There are two kinds of dangerous temptations—those that tempt us, and those that don't. Those that don't, give us a false notion of our resisting power, and so make us easy victims to the others. I thought I knew myself pretty thoroughly, and I believed there was nothing that could tempt me to neglect my business. With this delusion of my strength firmly in mind, when Anita became a temptation to neglect business, I said to myself: “To go up-town during business hours for long lunches, to spend the mornings selecting flowers and presents for her—these thingslooklike neglect of business, and would be so in some men. ButIcouldn't neglect business. I do them because my affairs are so well ordered that a few hours of absence now and then make no difference—probably send me back fresher and clearer.”
When I left the office at half-past twelve on that fateful Wednesday in June, my business was never in better shape. Textile Common had dropped a point and a quarter in two days—evidently it was at last on its way slowly down toward where I could free myself and take profits. As for the Coal enterprise nothing could possibly happen to disturb it; I was all ready for the first of July announcement and boom. Never did I have a lighter heart than when I joined Anita and her friends at Sherry's. It seemed to me her friendliness was less perfunctory, less a matter of appearances. And the sun was bright, the air delicious, my health perfect. It took all the strength of all the straps Monson had put on my natural spirits to keep me from being exuberant.
I had fully intended to be back at my office half an hour before the Exchange closed—this in addition to the obvious precaution of leaving orders that they were to telephone me if anything should occur about which they had the least doubt. But so comfortable did my vanity make me that I forgot to look at my watch until a quarter to three. I had a momentary qualm; then, reassured, I asked Anita to take a walk with me. Before we set out I telephoned my right-hand man and partner, Ball. As I had thought, everything was quiet; the Exchange was closing with Textile sluggish and down a quarter. Anita and I took a car to the park.
As we strolled about there, it seemed to me I was making more headway with her than in all the times I had seen her since we became engaged. At each meeting I had had to begin at the beginning once more, almost as if we had never met; for I found that she had in the meanwhile taken on all, or almost all, her original reserve. It was as if she forgot me the instant I left her—not very flattering, that!
“You accuse me of refusing to get acquainted with you,” said I, “of refusing to see that you're a different person from what I imagine. But how about you? Why do you still stick to your first notion of me? Whatever I am or am not, I'm not the person you condemned on sight.”
“Youhavechanged,” she conceded. “The way you dress—and sometimes the way you act. Or, is it because I'm getting used to you?”
“No—it's—” I began, but stopped there. Some day I would confess about Monson, but not yet. Also, I hoped the change wasn't altogether due to Monson and the dancing-master and my imitation of the tricks of speech and manner of the people in her set.
She did not notice my abrupt halt. Indeed, I often caught her at not listening to me. I saw that she wasn't listening now.
“You didn't hear what I said,” I accused somewhat sharply, for I was irritated—as who would not have been?
She started, gave me that hurried, apologetic look that was bitterer to me than the most savage insult would have been.
“I beg your pardon,” she said. “We were talking of—of changes, weren't we?”
“We were talking ofme” I answered. “Of the subject that interests you not at all.”
She looked at me in a forlorn sort of way that softened my irritation with sympathy. “I've told you how it is with me,” she said. “I do my best to please you. I—”
“Damn your best!” I cried. “Don't try to pleaseme. Be yourself. I'm no slave-driver. I don't have to be conciliated. Can't you ever see that I'm not your tyrant? Do I treat you as any other man would feel he had the right to treat the girl who had engaged herself to him? Do I ever thrust my feelings or wishes—or—longings on you? And do you think repression easy for a man of my temperament?”
“You have been very good,” she said humbly.
“Don't you ever say that to me again,” I half commanded, half pleaded. “I won't have you always putting me in the position of a kind and indulgent master.”
She halted and faced me.
“Why do you want me, anyhow?” she cried. Then she noticed several loungers on a bench staring at us and grinning; she flushed and walked on.
“I don't know,” said I. “Because I'm a fool, probably. My common sense tells me I can't hope to break through that shell of self-complacence you've been cased in by your family and your associates. Sometimes I think I'm mistaken in you, think there isn't any real, human blood left in your veins, that you're like the rest of them—a human body whose heart and mind have been taken out and a machine substituted—a machine that can say and do only a narrow little range of conventional things—like one of those French dolls.”
“You mustn't blame me for that,” she said gently. “I realize it, too—and I'm ashamed of it. But—if you could know how I've been educated. They've treated me as the Flathead Indian women treat their babies—keep their skulls in a press—isn't that it?—until their heads and brains grow of the Flathead pattern. Only, somehow, in my case—the process wasn't quite complete. And so, instead of being contented like the other Flathead girls, I'm—almost a rebel, at times. I'm neither the one thing nor the other—not natural and not Flathead, not enough natural to grow away from Flathead, not enough Flathead to get rid of the natural.”
“I take back what I said about not knowing why I—I want you, Anita,” I said. “I do know why—and—well, as I told you before, you'll never regret marrying me.”
“If you won't misunderstand me,” she answered, “I'll confess to you my instinct has been telling me that, too. I'm not so bad as you must think. I did bargain to sell myself, but I'd have thrown up the bargain if you had been as—as you seemed at first.” For some reason—perhaps it was her dress, or hat—she was looking particularly girlish that day, and her skin was even more transparent than usual. “You're different from the men I've been used to all my life,” she went on, and—smiling in a friendly way—“you often give me a terrifying sense of your being a—a wild man on his good behavior. But I've come to feel that you're generous and unselfish and that you'll be kind to me—won't you? And I must make a life for myself—I must—I must! Oh, I can't explain to you, but—” She turned her little head toward me, and I was looking into those eyes that the flowers were like.
I thought she meant her home life. “You needn't tell me,” I said, and I'll have to confess my voice was anything but steady. “And, I repeat, you'll never regret.”
She evidently feared that she had said too much, for she lapsed into silence, and when I tried to resume the subject of ourselves, she answered me with painful constraint. I respected her nervousness and soon began to talk of things not so personal to us. Again, my mistake of treating her as if she were marked “Fragile. Handle with care.” I know now that she, like all women, had the plain, tough, durable human fibre under that exterior of delicacy and fragility, and that my overconsideration caused her to exaggerate to herself her own preposterous notions of her superior fineness. We walked for an hour, talking—with less constraint and more friendliness than ever before, and when I left her I, for the first time, felt that I had left a good impression.
When I entered my offices, I, from force of habit, mechanically went direct to the ticker—and dropped all in an instant from the pinnacle of Heaven into a boiling inferno. For the ticker was just spelling out these words: “Mowbray Langdon, president of the Textile Association, sailed unexpectedly on theKaiser Wilhelmat noon. A two per cent. raise of the dividend rate of Textile Common, from the present four per cent, to six, has been determined upon.”
And I had staked up to, perhaps beyond, my limit of safety that Textile would fall!
Ball was watching narrowly for some sign that the news was as bad as he feared. But it cost me no effort to keep my face expressionless; I was like a man who has been killed by lightning and lies dead with the look on his face that he had just before the bolt struck him.
“Why didn't you tell me this,” said I to Ball, “when I had you on the 'phone?” My tone was quiet enough, but the very question ought to have shown him that my brain was like a schooner in a cyclone.
“We heard it just after you rang off,” was his reply. “We've been trying to get you ever since. I've gone everywhere after Textile stock. Very few will sell, or even lend, and they ask—the best price was ten points above to-day's closing. A strong tip's out that Textiles are to be rocketed.”
Ten points up already—on the mere rumor! Already ten dollars to pay on every share I was “short”—and I short more than two hundred thousand! I felt the claws of the fiend Ruin sink into the flesh of my shoulders. “Ball doesn't know how I'm fixed,” I remember I thought, “and he mustn't know.”
I lit a cigar with a steady hand and waited for Joe's next words.
“I went to see Jenkins at once,” he went on. Jenkins was then first vice-president of the Textile Trust. “He's all cut up because the news got out—says Langdon and he were the only ones who knew, so he supposed—says the announcement wasn't to have been made for a month—not till Langdon returned. He has had to confirm it, though. That was the only way to free his crowd from suspicion of intending to rig the market.”
“All right,” said I.
“Have you seen the afternoon paper?” he asked. As he held it out to me, my eye caught big Textile head-lines, then flashed to some others—something about my going to marry Miss Ellersly.
“All right,” said I, and with the paper in my hand, went to my outside office. I kept on toward my inner office, saying over my shoulder—to the stenographer: “Don't let anybody interrupt me.” Behind the closed and locked door my body ventured to come to life again and my face to reflect as much as it could of the chaos that was heaving in me like ten thousand warring devils.
Three months before, in the same situation, my gambler's instinct would probably have helped me out. For I had not been gambling in the great American Monte Carlo all those years without getting used to the downs as well as to the ups. I had not—and have not—anything of the business man in my composition. To me, it was wholly finance, wholly a game, with excitement the chief factor and the sure winning, whether the little ball rolled my way or not. I was the financier, the gambler and adventurer; and that had been my principal asset. For, the man who wins in the long run at any of the great games of life—and they are all alike—is the man with the cool head; and the only man whose head is cool is he who plays for the game's sake, not caring greatly whether he wins or loses on any one play, because he feels that if he wins to-day, he will lose to-morrow; if he loses to-day, he will win to-morrow. But now a new factor had come into the game. I spread out the paper and stared at the head-lines: “Black Matt To Wed Society Belle—The Bucket-Shop King Will Lead Anita Ellersly To The Altar.” I tried to read the vulgar article under these vulgar lines, but I could not. I was sick, sick in body and in mind. My “nerve” was gone. I was no longer the free lance; I had responsibilities.
That thought dragged another in its train, an ugly, grinning imp that leered at me and sneered: “But she won't have you now!”
“She will! She must!” I cried aloud, starting up. And then the storm burst—I raged up and down the floor, shaking my clinched fists, gnashing my teeth, muttering all kinds of furious commands and threats—a truly ridiculous exhibition of impotent rage. For through it all I saw clearly enough that she wouldn't have me, that all these people I'd been trying to climb up among would kick loose my clinging hands and laugh as they watched me disappear. They who were none too gentle and slow in disengaging themselves from those of their own lifelong associates who had reverses of fortune—what consideration could “Black Matt” expect from them? And she—The necessity and the ability to deceive myself had gone, now that I could not pay the purchase price for her. The full hideousness of my bargain for her dropped its veil and stood naked before me.
At last, disgusted and exhausted, I flung myself down again, and dumbly and helplessly inspected the ruins of my projects—or, rather, the ruin of the one project upon which I had my heart set. I had known I cared for her, but it had seemed to me she was simply one more, the latest, of the objects on which I was in the habit of fixing my will from time to time to make the game more deeply interesting. I now saw that never before had I really been in earnest about anything, that on winning her I had staked myself, and that myself was a wholly different person from what I had been imagining. In a word, I sat face to face with that unfathomable mystery of sex-affinity that every man laughs at and mocks another man for believing in, until he has himself felt it drawing him against will, against reason, and sense, and interest, over the brink of destruction yawning before his eyes—drawing him as the magnet-mountain drew Sindbad and his ship. And I say to you that those who can defy and resist that compulsion are not more, but less, than man or woman; and their fancied strength is in reality a deficiency. Looking calmly back upon my follies under her spell, I think the better of myself for them. It is the splendid follies of life that redeem it from vulgarity.
But—it is not in me to despair. There never yet was an impenetrable siege line; to escape, it is only necessary by craft or by chance to hit upon the moment and the spot for the sortie. “Ruined!” I said aloud. “Trapped and trimmed like the stupidest sucker that ever wandered into Wall Street! A dead one, no doubt; but I'll see to it that they don't enjoy my funeral.”
In my childhood at home, my father was often away for a week or longer, working or looking for work. My mother had a notion that a boy should be punished only by his father; so, whenever she caught me in what she regarded as a serious transgression, she used to say: “You will get a good whipping for this, when your father comes home.” At first I used to wait passively, suffering the torments of ten thrashings before the “good whipping” came to pass. But soon my mind began to employ the interval more profitably. I would scheme to escape execution of sentence; and, though my mother was a determined woman, many's the time I contrived to change her mind. I am not recommending to parents the system of delay in execution of sentence; but I must say that in my case it was responsible for an invaluable discipline. For example, the Textile tangle.
I knew I was in all human probability doomed to go down before the Stock Exchange had been open an hour the next morning. All Textile stocks must start many points higher than they had been at the close, must go steadily and swiftly up. Entangled as my reserve resources were in the Coal deal, I should have no chance to cover my shorts on any terms less than the loss of all I had. At most, I could hope only to save myself from criminal bankruptcy.
And now my early training in coolly and calmly studying how to avert execution of sentence came into play. There is a kind of cornered-rat, hit-or-miss, last-ditch fight that any creature will make in such circumstances as mine then were, and the inspirations of despair sometimes happen to be lucky. But I prefer the reasoned-out plan.
There was no signal of distress in my voice as I telephoned Corey, president of the Interstate Trust Company, to stay at his office until I came; there was no signal of distress in my manner as I sallied forth and went down to the Power Trust Building; nor did I show or suggest that I had heard the “shot-at-sunrise” sentence, as I strode into Roebuck's presence and greeted him. I was assuming, by way of precaution, that some rumor about me either had reached him or would soon reach him. I knew he had an eye in every secret of finance and industry, and, while I believed my secret was wholly my own, I had too much at stake with him to bank on that, when I could, as I thought, so easily reassure him.
“I've come to suggest, Mr. Roebuck,” said I, “that you let my house—Blacklock and Company—announce the Coal reorganization plan. It would give me a great lift, and Melville and his bank don't need prestige. My daily letters to the public on investments have, as you know, got me a big following that would help me make the flotation an even bigger success than it's bound to be, no matter who announces it and invites subscriptions.”
As I thus proposed that I be in a jiffy caught up from the extremely humble level of reputed bucket-shop dealer into the highest heaven of high finance, that I be made the official spokesman of the financial gods, his expression was so ludicrous that I almost lost my gravity. I suspect, for a moment he thought I had gone mad. His manner, when he recovered himself sufficiently to speak, was certainly not unlike what it would have been had he found himself alone before a dangerous lunatic who was armed with a bomb.
“You know how anxious I am to help you, to further your interests, Matthew,” said he wheedlingly. “I know no man who has a brighter future. But—not so fast, not so fast, young man. Of course, you will appear as one of the reorganizing committee—but we could not afford to have the announcement come through any less strong and old established house than the National Industrial Bank.”
“At least, you can make me joint announcer with them,” I urged.
“Perhaps—yes—possibly—we'll see,” said he soothingly. “There is plenty of time.”
“Plenty of time,” I assented, as if quite content. “I only wanted to put the matter before you.” And I rose to go.
“Have you heard the news of Textile Common?” he asked.
“Yes,” said I carelessly. Then, all in an instant, a plan took shape in my mind. “I own a good deal of the stock, and I must say, I don't like this raise.”
“Why?” he inquired.
“Because I'm sure it's a stock-jobbing scheme,” replied I boldly. “I know the dividend wasn't earned. I don't like that sort of thing, Mr. Roebuck. Not because it's unlawful—the laws are so clumsy that a practical man often must disregard them. But because it is tampering with the reputation and the stability of a great enterprise for the sake of a few millions of dishonest profit. I'm surprised at Langdon.”
“I hope you're wrong, Matthew,” was Roebuck's only comment. He questioned me no further, and I went away, confident that, when the crash came in the morning, if come it must, there would be no more astonished man in Wall Street than Henry J. Roebuck. How he must have laughed; or, rather, would have laughed, if his sort of human hyena expressed its emotions in the human way.
From him, straight to my lawyers, Whitehouse and Fisher, in the Mills Building.
“I want you to send for the newspaper reporters at once,” said I to Fisher, “and tell them that in my behalf you are going to apply for an injunction against the Textile Trust, forbidding them to take any further steps toward that increase of dividend. Tell them I, as a large stock-holder, and representing a group of large stock-holders, purpose to stop the paying of unearned dividends.”
Fisher knew how closely connected my house and the Textile Trust had been; but he showed, and probably felt no astonishment. He was too experienced in the ways of finance and financiers. It was a matter of indifference to him whether I was trying to assassinate my friend and ally, or was feinting at Langdon, to lure the public within reach so that we might, together, fall upon it and make a battue. Your lawyer is your true mercenary. Under his code honor consists in making the best possible fight in exchange for the biggest possible fee. He is frankly for sale to the highest bidder. At least so it is with those that lead the profession nowadays, give it what is called “character” and “tone.”
Not without some regret did I thus arrange to attack my friend in his absence. “Still,” I reasoned, “his blunder in trusting some leaky person with his secret is the cause of my peril—and I'll not have to justify myself to him for trying to save myself.” What effect my injunction would have I could not foresee. Certainly it could not save me from the loss of my fortune; but, possibly, it might check the upward course of the stock long enough to enable me to snatch myself from ruin, and to cling to firm ground until the Coal deal drew me up to safety.
My next call was at the Interstate Trust Company. I found Corey waiting for me in a most uneasy state of mind.
“Is there any truth in this story about you?” was the question he plumped at me.
“What story?” said I, and a hard fight I had to keep my confusion and alarm from the surface. For, apparently, my secret was out.
“That you're on the wrong side of the Textile.”
So it was out! “Some truth,” I admitted, since denial would have been useless here. “And I've come to you for the money to tide me over.”
He grew white, a sickly white, and into his eyes came a horrible, drowning look.
“I owe a lot to you, Matt,” he pleaded. “But I've done you a great many favors, haven't I?”
“That you have Bob,” I cordially agreed. “But this isn't a favor. It's business.”
“You mustn't ask it, Blacklock,” he cried. “I've loaned you more money now than the law allows. And I can't let you have any more.”
“Some one has been lying to you, and you've been believing him,” said I. “When I say my request isn't a favor, but business, I mean it.”
“I can't let you have any more,” he repeated. “I can't!” And down came his fist in a weak-violent gesture.
I leaned forward and laid my hand strongly on his arm.
“In addition to the stock of this concern that I hold in my own name,” said I, “I hold five shares in the name of a man whom nobody knows that I even know. If you don't let me have the money, that man goes to the district attorney with information that lands you in the penitentiary, that puts your company out of business and into bankruptcy before to-morrow noon. I saved you three years ago, and got you this job against just such an emergency as this, Bob Corey. And, by God, you'll toe the mark!”
“But we haven't done anything that every bank in town doesn't do every day—doesn't have to do. If we didn't lend money to dummy borrowers and over-certify accounts, our customers would go where they could get accommodations.”
“That's true enough,” said I. “But I'm in a position for the moment where I need my friends—and they've got to come to time. If I don't get the money from you, I'll get it elsewhere—but over the cliff with you and your bank! The laws you've been violating may be bad for the practical banking business, but they're mighty good for punishing ingratitude and treachery.”
He sat there, yellow and pinched, and shivering every now and then. He made no reply. He was one of those shells of men that are conspicuous as figureheads in every department of active life—fellows with well-shaped, white-haired or prematurely bald heads, and grave, respectable faces; they look dignified and substantial, and the soul of uprightness; they coin their looks into good salaries by selling themselves as covers for operations of the financiers. And how those operations, in the nude, as it were, would terrify the plodders that save up and deposit or invest the money the financiers gamble with on the big green tables!
Presently I shook his arm impatiently. His eyes met mine, and I fixed them.
“I'm going to pull through,” said I. “But if I weren't, I'd see to it that you were protected. Come, what's your answer? Friend or traitor?”
“Can't you give me any security—any collateral?”
“No more than I took from you when I saved you as you were going down with the rest in the Dumont smash. My word—that's all. I borrow on the same terms you've given me before, the same you're giving four of your heaviest borrowers right now.”
He winced as I thus reminded him how minute my knowledge was of the workings of his bank.
“I didn't think this of you, Matt,” he whined. “I believed you above such hold-up methods.”
“I suit my methods to the men I'm dealing with,” was my answer. “These fellows are trying to push me off the life raft. I fight with every weapon I can lay hands on. And I know as well as you do that, if you get into serious trouble through this loan, at least five men we could both name would have to step in and save the bank and cover up the scandal. You'll blackmail them, just as you've blackmailed them before, and they you. Blackmail's a legitimate part of the game. Nobody appreciates that better than you.” It was no time for the smug hypocrisies under which we people down town usually conduct our business—just as the desperadoes used to patrol the highways disguised as peaceful merchants.
“Send round in the morning and get the money,” said he, putting on a resigned, hopeless look.
I laughed. “I'll feel easier if I take it now,” I replied. “We'll fix up the notes and checks at once.”
He reddened, but after a brief hesitation busied himself. When the papers were all made up and signed, and I had the certified checks in my pocket, I said: “Wait here, Bob, until the National Industrial people call you up. I'll ask them to do it, so they can get your personal assurance that everything's all right. And I'll stop there until they tell me they've talked with you.”
“But it's too late,” he said. “You can't deposit to-day.”
“I've a special arrangement with them,” I replied.
His face betrayed him. I saw that at no stage of that proceeding had I been wiser than in shutting off his last chance to evade. What scheme he had in mind I don't know, and can't imagine. But he had thought out something, probably something foolish that would have given me trouble without saving him. A foolish man in a tight place is as foolish as ever, and Corey was a foolish man—only a fool commits crimes that put him in the power of others. The crimes of the really big captains of industry and generals of finance are of the kind that puts others in their power.
“Buck up, Corey,” said I. “Do you think I'm the man to shut a friend in the hold of a sinking ship? Tell me, who told you I was short on Textile?”
“One of my men,” he slowly replied, as he braced himself together.
“Which one? Who?” I persisted. For I wanted to know just how far the news was likely to spread.
He seemed to be thinking out a lie.
“The truth!” I commanded. “I know it couldn't have been one of your men. Who was it? I'll not give you away.”
“It was Tom Langdon,” he finally said.
I checked an exclamation of amazement. I had been assuming that I had been betrayed by some one of those tiny mischances that so often throw the best plans into confusion.
“Tom Langdon,” I said satirically. “It was he that warned you against me?”
“It was a friendly act,” said Corey. “He and I are very intimate. And he doesn't know how close you and I are.”
“Suggested that you call my loans, did he?” I went on.
“You mustn't blame him, Blacklock; really you mustn't,” said Corey earnestly, for he was a pretty good friend to those he liked, as friendship goes in finance. “He happened to hear. You know the Langdons keep a sharp watch on operations in their stock. And he dropped in to warn me as a friend. You'd do the same thing in the same circumstances. He didn't say a word about my calling your loans. I—to be frank—I instantly thought of it myself. I intended to do it when you came, but”—a sickly smile—“you anticipated me.”
“I understand,” said I good-humoredly. “I don't blame him.” And I didn't then.
After I had completed my business at the National Industrial, I went back to my office and gathered together the threads of my web of defense. Then I wrote and sent out to all my newspapers and all my agents a broadside against the management of the Textile Trust—it would be published in the morning, in good time for the opening of the Stock Exchange. Before the first quotation of Textile could be made, thousands on thousands of investors and speculators throughout the country would have read my letter, would be believing that Matthew Blacklock had detected the Textile Trust in a stock-jobbing swindle, and had promptly turned against it, preferring to keep faith with his customers and with the public. As I read over my pronunciamiento aloud before sending it out, I found in it a note of confidence that cheered me mightily. “I'm even stronger than I thought,” said I. And I felt stronger still as I went on to picture the thousands on thousands throughout the land rallying at my call to give battle.
I had asked Sam Ellersly to dine with me; so preoccupied was I that not until ten minutes before the hour set did he come into my mind—he or any of his family, even his sister. My first impulse was to send word that I couldn't keep the engagement. “But I must dine somewhere,” I reflected, “and there's no reason why I shouldn't dine with him, since I've done everything that can be done.” In my office suite I had a bath and dressing-room, with a complete wardrobe. Thus, by hurrying a little over my toilet, and by making my chauffeur crowd the speed limit, I was at Delmonico's only twenty minutes late.
Sam, who had been late also, as usual, was having a cocktail and was ordering the dinner. I smoked a cigarette and watched him. At business or at anything serious his mind was all but useless; but at ordering dinner and things of that sort, he shone. Those small accomplishments of his had often moved me to a sort of pitying contempt, as if one saw a man of talent devoting himself to engraving the Lord's Prayer on gold dollars. That evening, however, as I saw how comfortable and contented he looked, with not a care in the world, since he was to have a good dinner and a good cigar afterward; as I saw how much genuine pleasure he was getting out of selecting the dishes and giving the waiter minute directions for the chef, I envied him.
What Langdon had once said came back to me: “We are under the tyranny of to-morrow, and happiness is impossible.” And I thought how true that was. But, for the Sammys, high and low, there is no to-morrow. He was somehow impressing me with a sense that he was my superior. His face was weak, and, in a weak way, bad; but there was a certain fineness of quality in it, a sort of hothouse look, as if he had been sheltered all his life, and brought up on especially selected food. “Men like me,” thought I with a certain envy, “rise and fall. But his sort of men have got something that can't be taken away, that enables them to carry off with grace, poverty or the degradation of being spongers and beggars.”
This shows how far I had let that attack of snobbishness eat into me. I glanced down at my hands. No delicateness there; certainly those fingers, though white enough nowadays, and long enough, too, were not made for fancy work and parlor tricks. They would have looked in place round the handle of a spade or the throttle of an engine, while Sam's seemed made for the keyboard of a piano.
“You must come over to my rooms after dinner, and give me some music,” said I.
“Thanks,” he replied, “but I've promised to go home and play bridge. Mother's got a few in to dinner, and more are coming afterward, I believe.”
“Then I'll go with you, and talk to your sister—she doesn't play.”
He glanced at me in a way that made me pass my hand over my face. I learned at least part of the reason for my feeling at disadvantage before him. I had forgotten to shave; and as my beard is heavy and black, it has to be looked after twice a day. “Oh, I can stop at my rooms and get my face into condition in a few minutes,” said I.
“And put on evening dress, too,” he suggested. “You wouldn't want to go in a dinner jacket.”
I can't say why this was the “last straw,” but it was.
“Bother!” said I, my common sense smashing the spell of snobbishness that had begun to reassert itself as soon as I got into his unnatural, unhealthy atmosphere. “I'll go as I am, beard and all. I only make myself ridiculous, trying to be a sheep. I'm a goat, and a goat I'll stay.”
That shut him into himself. When he re-emerged, it was to say: “Something doing down town to-day, eh?”
A sharpness in his voice and in his eyes, too, made me put my mind on him more closely, and then I saw what I should have seen before—that he was moody and slightly distant.
“Seen Tom Langdon this afternoon?” I asked carelessly.
He colored. “Yes—had lunch with him,” was his answer.
I smiled—for his benefit. “Aha!” thought I. “So Tom Langdon has been fool enough to take this paroquet into his confidence.” Then I said to him: “Is Tom making the rounds, warning the rats to leave the sinking ship?”
“What do you mean, Matt?” he demanded, as if I had accused him.
I looked steadily at him, and I imagine my unshaven jaw did not make my aspect alluring.
“That I'm thinking of driving the rats overboard,” replied I. “The ship's sound, but it would be sounder if there were fewer of them.”
“You don't imagine anything Tom could say would change my feelings toward you?” he pleaded.
“I don't know, and I don't care a damn,” replied I coolly. “But I do know, before the Langdons or anybody else can have Blacklock pie, they'll have first to catch their Blacklock.”
I saw Langdon had made him uneasy, despite his belief in my strength. And he was groping for confirmation or reassurance. “But,” thought I, “if he thinks I may be going up the spout, why isn't he more upset? He probably hates me because I've befriended him, but no matter how much he hated me, wouldn't his fear of being cut off from supplies drive him almost crazy?” I studied him in vain for sign of deep anxiety. Either Tom didn't tell him much, I decided, or he didn't believe Tom knew what he was talking about.
“What did Tom say about me?” I inquired.
“Oh, almost nothing. We were talking chiefly of—of club matters,” he answered, in a fair imitation of his usual offhand manner.
“When does my name come up there?” said I.
He flushed and shifted. “I was just about to tell you,” he stammered. “But perhaps you know?”
“Know what?”
“That—Hasn't Tom told you? He has withdrawn—and—you'll have to get another second—if you think—that is—unless you—I suppose you'd have told me, if you'd changed your mind?”
Since I had become so deeply interested in Anita, my ambition—ambition!—to join the Travelers had all but dropped out of my mind.
“I had forgotten about it,” said I. “But, now that you remind me, I want my name withdrawn. It was a passing fancy. It was part and parcel of a lot of damn foolishness I've been indulging in for the last few months. But I've come to my senses—and it's 'me to the wild,' where I belong, Sammy, from this time on.”
He looked tremendously relieved, and a little puzzled, too. I thought I was reading him like an illuminated sign. “He's eager to keep friends with me,” thought I, “until he's absolutely sure there's nothing more in it for him and his people.” And that guess was a pretty good one. It is not to the discredit of my shrewdness that I didn't see it was not hope, but fear, that made him try to placate me. I could not have possibly known then what the Langdons had done. But—Sammy was saying, in his friendliest tone:
“What's the matter, old man? You're sour to-night.”
“Never in a better humor,” I assured him, and as I spoke the words they came true. What I had been saying about the Travelers and all it represented—all the snobbery, and smirking, and rotten pretense—my final and absolute renunciation of it all—acted on me as I've seen religion act on the fellows that used to go up to the mourners' bench at the revivals. I felt as if I had suddenly emerged from the parlor of a dive and its stench of sickening perfumes, into the pure air of God's Heaven.
I signed the bill, and we went afoot up the avenue. Sam, as I saw with a good deal of amusement, was trying to devise some subtle, tactful way of attaching his poor, clumsy little suction-pump to the well of my secret thoughts.
“What is it, Sammy?” said I at last. “What do you want to know that you're afraid to ask me?”
“Nothing,” he said hastily. “I'm only a bit worried about—about you and Textile. Matt,”—this in the tone of deep emotion we reserve for the attempt to lure our friends into confiding that about themselves which will give us the opportunity to pity them, and, if necessary, to sheer off from them—“Matt, I do hope you haven't been hard hit?”
“Not yet,” said I easily. “Dry your tears and put away your black clothes. Your friend, Tom Langdon, was a little premature.”
“I'm afraid I've given you a false impression,” Sam continued, with an overeagerness to convince me that did not attract my attention at the time. “Tom merely said, 'I hear Blacklock is loaded up with Textile shorts,'—that was all. A careless remark. I really didn't think of it again until I saw you looking so black and glum.”
That seemed natural enough, so I changed the subject. As we entered his house, I said:
“I'll not go up to the drawing-room. Make my excuses to your mother, will you? I'll turn into the little smoking-room here. Tell your sister—and say I'm going to stop only a moment.”
Sam had just left me when the butler came.
“Mr. Ball—I think that was the name, sir—wishes to speak to you on the telephone.”
I had given Ellerslys' as one of the places at which I might be found, should it be necessary to consult me. I followed the butler to the telephone closet under the main stairway. As soon as Ball made sure it was I, he began:
“I'll use the code words. I've just seen Fearless, as you told me to.”
Fearless—that was Mitchell, my spy in the employ of Tavistock, who was my principal rival in the business of confidential brokerage for the high financiers. “Yes,” said I. “What does he say?”
“There has been a great deal of heavy buying for a month past.”
Then my dread was well-founded—Textiles were to be deliberately rocketed. “Who's been doing it?” I asked.
“He found out only this afternoon. It's been kept unusually dark. It—”
“Who? Who?” I demanded.
“Intrepid,” he answered.
Intrepid—that is, Langdon—Mowbray Langdon!
“The whole thing—was planned carefully,” continued Ball, “and is coming off according to schedule. Fearless overheard a final message Intrepid's brother brought from him to-day.”
So it was no mischance—it was an assassination. Mowbray Langdon had stabbed me in the back and fled.
“Did you hear what I said?” asked Ball. “Is that you?”
“Yes,” I replied.
“Oh,” came in a relieved tone from the other end of the wire. “You were so long in answering that I thought I'd been cut off. Any instructions?”
“No,” said I. “Good-by.”
I heard him ring off, but I sat there for several minutes, the receiver still to my ear. I was muttering: “Langdon, Langdon—why—why—why?” again and again. Why had he turned against me? Why had he plotted to destroy me—one of those plots so frequent in Wall Street—where the assassin steals up, delivers the mortal blow, and steals away without ever being detected or even suspected? I saw the whole plot now—I understood Tom Langdon's activities, I recalled Mowbray Langdon's curious phrases and looks and tones. But—why—why—why? How was I in his way?
It was all dark to me—pitch-dark. I returned to the smoking-room, lighted a cigar, sat fumbling at the new situation. I was in no worse plight than before—what did it matter who was attacking me? In the circumstances, a novice could now destroy me as easily as a Langdon. Still, Ball's news seemed to take away my courage. I reminded myself that I was used to treachery of this sort, that I deserved what I was getting because I had, like a fool, dropped my guard in the fight that is always an every-man-for-himself. But I reminded myself in vain. Langdon's smiling treachery made me heart-sick.
Soon Anita appeared—preceded and heralded by a faint rustling from soft and clinging skirts, that swept my nerves like a love-tune. I suppose for all men there is a charm, a spell, beyond expression, in the sight of a delicate beautiful young woman, especially if she be dressed in those fine fabrics that look as if only a fairy loom could have woven them; and when a man loves the woman who bursts upon his vision, that spell must overwhelm him, especially if he be such a man as was I—a product of life's roughest factories, hard and harsh, an elbower and a trampler, a hustler and a bluffer. Then, you must also consider the exact circumstances—I standing there, with destruction hanging over me, with the sense that within a few hours I should be a pariah to her, a masquerader stripped of his disguise and cast out from the ball where he had been making so merry and so free. Only a few hours more! Perhaps now was the last time I should ever stand so near to her! The full realization of all this swallowed me up as in a great, thick, black mist. And my arms strained to escape from my tightly-locked hands, strained to seize her, to snatch from her, reluctant though she might be, at least some part of the happiness that was to be denied me.
I think my torment must have somehow penetrated to her. For she was sweet and friendly—and she could not have hurt me worse! If I had followed my impulse I should have fallen at her feet and buried my face, scorching, in the folds of that pale blue, faintly-shimmering robe of hers.
“Do throw away that huge, hideous cigar,” she said, laughing. And she took two cigarettes from the box, put both between her lips, lit them, held one toward me. I looked at her face, and along her smooth, bare, outstretched arm, and at the pink, slender fingers holding the cigarette. I took it as if I were afraid the spell would be broken, should my fingers touch hers. Afraid—that's it! That's why I didn't pour out all that was in my heart. I deserved to lose her.
“I'm taking you away from the others,” I said. We could hear the murmur of many voices and of music. In fancy I could see them assembled round the little card-tables—the well-fed bodies, the well-cared-for skins, the elaborate toilets, the useless jeweled hands—comfortable, secure, self-satisfied, idle, always idle, always playing at the imitation games—like their own pampered children, to be sheltered in the nurseries of wealth their whole lives through. And not at all in bitterness, but wholly in sadness, a sense of the injustice, the unfairness of it all—a sense that had been strong in me in my youth but blunted during the years of my busy prosperity—returned for a moment. For a moment only; my mind was soon back to realities—to her and me—to “us.” How soon it would never be “us” again!
“They're mama's friends,” Anita was answering. “Oldish and tiresome. When you leave I shall go straight on up to bed.”
“I'd like to—to see your room—where you live,” said I, more to myself than to her.
“I sleep in a bare little box,” she replied with a laugh. “It's like a cell. A friend of ours who has the anti-germ fad insisted on it. But my sitting-room isn't so bad.”
“Langdon has the anti-germ fad,” said I. She answered “Yes” after a pause, and in such a strained voice that I looked at her. A flush was just dying out of her face. “He was the friend I spoke of,” she went on.
“You know him very well?” I asked.
“We've known him—always,” said she. “I think he's one of my earliest recollections. His father's summer place and ours adjoin. And once—I guess it's the first time I remember seeing him—he was a freshman at Harvard, and he came along on a horse past the pony cart in which a groom was driving me. And I—I was very little then—I begged him to take me up, and he did. I thought he was the greatest, most wonderful man that ever lived.” She laughed queerly. “When I said my prayers, I used to imagine a god that looked like him to say them to.”
I echoed her laugh heartily. The idea of Mowbray Langdon as a god struck me as peculiarly funny, though natural enough, too.
“Absurd, wasn't it?” said she. But her face was grave, and she let her cigarette die out.
“I guess you know him better than that now?”
“Yes—better,” she answered, slowly and absently. “He's—anything but a god!”
“And the more fascinating on that account,” said I. “I wonder why women like best the really bad, dangerous sort of man, who hasn't any respect for them, or for anything.”
I said this that she might protest, at least for herself. But her answer was a vague, musing, “I wonder—I wonder.”
“I'm sureyouwouldn't,” I protested earnestly, for her.
She looked at me queerly.
“Can I never convince you that I'm just a woman?” said she mockingly. “Just a woman, and one a man with your ideas of women would fly from.”
“I wish you were!” I exclaimed. “Then—I'd not find it so—so impossible to give you up.”
She rose and made a slow tour of the room, halting on the rug before the closed fireplace a few feet from me. I sat looking at her.
“I am going to give you up,” I said at last.
Her eyes, staring into vacancy, grew larger and intenser with each long, deep breath she took.
“I didn't intend to say what I'm about to say—at least, not this evening,” I went on, and to me it seemed to be some other than myself who was speaking. “Certain things happened down town to-day that have set me to thinking. And—I shall do whatever I can for your brother and your father. But you—you are free!”
She went to the table, stood there in profile to me, straight and slender as a sunflower stalk. She traced the silver chasings in the lid of the cigarette box with her forefinger; then she took a cigarette and began rolling it slowly and absently.
“Please don't scent and stain your fingers with that filthy tobacco,” said I rather harshly.
“And only this afternoon you were saying you had become reconciled to my vice—that you had canonized it along with me—wasn't that your phrase?” This indifferently, without turning toward me, and as if she were thinking of something else.
“So I have,” retorted I. “But my mood—please oblige me this once.”
She let the cigarette fall into the box, closed the lid gently, leaned against the table, folded her arms upon her bosom and looked full at me. I was as acutely conscious of her every movement, of the very coming and going of the breath at her nostrils, as a man on the operating-table is conscious of the slightest gesture of the surgeon.
“You are—suffering!” she said, and her voice was like the flow of oil upon a burn. “I have never seen you like this. I didn't believe you capable of—of much feeling.”
I could not trust myself to speak. If Bob Corey could have looked in on that scene, could have understood it, how amazed he would have been!
“What happened down town to-day?” she went on. “Tell me, if I may know.”
“I'll tell you what I didn't think, ten minutes ago, I'd tell any human being,” said I. “They've got me strapped down in the press. At ten o'clock in the morning—precisely at ten—they're going to put on the screws.” I laughed. “I guess they'll have me squeezed pretty dry before noon.”
She shivered.
“So, you see,” I continued, “I don't deserve any credit for giving you up. I only anticipate you by about twenty-four hours. Mine's a deathbed repentance.”
“I'd thought of that,” said she reflectively. Presently she added: “Then, it is true.” And I knew Sammy had given her some hint that prepared her for my confession.
“Yes—I can't go blustering through the matrimonial market,” replied I. “I've been thrown out. I'm a beggar at the gates.”
“A beggar at the gates,” she murmured.
I got up and stood looking down at her.
“Don'tpityme!” I said. “My remark was a figure of speech. I want no alms. I wouldn't take even you as alms. They'll probably get me down, and stamp the life out of me—nearly. But not quite—don't you lose sight of that. They can't kill me, and they can't tame me. I'll recover, and I'll strew the Street with their blood and broken bones.”
She drew in her breath sharply.
“And a minute ago I was almost liking you!” she exclaimed.
I retreated to my chair and gave her a smile that must have been grim.
“Your ideas of life and of men are like a cloistered nun's,” said I. “If there are any real men among your acquaintances, you may find out some day that they're not so much like lapdogs as they pretend—and that you wouldn't like them, if they were.”
“What—just what—happened to you down town to-day—after you left me?”
“A friend of mine has been luring me into a trap—why, I can't quite fathom. To-day he sprang the trap and ran away.”
“A friend of yours?”
“The man we were talking about—your ex-god—Langdon.”
“Langdon,” she repeated, and her tone told me that Sammy knew and had hinted to her more than I suspected him of knowing. And, with her arms still folded, she paced up and down the room. I watched her slender feet in pale blue slippers appear and disappear—first one, then the other—at the edge of her trailing skirt.
Presently she stopped in front of me. Her eyes were gazing past me.
“You are sure it was he?” she asked.
I could not answer immediately, so amazed was I at her expression. I had been regarding her as a being above and apart, an incarnation of youth and innocence; with a shock it now came to me that she was experienced, intelligent, that she understood the whole of life, the dark as fully as the light, and that she was capable to live it, too. It was not a girl that was questioning me there; it was a woman.
“Yes—Langdon,” I replied. “But I've no quarrel with him. My reverse is nothing but the fortune of war. I assure you, when I see him again, I'll be as friendly as ever—only a bit less of a trusting ass, I fancy. We're a lot of free lances down in the Street. We fight now on one side, now on the other. We change sides whenever it's expedient; and under the code it's not necessary to give warning. To-day, before I knew he was the assassin, I had made my plans to try to save myself at his expense, though I believed him to be the best friend I had down town. No doubt he's got some good reason for creeping up on me in the dark.”
“You are sure it was he?” she repeated.
“He, and nobody else,” replied I. “He decided to do me up—and I guess he'll succeed. He's not the man to lift his gun unless he's sure the bird will fall.”
“Do you really not care any more than you show?” she asked. “Or is your manner only bravado—to show off before me?”
“I don't care a damn, since I'm to lose you,” said I. “It'll be a godsend to have a hard row to hoe the next few months or years.”
She went back to leaning against the table, her arms folded as before. I saw she was thinking out something. Finally she said:
“I have decided not to accept your release.”
I sprang to my feet.
“Anita!” I cried, my arms stretched toward her.
But she only looked coldly at me, folded her arms the more tightly and said:
“Do not misunderstand me. The bargain is the same as before. If you want me on those terms, I must—give myself.”
“Why?” I asked.
A faint smile, with no mirth in it, drifted round the corners of her mouth.
“An impulse,” she said. “I don't quite understand it myself. An impulse from—from—” Her eyes and her thoughts were far away, and her expression was the one that made it hardest for me to believe she was a child of those parents of hers. “An impulse from a sense of justice—of decency. I am the cause of your trouble, and I daren't be a coward and a cheat.” She repeated the last words. “A coward—a cheat! We—I—have taken much from you, more than you know. It must be repaid. If you still wish, I will—will keep to my bargain.”
“It's true, I'd not have got into the mess,” said I, “if I'd been attending to business instead of dangling after you. But you're not responsible for that folly.”
She tried to speak several times, before she finally succeeded in saying:
“It's my fault. I mustn't shirk.”
I studied her, but I couldn't puzzle her out.
“I've been thinking all along that you were simple and transparent,” I said. “Now, I see you are a mystery. What are you hiding from me?”
Her smile was almost coquettish as she replied:
“When a woman makes a mystery of herself to a man, it's for the man's good.”
I took her hand—almost timidly.
“Anita,” I said, “do you still—dislike me?”
“I do not—and shall not—love you,” she answered. “But you are—”
“More endurable?” I suggested, as she hesitated.
“Less unendurable,” she said with raillery. Then she added, “Less unendurable than profiting by a-creeping up in the dark.”
I thought I understood her better than she understood herself. And suddenly my passion melted in a tenderness I would have said was as foreign to me as rain to a desert. I noticed that she had a haggard look. “You are very tired, child,” said I. “Good night. I am a different man from what I was when I came in here.”
“And I a different woman,” said she, a beauty shining from her that was as far beyond her physical beauty as—as love is beyond passion.
“A nobler, better woman,” I exclaimed, kissing her hand.
She snatched it away.
“If you only knew!” she cried. “It seems to me, as I realize what sort of woman I am, that I am almost worthy ofyou!” And she blazed a look at me that left me rooted there, astounded.
But I went down the avenue with a light heart. “Just like a woman,” I was saying to myself cheerfully, “not to know her own mind.”
A few blocks, and I stopped and laughed outright—at Langdon's treachery, at my own credulity. “What an ass I've been making of myself!” said I to myself. And I could see myself as I really had been during those months of social struggling—an ass, braying and gamboling in a lion's skin—to impress the ladies!
“But not wholly to no purpose,” I reflected, again all in a glow at thought of Anita.