-book and looked at it solemnly.
"Good! Now he's figuring how much he'll give me and cut me off!" thought the son.
"Tom, I don't want to lose you too," said the father slowly. "I'm going to try a different way with you. You're sound and you ring true. The only trouble is you don't know; you've got to learn your lesson. So you think if you had a start you'd clean up a fortune, don't you?—and you believe—" he paused—"in Wall Street friends. Very well; I'm going to give you an opportunity to get your eyes open."
He dipped his pen in the ink and wrote a check with deliberation, while Bojo, puzzled, thought to himself: "What the deuce is he up to now?"
"I'm not going to make a bargain with you. I'm going to trust to experience and to the Crocker in you. I know the stuff you're made of. You'll never make an idler, you'll never stand that life, but you want to try it. Very well. I'm going to give you a check. It's yours. Play with it all you want. You'll get it taken away from you in two years at the most. When that happens come back to me, do you understand, where you belong! Blood's thicker than water, my boy; there's something in father and son sticking together, doing something that counts! Here, take this."
And he placed in his hand a check which read:
Pay to the order of Thomas Beauchamp CrockerFifty thousand dollarsJotham B. Crocker.
A week after his interview with his father, Tom Crocker entered the great shadowy library of the Drakes in response to an invitation from the father. At this time, when Wall Street was approaching that dramatic phase which is inevitable in social transformations, when dominant and outstanding individualities succumb to the obliterating rise of bureaucracies, there was no more picturesque personality than Daniel Drake. He had come to New York several years before, awaited as a vaulting spirit who played the game recklessly and who would never cease to aspire until he had forced his way to the top or been utterly broken in the attempt.
His career had bordered on the fantastic. As a boy theWanderlusthad driven him over the face of the globe. A shrewd capacity for making money of anything to which he put his hand had carried him through strange professions. He had been a pedler on the Mississippi, cook on a tramp steamer to Australia, boxed in minor professional encounters, exhibited as a trick bicycle rider, served as a soldier of fortune up and down Central America, and returned to his native country to establish a small fortune in the field of the country fairs.
With the acquisition of capital, he became conservativeand industrious. Reconciled with his family, he had secured the necessary funds to attempt an operation in the wheat market which, conducted on a reasonable scale, netted him a handsome profit and enlarged his activities. His genius for manipulation and trading, which was soon recognized, brought him into the services of big industries. He made money rapidly, and married impulsively against the advice of his friends a woman of social prominence who cared absolutely nothing about him—a fact which he was the last to perceive.
He next undertook a daring operation, the buying up of the control of a great industry in competition with an eastern group. A friend whom he trusted betrayed the pool he had formed, and the loyalty of his associates, which made him continue, completely bankrupted him. Before the public had even an inkling of the extent of his catastrophe he had mended his fortunes by the brilliant stroke, secured control of one of the subsidiary companies destined for the steel trust, and realized a couple of millions as his share. When he referred to this moment, which he often did, he used to say frankly:
"We went into the meeting bankrupt and came out seven millionaires."
He became the leader of a group of young financiers who acquired and developed with amazing success a chain of impoverished railroads. He played the game, scrupulous to his word, merciless in a fight, generous to a conquered enemy, for the love of the game itself. A big man with a curious atmosphere of amused calm in the midst of the flurry and turmoil he aroused, he enjoyed the turns and twists offate with the zest of a boy gray-eyed, imperturbable, and magnetic, winning even those who saw in him an ethical and economical danger.
Such was the man who was bending over a great oaken table engrossed in the piecing together of an intricate picture puzzle, as Bojo came through the heavy tapestry portières. Patsie, perched on a corner, was looking on with approving interest at the happy solving of a perplexing group. She sprang down, flung her arms about her father in an impulsive farewell, and came prancing over to Bojo with a laughing warning:
"Whatever you do,neverfind a piece for him. It makes him madder than a wet hen. He wants to do it all himself. Now I'm running off. Don't worry! Go on, talk your old business."
She went off like the flash of a golden bird while Bojo, slightly intimidated, was wishing she might remain.
"Tom—glad to see you—come in—just a moment—help yourself to a cigar. Confound that piece, I knew it fitted in there!" Drake left the board with a lingering regret, shook hands with a grip that seemed to envelop the young man, and went to the mantel for a match, where a large equestrian statue of Bartolommeo Colleoni rose threateningly from the shadows.
"Glad to see you, my boy—my orders are in from the General Manager, and when the General Manager gives orders I know it means hustle!" By this title he designated Doris, whose practical ambitions and perseverance he satirized with an indulgent smile. "Far as I can make out, Doris hasdetermined to make you a millionaire in a couple of years or so, so I suppose the best thing is to sit down and discuss it."
As he stood there gaunt and alert against the bronze background, there was something about him too of the old condottieri, a certain blunt and hardened quality of the grizzled head, as though he too had just hung back a steel helmet and emerged tense and victorious from a bruising scramble.
"Supposing he's figuring out that I'll cost him less than the Duke," thought Tom, conscious of a certain proprietary estimation below all the surface urbanity, and, squaring to the charge, he said: "I'm afraid, sir, you've a pretty poor opinion of me."
"What do you mean?" said Drake, with sudden interest.
"May I talk to you plainly, sir?" said Tom, a little flustered. "I don't know just how I feel about Doris or even just how she feels about me. I certainly have no intention of marrying her until I know what I am worth myself, and I certainly don't intend to come to you, her father, to make money for me."
He stopped with a little fear for his boldness, for this had not been his intention on entering the room. In fact, he had come rather in a state of indecision, after long discussions with Doris, and much serving up of sophistries to his conscience; but Drake's greeting had struck at his young independence, as perhaps it had been meant to do, and an impulsive wave of indignation overruled his calculations. He stood a little apprehensive, watching the older man, wondering how he would receive the defiance.
"That's talking," said Drake, with an approving smile. "Go on."
"Mr. Drake, I can't help feeling that we're going to look at things more and more from a different point of view. Doris cares for me—I suppose so—if she can have me without sacrificing anything. I don't express it very well, but I do feel at times that she's more interested in what she can make out of me than in me, and I don't know if I'll work out the way she wants; in fact, I'm not at all sure," he blurted out pugnaciously. "But I want to work out that way, and if I don't there'll come a smashup pretty soon."
"There's something in what you say," said Drake, nodding, "and I like your coming straight out with it. Now look here, my boy, I'm not going to take hold of you because I expect you to marry Doris, but because Iwantyou to marry her! Get that down. I can control lots of things, but I can't control the women. They beat me every time. I'm pulp. I've given in once, though Lord knows I hope my little girl won't regret it. I've got one decayed foreign title dangling to the totem-pole, and that's enough; that's got to satisfy the missus. I don't want another and I don't want any high-stepping Fifth Avenue dude. I want a man, one of my own kind who can talk my language."
He arose, took a turn, and clapped him on the shoulder. "I want you. I settled that in my own mind long ago. Now I'm going to talk as plain to you. As you get on you'll look at people differently than you do. You'll see how much is due to accident, the parting of the ways, going to the left instead of to the right. Now I know Doris. I've watched her.She's got two sides to her; you appeal to the best. I know it. She knows it. She wouldn't marry you if you were a beggar—women are that way—but she'll stick to you loyal, as a regular, if she marries you; and you're not going to be a beggar."
"Yes, if I consent to close my eyes and let you build—"
"Now don't get huffy. I'm not going to tuck you under my wing," said Drake, grinning. "Furthermore, I wouldn't want you in the family if I didn't know you had stuff in you. Don't you think I want some one I can trust in this cut-throat game? Don't worry, if you're the right sort I can use you. Now quit thinking too much—let things work out. Doris is the kind that belongs at the top; she's bound to be a leader, and we're going to put her there, you and I. Now what do you want to do?"
"I want to stand on my own feet," said Tom, with a last resistance. "I want to see what I'm worth by myself."
"Wall Street, of course," said Drake, grinning again. "Well, why not? You'll learn quicker the things you've got to learn, even if it costs you more."
He flung down in a great armchair, and stared out at the raw recruit as though for an instant rolling back the years to his own beginnings.
"Tom, if you're going in," he said all at once, "go in with your eyes open and make up your mind soon what you want; but when you've made up your mind don't fool yourself. If you want to plod along safe and sane, you can do it just as well in Wall Street as anywhere else. But I reckon that's not what you're after." He chuckled at Bojo's confusedacknowledgment of the patness of his surmise and continued:
"Well, then, recognize that what you're going into is war, nothing more nor less. You see, we're a curious people; we haven't had the chance to develop as others. And there's something instinctive about war; in a growing nation it lets off a lot of wild energy. Now there's a group of the big fellows here that ought to have had a chance at being field marshals or admirals, and because they haven't the chance they've developed a special little battlefield of their own to fight each other. And, say, the big fellows don't fool themselves—they know what they're doing! They're under no illusions. But there're a lot of big little men down there who go around hugging delusions to their hearts, who'll sack a railroad or lay siege to a corporation with the idea they're ordained to grab the other fellow's property. Now I don't fool myself: that's my strong point. I'm grabbing as fast as the other fellow, but I know the time's coming when they won't let us grab any more. I do it because I want to, because I love it and because we're founding aristocracies here as the Old World did a couple of centuries ago. Well, to come back to you. I'll see you start in a good firm—"
"I'd rather do it myself."
"As you wish. Got any money?"
"Fifty thousand dollars," said Tom, who then related his father's prediction.
"Ordinarily he's a good guesser," said Drake, laughing. "But we may put one over on him. There's a scheme I've been brewing over for a bigcombine in the woolen industry that may give him a pleasant surprise. Well, then, start in on your own feet, my boy. Learn all you can of men. Study them—browse around in figures, if you want, but everlastingly keep your eyes on men! It's the man and not the proposition that's gilt-edged or empty. You've got to learn how the other fellow thinks, what he'll do in a given situation, if you're going to think ahead of him, and that's the quality that counts. That's where I've got them guessing, every minute of the day; there isn't one of them can figure out now if I'm twenty millions to the good or ten behind."
"Why, Tom, there was a time when I was stone broke—by golly, even my creditors were broke, which is an awful thing; and everything depended on my getting the right backing on the proposition that saved me. Do you think any one of those sleuth-hounds were on? Not on your life. I was living at the biggest hotel, in the biggest suite, spilling money all over the city—on tick, of course. And, say, in the critical week, when I was dodging my own tailor, I sent the missus (she didn't know anything, either) up to Fifth Avenue to buy a $100,000 necklace. That settled it. The other fellows, the fellows whose brains wind up like clocks, couldn't figure it out. I got my backing."
"But supposing you hadn't," said Bojo involuntarily. He had been listening to this recital open-eyed like a child at a circus. "What would have happened?"
Drake laughed contentedly. "There you are. That's all the other fellow could figure on. Nowdon't imagine you can do what I did—you can't. I suppose there's no use telling you not to speculate, because you're going to, no matter what you think now. You will; because the young fellow who goes into Wall Street and doesn't think he's a genius in the first three months hasn't been born yet! But the first time it comes over you, throw only a third of your capital out of the window. Do you get me?"
"I won't do that," said Bojo resolutely.
"Go on. Do. You ought. It's cheap at that! I paid seven hundred thousand for the same information," said Drake, giving him his hand. He caught his shoulder in his powerful grip and added: "If you get in too much trouble, come to me! Remember that and good luck!"
Three months after his entry into Wall Street, Bojo emerged from his bedroom into the communal sitting-room in a state of tense excitement. The day before he had taken his first plunge into the world of speculation and bought a thousand shares of Indiana Smelter on a twenty per cent. margin. This transaction, which represented to his mind the inevitable challenge at the gates of fortune, had left him in a turmoil through all the restless night. He had taken the decision which was to decide his future only after a long wrestling with his conscience.
At first he had imposed a limit, promising himself that he would not touch a penny of his $50,000 capital until he should know of his own knowledge. Gradually this time limit had contracted. Speculation was in the air, triumphant and insidious. The whole market was sweeping up irresistibly. The times were dramatic. Golden opportunity seemed within every one's grasp. Expansion, development, amalgamation were on every tongue. Roscoe Marsh had made a hundred thousand on paper. Even Fred DeLancy had won several turns which had netted him handsome profits.
Bojo had resisted stubbornly at first, turning heedlessears to the excited arguments of his friends, but the fever of speculation had entered his veins, he dreamed of nothing else, and gradually the thought of his $50,000, so modestly invested in four per cent. bonds obsessed him. What was worse was that each time he had refused to follow a tip of Marsh or DeLancy or a dozen new-found friends, he secretly noted down the speculation; and the thought of these dollars he had refused, which could have been his for the asking, rose up before him in a constant reproach. In the end it was Doris who decided him.
That indefatigable schemer, whom even he now called the General Manager, had a dozen times summoned him for an excited consultation on some rumor which she had caught in passage. At first he had laughed her down, then he had stubbornly refused such an alliance. But Doris, undaunted, returned to the charge, amazing him at times with the pertinency of her information, which she picked up from the wives and daughters, from those who came as suitors, or as mere friends of the family, while just as industriously and cleverly she commandeered her acquaintance and sent Bojo a string of customers which had remarkably affected his progress in the brokerage offices of Hauk, Flaspoller and Forshay.
Finally he had yielded, because for weeks he had been longing to yield as a spectator tires of watching inactive the spectacle of the shifting golden combinations on the green cloth of the gambling table. She had information of the most explicit sort. A great combination of Middle Western Smelters had been held up for several weeks by the refusal of two great companies to enter at the price offered—IndianaSmelter and Rockland Foundry. She knew positively that the matter would be adjusted in the next fortnight.
"Did your father say so?" he asked, really impressed, for Drake was reported as directly interested.
"Not in the first place."
"But where did you get your information?"
"Oh, I have my ways," she said, delighted, "and I keep my secrets too. Just remember if you'd taken my advice what you'd have made."
"It is astounding how right you've been," he said doubtfully.
"Listen, Bojo, this is absolutely correct. I know it. I can't tell you now—I promised—but if I could you wouldn't have the slightest doubt. Can't you trust me just this once? Don't you know that I'm working for you? Oh, it's such an opportunity for us both. Listen, if you won't do it, buy five hundred shares for me with my own money. Oh, how can I convince you!"
He looked away thoughtfully; tempted, convinced, suspecting the source of her information, but wishing to remain ignorant.
"You are determined to buy?" She nodded energetically. "What does your father say?"
She seized his idea, saving him the embarrassment of a direct suggestion.
"If Dad says yes, will that convince you? Wait." She thought a moment, pacing up and down, humming brightly to herself. Suddenly she turned, her eyes sparkling with the delight of her own machinations. "I'll tell you how I'll do it. Next week's mybirthday. I'll ask him to give me the tip as a birthday present." She clapped her hands gleefully, adding: "I'll tell him it's for my trousseau. If he says all right you won't refuse."
"No, I won't."
She flung herself joyfully into his arms at this victory won, at this prospect opened.
"Bojo, I do love you and I do want to do so much for you!" she cried, tightening her arms about his neck, with more genuine demonstration than she had shown in months.
"After all, I'd be a fool to refuse," he thought, excited too, and aloud he said, "Yes, Miss General Manager."
"Oh, call me anything you like if you'll only let me manage you!" she said, laughing. "Now sit down and let me tell you all I've planned out for you to do."
That night she told him excitedly over the telephone that her little scheme had succeeded, that her father had given his O. K., but of course no one must know. The next day he had bought five hundred shares for her, and after much hesitation a thousand for his own account at 104½. It was a good risk; the stock had been stable for years; even if the combination did not go through, there was little danger of a rapid fall; and if it went up there was a chance at a thirty- or forty-point rise. He kept the injunction of secrecy, as all such injunctions are kept, to the point of telling only his closest friends, Marsh and DeLancy, who bought at once.
Nevertheless, no sooner had the transaction been completed than he had a sudden revulsion. He hadbeen long enough in Wall Street to have heard a hundred tales of the methods of big manipulators. What if Dan Drake's endorsement was only a clever ruse to conceal his real intentions, quits for reimbursing Doris afterward with a check, according to a famous precedent? Perhaps he even suspected that he, Bojo, had put Doris up to it and was taking this method to read him the lesson that his methods were not to be solved along such lines. At any rate, Tom passed a very bad night, saying to himself that he had plunged ahead on the flimsiest sort of evidence and fully deserved a shearing.
A glorious December morning, with a touch of Indian summer, was pouring through the half-opened window, bearing the distant sounds of steam riveters. Marsh was busily culling half a dozen newspapers, while Fred was yawning over the eggs and coffee, when the mail was brought in by the grinning Oriental who had been dubbed Sweeney. DeLancy, who had the curiosity of a girl, pounced upon the letters, slinging half a dozen at Bojo with a grumbled comment.
"Dog ding him if he isn't more popular than me! Important business letters—Mr. Morgan and Mr. Rockefeller asking your advice—society invitations—do honor our humble palace, pink envelope, heavily scented. I say, Bojo, I've gone in deep on your precious stock, two hundred shares—all I could scrape together. Hope you guess right. Anything I hate is work, and 10 per cent. margin ought to be bolstered up by divine revelation."
"Wish the deuce you hadn't," said Bojo, sitting down and opening the formal announcement of hisbroker's purchase, which struck his eyes like a criminal warrant.
"Cheer up," said Marsh, emerging from the litter of papers. "I've got a tip from another angle, one of the lawyers involved. I'm going in for another couple of thousand shares. Why so glum, Bojo?"
"Wish I hadn't told you fellows."
"Rats; that's all in the game!" said Marsh, but DeLancy did not look so philosophical.
Bojo opened several invitations, a notice from the tailor to call for a fitting, two letters from clients, personal friends, and finally the pink envelope, which was from Doris.