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 withmynotion 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 rebukinghim—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.
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 Iwereclever,” 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. Laughwithme if you like; but, before you laughatme, 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.
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 yoususpectthe 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 jailedthem.”
“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 onyourhands—yourhead? 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.