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.”
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, isthatall?” 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. Youwillmake 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 leavingmybox 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, Iamvulgar—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.”
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!
“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—thereason? 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 hemostwants.”
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.
“Ican notmarry 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.
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.