No sane creature, not even a sane bulldog, will fight simply from love of fighting. When a man is attacked, he may be sure he has excited either fear or cupidity, or both. As far as I could see, it was absurd that cupidity was inciting Langdon and Roebuck against me. I hadn't enough to tempt them. Thus, I was forced to conclude that I must possess a strength of which I was unaware, and which stirred even Roebuck's fears. But what could it be?
Besides Langdon and Roebuck and me there were six principals in the proposed Coal combine, three of them richer and more influential in finance than even Langdon, all of them except possibly Dykeman, the lawyer or navigating officer of the combine, more formidable figures than I. Yet none of these men was being assailed. “Why am I singled out?” I asked myself, and I felt that if I could answer, I should find I had the means wholly or partly to defeat them. But I could not explain to my satisfaction even Langdon's activities against me. I felt that Anita was somehow, in part at least, the cause; but, even so, how had he succeeded in convincing Roebuck that I must be clipped and plucked into a groundling?
“It must have something to do with the Manasquale mines,” I decided. “I thought I had given over my control of them, but somehow I must still have a control that makes me too powerful for Roebuck to be at ease so long as I am afoot and armed.” And I resolved to take my lawyers and search the whole Manasquale transaction—to explore it from attic to underneath the cellar flooring. “We'll go through it,” said I, “like ferrets through a ship's hold.”
As I was finishing breakfast, Anita came in. She had evidently slept well, and I regarded that as ominous. At her age, a crisis means little sleep until a decision has been reached. I rose, but her manner warned me not to advance and try to shake hands with her.
“I have asked Alva to stop with me here for a few days,” she said formally.
“Alva!” said I, much surprised. She had not asked one of her own friends; she had asked a girl she had met less than two days before, and that girl my partner's daughter.
“She was here yesterday morning,” Anita explained. And I now wondered how much Alva there was in Anita's firm stand against her parents.
“Why don't you take her down to our place on Long Island?” said I, most carefully concealing my delight—for Alva near her meant a friend of mine and an advocate and example of real womanhood near her. “Everything's ready for you there, and I'm going to be busy the next few days—busy day and night.”
She reflected. “Very well,” she assented presently. And she gave me a puzzled glance she thought I did not see—as if she were wondering whether the enemy was not hiding new and deeper guile under an apparently harmless suggestion.
“Then I'll not see you again for several days,” said I, most businesslike. “If you want anything, there will be Monson out at the stables where he can't annoy you. Or you can get me on the 'long distance.' Good-by. Good luck.”
And I nodded carelessly and friendlily to her, and went away, enjoying the pleasure of having startled her into visible astonishment. “There's a better game than icy hostility, you very young, young lady,” said I to myself, “and that game is friendly indifference.”
Alva would be with her. So she was secure for the present and my mind was free for “finance.”
At that time the two most powerful men in finance were Galloway and Roebuck. In Spain I once saw a fight between a bull and a tiger—or, rather the beginning of a fight. They were released into a huge iron cage. After circling it several times in the same direction, searching for a way out, they came face to face. The bull tossed the tiger; the tiger clawed the bull. The bull roared; the tiger screamed. Each retreated to his own side of the cage. The bull pawed and snorted as if he could hardly wait to get at the tiger; the tiger crouched and quivered and glared murderously, as if he were going instantly to spring upon the bull. But the bull did not rush, neither did the tiger spring. That was the Roebuck-Galloway situation.
How to bait Tiger Galloway to attack Bull Roebuck—that was the problem I must solve, and solve straightway. If I could bring about war between the giants, spreading confusion over the whole field of finance and filling all men with dread and fear, there was a chance, a bare chance, that in the confusion I might bear off part of my fortune. Certainly, conditions would result in which I could more easily get myself intrenched again; then, too, there would be a by no means small satisfaction in seeing Roebuck clawed and bitten in punishment for having plotted against me.
Mutual fear had kept these two at peace for five years, and most considerate and polite about each other's “rights.” But while our country's industrial territory is vast, the interests of the few great controllers who determine wages and prices for all are equally vast, and each plutocrat is tormented incessantly by jealousy and suspicion; not a day passes without conflicts of interest that adroit diplomacy could turn into ferocious warfare. And in this matter of monopolizing the coal, despite Roebuck's earnest assurances to Galloway that the combine was purely defensive, and was really concerned only with the labor question, Galloway, a great manufacturer, or, rather, a huge levier of the taxes of dividends and interest upon manufacturing enterprises, could not but be uneasy.
Before I rose that morning I had a tentative plan for stirring him to action. I was elaborating it on the way down town in my electric. It shows how badly Anita was crippling my brain, that not until I was almost at my office did it occur to me: “That was a tremendous luxury Roebuck indulged his conscience in last night. It isn't like him to forewarn a man, even when he's sure he can't escape. Though his prayers were hot in his mouth, still, it's strange he didn't try to fool me. In fact, it's suspicious. In fact—”
Suspicious? The instant the idea was fairly before my mind, I knew I had let his canting fool me once more. I entered my offices, feeling that the blow had already fallen; and I was surprised, but not relieved, when I found everything calm. “But fall it will within an hour or so—before I can move to avert it,” said I to myself.
And fall it did. At eleven o'clock, just as I was setting out to make my first move toward heating old Galloway's heels for the war-path, Joe came in with the news: “A general lockout's declared in the coal regions. The operators have stolen a march on the men who, so they allege, were secretly getting ready to strike. By night every coal road will be tied up and every mine shut down.”
Joe knew our coal interests were heavy, but he did not dream his news meant that before the day was over we would be bankrupt and not able to pay fifteen cents on the dollar. However, he knew enough to throw him into a fever of fright. He watched my calmness with terror. “Coal stocks are dropping like a thermometer in a cold wave,” he said, like a fireman at a sleeper in a burning house.
“Naturally,” said I, unruffled, apparently. “What can we do about it?”
“We must do something!” he exclaimed.
“Yes, we must,” I admitted. “For instance, we must keep cool, especially when two or three dozen people are watching us. Also, you must attend to your usual routine.”
“What are you going to do?” he cried. “For God's sake, Matt, don't keep me in suspense!”
“Go to your desk,” I commanded. And he quieted down and went. I hadn't been schooling him in the fire-drill for fifteen years in vain.
I went up the street and into the great banking and brokerage house of Galloway and Company. I made my way through the small army of guards, behind which the old beast of prey was intrenched, and into his private den. There he sat, at a small, plain table, in the middle of the room without any article of furniture in it but his table and his chair. On the table was a small inkstand, perfectly clean, a steel pen equally clean, on the rest attached to it. And that was all—not a letter, not a scrap of paper, not a sign of work or of intention to work. It might have been the desk of a man who did nothing; in fact, it was the desk of a man who had so much to do that his only hope of escape from being overwhelmed was to despatch and clear away each matter the instant it was presented to him. Many things could be read from the powerful form, bolt upright in that stiff chair, and from the cynical, masterful old face. But to me the chief quality there revealed was that quality of qualities, decision—the greatest power a man can have, except only courage. And old James Galloway had both.
He respected Roebuck; Roebuck feared him. Roebuck did have some sort of conscience, distorted though it was, and the dictator of savageries Galloway would have scorned to commit. Galloway had no professions of conscience—beyond such small glozing of hypocrisy as any man must put on if he wishes to be intrusted with the money of a public that associates professions of religion and appearances of respectability with honesty. Roebuck's passion was wealth—to see the millions heap up and up. Galloway had that passion, too—I have yet to meet a multi-millionaire who isn't avaricious and even stingy. But Galloway's chief passion was power—to handle men as a junk merchant handles rags, to plan and lead campaigns of conquest with his golden legions, and to distribute the spoils like an autocrat who is careless how they are divided, since all belongs to him, whenever he wishes to claim it.
He pierced me with his blue eyes, keen as a youth's, though his face was seamed with scars of seventy tumultuous years. He extended toward me over the table his broad, stubby white hand—the hand of a builder, of a constructive genius. “How are you, Blacklock?” said he. “What can I do for you?” He just touched my hand before dropping it, and resumed that idol-like pose. But although there was only repose and deliberation in his manner, and not a suggestion of haste, I, like every one who came into that room and that presence, had a sense of an interminable procession behind me, a procession of men who must be seen by this master-mover, that they might submit important and pressing affairs to him for decision. It was unnecessary for him to tell any one to be brief and pointed.
“I shall have to go to the wall to-day,” said I, taking a paper from my pocket, “unless you save me. Here is a statement of my assets and liabilities. I call to your attention my Coal holdings. I was one of the eight men whom Roebuck got round him for the new combine—it is a secret, but I assume you know all about it.”
He laid the paper before him, put on his nose-glasses and looked at it.
“If you will save me,” I continued, “I will transfer to you, in a block, all my Coal holdings. They will be worth double my total liabilities within three months—as soon as the reorganization is announced. I leave it entirely to your sense of justice whether I shall have any part of them back when this storm blows over.”
“Why didn't you go to Roebuck?” he asked without looking up.
“Because it is he that has stuck the knife into me.”
“Why?”
“I don't know. I suspect the Manasquale properties, which I brought into the combine, have some value, which no one but Roebuck, and perhaps Langdon, knows about—and that I in some way was dangerous to them through that fact. They haven't given me time to look into it.”
A grim smile flitted over his face. “You've been too busy getting married, eh?”
“Exactly,” said I. “It's another case of unbuckling for the wedding-feast and getting assassinated as a penalty. Do you wish me to explain anything on that list—do you want any details of the combine—of the Coal stocks there?”
“Not necessary,” he replied. As I had thought, with that enormous machine of his for drawing in information, and with that enormous memory of his for details, he probably knew more about the combine and its properties than I did.
“You have heard of the lockout?” I inquired—for I wished him to know I had no intention of deceiving him as to the present market value of those stocks.
“Roebuck has been commanded by his God,” he said, “to eject the free American labor from the coal regions and to substitute importations of coolie Huns and Bohemians. Thus, the wicked American laborers will be chastened for trying to get higher wages and cut down a pious man's dividends; and the downtrodden coolies will be brought where they can enjoy the blessings of liberty and of the preaching of Roebuck's missionaries.”
I laughed, though he had not smiled, but had spoken as if stating colorless facts. “And righteousness and Roebuck will prevail,” said I.
He frowned slightly, a sardonic grin breaking the straight, thin, cruel line of his lips. He opened his table's one shallow drawer, and took out a pad and a pencil. He wrote a few words on the lowest part of the top sheet, folded it, tore off the part he had scribbled on, returned the pad and pencil to the drawer, handed the scrap of paper to me. “I will do it,” he said. “Give this to Mr. Farquhar, second door to the left. Good morning.” And in that atmosphere of vast affairs speedily despatched his consent without argument seemed, and was, the matter-of-course.
I bowed. Though he had not saved me as a favor to me, but because it fitted in with his plans, whatever they were, my eyes dimmed. “I shan't forget this,” said I, my voice not quite steady.
“I know it,” said he curtly. “I know you.” I saw that his mind had already turned me out. I said no more, and withdrew. When I left the room it was precisely as it had been when I entered it—except the bit of paper torn from the pad. But what a difference to me, to the thousands, the hundreds of thousands directly and indirectly interested in the Coal combine and its strike and its products, was represented by those few, almost illegible scrawlings on that scrap of paper.
Not until I had gone over the situation with Farquhar, and we had signed and exchanged the necessary papers, did I begin to relax from the strain—how great that strain was I realized a few weeks later, when the gray appeared thick at my temples and there was in my crown what was, for such a shock as mine, a thin spot. “I am saved!” said I to myself, venturing a long breath, as I stood on the steps of Galloway's establishment, where hourly was transacted business vitally affecting the welfare of scores of millions of human beings, with James Galloway's personal interest as the sole guiding principle. “Saved!” I repeated, and not until then did it flash before me, “I must have paid a frightful price. He would never have consented to interfere with Roebuck as soon as I asked him to do it, unless there had been some powerful motive. If I had had my wits about me, I could have made far better terms.” Why hadn't I my wits about me? “Anita” was my instant answer to my own question. “Anita again. I had a bad attack of family man's panic.” And thus it came about that I went back to my own office, feeling as if I had suffered a severe defeat, instead of jubilant over my narrow escape.
Joe followed me into my den. “What luck?” asked he, in the tone of a mother waylaying the doctor as he issues from the sick-room.
“Luck?” said I, gazing blankly at him.
“You've seen the latest quotation, haven't you?” In his nervousness his temper was on a fine edge.
“No,” replied I indifferently. I sat down at my desk and began to busy myself. Then I added: “We're out of the Coal combine. I've transferred our holdings. Look after these things, please.” And I gave him the checks, notes and memoranda of agreement.
“Galloway!” he exclaimed. And then his eye fell on the totals of the stock I had been carrying. “Good God, Matt!” he gasped. “Ruined!”
And he sat down, and buried his face and cried like a child—it was then that I measured the full depth of the chasm I had escaped. I made no such exhibition of myself, but when I tried to relight my cigar my hand trembled so that the flame scorched my lips.
“Ruined?” I said to Joe, easily enough. “Not at all. We're back in the road, going smoothly ahead—only, at a bit less stiff a pace. Think, Joe, of all those poor devils down in the mining districts. They're out—clear out—and thousands of 'em don't know where their families will get bread. And though they haven't found it out yet, they've got to leave the place where they've lived all their lives, and their fathers before them—have got to go wandering about in a world that's as strange to them as the surface of the moon, and as bare for them as the Sahara desert.”
“That's so,” said Joe. “It's hard luck.” But I saw he was thinking only of himself and his narrow escape from having to give up his big house and all the rest of it; that, soft-hearted and generous though he was, to those poor chaps and their wives and children he wasn't giving a thought.
Wall Street never does—they're too remote, too vague. It deals with columns of figures and slips of paper. It never thinks of those abstractions as standing for so many hearts and so many mouths, just as the bank clerk never thinks of the bits of metal he counts so swiftly as money with which things and men could be bought. I read somewhere once that Voltaire—I think it was Voltaire—asked a man what he would do if, by pressing a button on his table, he would be enormously rich and at the same time would cause the death of a person away off at the other side of the earth, unknown to him, and probably no more worthy to live, and with no greater expectation of life or of happiness than the average sinful, short-lived human being. I've often thought of that as I've watched our great “captains of industry.” Voltaire's dilemma is theirs. And they don't hesitate; they press the button. I leave the morality of the performance to moralists; to me, its chief feature is its cowardice, its sneaking, slimy cowardice.
“You've done a grand two hours' work,” said Joe.
“Grander than you think,” replied I. “I've set the tiger on to fight the bull.”
“Galloway and Roebuck?”
“Just that,” said I. And I laughed, started up, sat down again. “No, I'll put off the pleasure,” said I. “I'll let Roebuck find out, when the claws catch in that tough old hide of his.”
On about the hottest afternoon of that summer I had the yacht take me down the Sound to a point on the Connecticut shore within sight of Dawn Hill, but seven miles farther from New York. I landed at the private pier of Howard Forrester, the only brother of Anita's mother. As I stepped upon the pier I saw a fine-looking old man in the pavilion overhanging the water. He was dressed all in white except a sky-blue tie that harmonized with the color of his eyes. He was neither fat nor lean, and his smooth skin was protesting ruddily against the age proclaimed by his wool-white hair. He rose as I came toward him, and, while I was still several yards away, showed unmistakably that he knew who I was and that he was anything but glad to see me.
“Mr. Forrester?” I asked
He grew purple to the line of his thick white hair. “It is, Mr. Blacklock,” said he. “I have the honor to wish you good day, sir.” And with that he turned his back on me and gazed out toward Long Island.
“I have come to ask a favor of you, sir,” said I, as polite to that hostile back as if I had been addressing a cordial face. And I waited.
He wheeled round, looked at me from head to foot. I withstood the inspection calmly; when it was ended I noted that in spite of himself he was somewhat relaxed from the opinion of me he had formed upon what he had heard and read. But he said: “I do not know you, sir, and I do not wish to know you.”
“You have made me painfully aware of that,” replied I. “But I have learned not to take snap judgments too seriously. I never go to a man unless I have something to say to him, and I never leave until I have said it.”
“I perceive, sir,” retorted he, “you have the thick skin necessary to living up to that rule.” And the twinkle in his eyes betrayed the man who delights to exercise a real or imaginary talent for caustic wit. Such men are like nettles—dangerous only to the timid touch.
“On the contrary,” replied I, easy in mind now, though I did not anger him by showing it, “I am most sensitive to insults—insults to myself. But you are not insultingme. You are insulting a purely imaginary, hearsay person who is, I venture to assure you, utterly unlike me, and who doubtless deserves to be insulted.”
His purple had now faded. In a far different tone he said: “If your business in any way relates to the family into which you have married, I do not wish to hear it. Spare my patience and your time, sir.”
“It does not,” was my answer. “It relates to my own family—to my wife and myself. As you may have heard, she is no longer a member of the Ellersly family. And I have come to you chiefly because I happen to know your sentiment toward the Ellerslys.”
“I have no sentiment toward them, sir!” he exclaimed. “They are non-existent, sir—nonexistent! Your wife's mother ceased to be a Forrester when she married that scoundrel. Your wife is still less a Forrester.”
“True,” said I. “She is a Blacklock.”
He winced, and it reminded me of the night of my marriage and Anita's expression when the preacher called her by her new name. But I held his gaze, and we looked each at the other fixedly for, it must have been, full half a minute. Then he said courteously: “What do you wish?”
I went straight to the point. My color may have been high, but my voice did not hesitate as I explained: “I wish to make my wife financially independent. I wish to settle on her a sum of money sufficient to give her an income that will enable her to live as she has been accustomed. I know she would not take it from me. So, I have come to ask you to pretend to give it to her—I, of course, giving it to you to give.”
Again—we looked full and fixedly each at the other. “Come to the house, Blacklock,” he said at last in a tone that was the subtlest of compliments. And he linked his arm in mine. Halfway to the rambling stone house, severe in its lines, yet fine and homelike, quaintly resembling its owner, as a man's house always should, he paused. “I owe you an apology,” said he. “After all my experience of this world of envy and malice, I should have recognized the man even in the caricatures of his enemies. And you brought the best possible credentials—you are well hated. To be well hated by the human race and by the creatures mounted on its back is a distinction, sir. It is the crown of the true kings of this world.”
We seated ourselves on the wide veranda; he had champagne and water brought, and cigars; and we proceeded to get acquainted—nothing promotes cordiality and sympathy like an initial misunderstanding. It was a good hour before this kind-hearted, hard-soft, typical old-fashioned New Englander reverted to the object of my visit. Said he: “And now, young man, may I venture to ask some extremely personal questions?”
“In the circumstances,” replied I, “you have the right to know everything. I did not come to you without first making sure what manner of man I was to find.” At this he blushed, pleased as a girl at her first beau's first compliment. “And you, Mr. Forrester, can not be expected to embark in the little adventure I propose, until you have satisfied yourself.”
“First, the why of your plan.”
“I am in active business,” replied I, “and I shall be still more active. That means financial uncertainty.”
His suspicion of me started up from its doze and rubbed its eyes. “Ah! You wish to insure yourself.”
“Yes,” was my answer, “but not in the way you hint. It takes away a man's courage just when he needs it most, to feel that his family is involved in his venture.”
“Why do you not make the settlement direct?” he asked, partly reassured.
“Because I wish her to feel that it is her own, that I have no right over it whatever.”
He thought about this. His eyes were keen as he said, “Is that your real reason?”
I saw I must be unreserved with him. “Part of it,” I replied. “The rest is—she would not take it from me.”
The old man smiled cynically. “Have you tried?” he inquired.
“If I had tried and failed, she would have been on the alert for an indirect attempt.”
“Try her, young man,” said he, laughing. “In this day there are few people anywhere who'd refuse any sum from anybody for anything. And a woman—and a New York woman—and a New York fashionable woman—and a daughter of old Ellersly—she'll take it as a baby takes the breast.”
“She would not take it,” said I.
My tone, though I strove to keep angry protest out of it, because I needed him, caused him to draw back instantly. “I beg your pardon,” said he. “I forgot for the moment that I was talking to a man young enough still to have youth's delusions about women. You'll learn that they're human, that it's from them we men inherit our weaknesses. However, let's assume that she won't take it:Whywon't she take your money? What is there about it that repels Ellersly's daughter, brought up in the sewers of fashionable New York—the sewers, sir!”
“She does not love me,” I answered.
“I have hurt you,” he said quickly, in great distress at having compelled me to expose my secret wound.
“The wound does not ache the worse,” said I, “for my showing it—toyou.” And that was the truth. I looked over toward Dawn Hill whose towers could just be seen. “We live there.” I pointed. “She is—like a guest in my house.”
When I glanced at him again, his face betrayed a feeling of which I doubt if any one had thought him capable in many a year. “I see that you love her,” he said, gently as a mother.
“Yes,” I replied. And presently I went on: “The idea of any one I love being dependent on me in a sordid way is most distasteful to me. And since she does not love me, does not even like me, it is doubly necessary that she be independent.”
“I confess I do not quite follow you” said he.
“How can she accept anything from me? If she should finally be compelled by necessity to do it, what hope could I have of her ever feeling toward me as a wife should feel toward her husband?”
At this explanation of mine his eyes sparkled with anger—and I could not but suspect that he had at one time in his life been faced with a problem like mine, and had settled it the other way. My suspicion was not weakened when he went on to say:
“Boyish motives again! They show you do not know women. Don't be deceived by their delicate exterior, by their pretenses of super-refinement. They affect to be what passion deludes us into thinking them. But they're clay, sir, just clay, and far less sensitive than we men. Don't you see, young man, that by making her independent you're throwing away your best chance of winning her? Women are like dogs—like dogs, sir! They lick the hand that feeds 'em—lick it, and like it.”
“Possibly,” said I, with no disposition to combat views based on I knew not what painful experience. “But I don't care for that sort of liking—from a woman, or from a dog.”
“It's the only kind you'll get,” retorted he, trying to control his agitation. “I'm an old man. I know human nature—that's why I live alone. You'll take that kind of liking, or do without.”
“Then I'll do without,” said I.
“Give her an income, and she'll go. I see it all. You've flattered her vanity by showing your love for her—that's the way with women. They go crazy about themselves, and forget all about the man. Give her an income and she'll go.”
“I doubt it,” said I. “And you would, if you knew her. But, even so, I shall lose her in any event. For, unless she is made independent, she'll certainly go with the last of the little money she has, the remnant of a small legacy.”
The old man argued with me, the more vigorously, I suspect, because he found me resolute. When he could think of no new way of stating his case—his case against Anita—he said: “You are a fool, young man—that's clear. I wonder such a fool was ever able to get together as much property as report credits you with. But—you're the kind of fool I like.”
“Then—you'll indulge my folly?” said I, smiling.
He threw up his arms in a gesture of mock despair. “If you will have it so,” he replied. “I am curious about this niece of mine. I want to see her. I want to see the woman who can resistyou.”
“Her mind and her heart are closed against me,” said I. “And it is my own fault—I closed them.”
“Put her out of your head,” he advised. “No woman is worth a serious man's while.”
“I have few wants, few purposes,” said I. “But those few I pursue to the end. Even though she were not worth while, even though I wholly lost hope, still I'd not give her up. I couldn't—that's my nature. But—sheis worth while.” And I could see her, slim and graceful, the curves in her face and figure that made my heart leap, the azure sheen upon her petal-like skin, the mystery of the soul luring from her eyes.
After we had arranged the business—or, rather, arranged to have it arranged through our lawyers—he walked down to the pier with me. At the gangway he gave me another searching look from head to foot—but vastly different from the inspection with which our interview had begun. “You are a devilish handsome young fellow,” said he. “Your pictures don't do you justice. And I shouldn't have believed any man could overcome in one brief sitting such a prejudice as I had against you. On second thought, I don't care to see her. She must be even below the average.”
“Or far above it,” I suggested.
“I suppose I'll have to ask her over to visit me,” he went on. “A fine hypocrite I'll feel.”
“You can make it one of the conditions of your gift that she is not to thank you or speak of it,” said I. “I fear your face would betray us, if she ever did.”
“An excellent idea!” he exclaimed. Then, as he shook hands with me in farewell: “You will win her yet—if you care to.”
As I steamed up the Sound, I was tempted to put in at Dawn Hill's harbor. Through my glass I could see Anita and Alva and several others, men and women, having tea on the lawn under a red and white awning. I could see her dress—a violet suit with a big violet hat to match. I knew that costume. Like everything she wore, it was both beautiful in itself and most becoming to her. I could see her face, could almost make out its expression—did I see, or did I imagine, a cruel contrast to what I always saw when she knew I was looking?
I gazed until the trees hid lawn and gay awning, and that lively company and her. In my bitterness I was full of resentment against her, full of self-pity. I quite forgot, for that moment,herside of the story.
It was next day, I think, that I met Mowbray Langdon and his brother Tom in the entrance of the Textile Building. Mowbray was back only a week from his summer abroad; but Tom I had seen and nodded to every day, often several times in the same day, as he went to and fro about his “respectable” dirty work for the Roebuck-Langdon clique. He was one of their most frequently used stool-pigeon directors in banks and insurance companies whose funds they staked in their big gambling operations, they taking almost all the profits and the depositors and policy holders taking almost all the risk. It had never once occurred to me to have any feeling of any kind about Tom, or in any way to take him into my calculations as to Anita. He was, to my eyes, too obviously a pale understudy of his powerful and fascinating brother. Whenever I thought of him as the man Anita fancied she loved, I put it aside instantly. “The kind of man a womanreallycares for,” I would say to myself, “is the measure of her true self. But not the kind of man sheimaginesshe cares for.”
Tom went on; Mowbray stopped. We shook hands, and exchanged commonplaces in the friendliest way—I was harboring no resentment against him, and I wished him to realize that his assault had bothered me no more than the buzzing and battering of a summer fly. “I've been trying to get in to see you,” said he. “I wanted to explain about that unfortunate Textile deal.”
This, when the assault on me had burst out with fresh energy the day after he landed from Europe! I could scarcely believe that his vanity, his confidence in his own skill at underground work could so delude him. “Don't bother,” said I. “All that's ancient history.”
But he had thought out some lies he regarded as particularly creditable to his ingenuity; he was not to be deprived of the pleasure of telling them. So I was compelled to listen; and, being in an indulgent mood, I did not spoil his pleasure by letting him see or suspect my unbelief. If he could have looked into my mind, as I stood there in an attitude of patient attention, I think even his self-complacence would have been put out of countenance. You may admire the exploits of a “gentleman” cracksman or pickpocket, if you hear or read them with only their ingenuity put before you. Butseea “gentleman” liar or thief at his sneaking, cowardly work, and admiration is impossible. As Langdon lied on, as I studied his cheap, vulgar exhibition of himself, he all unconscious, I thought: “Beneath that very thin surface of yours, you're a poor cowardly creature—you, and all your fellow bandits. No; bandit is too grand a word to apply to this game of 'high finance.' It's really on the level with the game of the fellow that waits for a dark night, slips into the barn-yard, poisons the watch-dog, bores an auger-hole in the granary, and takes to his heels at a suspicious sound.”
With his first full stop, I said: “I understand perfectly, Langdon. But I haven't the slightest interest in crooked enterprises now. I'm clear out of all you fellows' stocks. I've reinvested my property so that not even a panic would trouble me.”
“That's good,” he drawled. I saw he did not believe me—which was natural, as he knew nothing of my arrangement with Galloway and assumed I was laboring in heavy weather, with a bad cargo of Coal stocks and contracts. “Come to lunch with me. I've got some interesting things to tell you about my trip.”
A few months before, I should have accepted with alacrity. But I had lost interest in him. He had not changed; if anything, he was more dazzling than ever in the ways that had once dazzled me. It was I that had changed—my ideals, my point of view. I had no desire to feed my new-sprung contempt by watching him pump in vain for information to be used in his secret campaign against me. “No, thanks. Another day,” I replied, and left him with a curt nod. I noted that he had failed to speak of my marriage, though he had not seen me since. “A sore subject with all the Langdons,” thought I. “It must be very sore, indeed, to make a man who is all manners, neglect them.”
My whole life had been a series of transformations so continuous that I had noted little about my advance, beyond its direction—like a man hurrying up a steep that keeps him bent, eyes down. But, as I turned away from Langdon, I caught myself in the very act of transformation. No doubt, the new view had long been there, its horizon expanding with every step of my ascent; but not until that talk with him did I see it. I looked about me in Wall Street; in my mind's eye I all in an instant saw my world as it really was. I saw the great rascals of “high finance,” their respectability stripped from them; saw them gathering in the spoils which their cleverly-trained agents, commercial and political and legal, filched with light fingers from the pockets of the crowd, saw the crowd looking up to these trainers and employers of pickpockets, hailing them “captains of industry”! They reaped only where and what others had sown; they touched industry only to plunder and to blight it; they organized it only that its profits might go to those who did not toil and who despised those who did. “Have I gone mad in the midst of sane men?” I asked myself. “Or have I been mad, and have I suddenly become sane in a lunatic world?”
I did not linger on that problem. For me action remained the essential of life, whether I was sane or insane. I resolved then and there to map a new course. By toiling like a sailor at the pump of a sinking ship, I had taken advantage to the uttermost of the respite Galloway's help had given me. My property was no longer in more or less insecure speculative “securities,” but was, as I had told Langdon, in forms that would withstand the worst shocks. The attacks of my enemies, directed partly at my fortune, or, rather, at the stocks in which they imagined it was still invested, and partly at my personal character, were doing me good instead of harm. Hatred always forgets that its shafts, falling round its intended victim, spring up as legions of supporters for him. My business was growing rapidly; my daily letter to investors was read by hundreds of thousands where tens of thousands had read it before the Roebuck-Langdon clique began to make me famous by trying to make me infamous.
“I am strong and secure,” said I to myself as I strode through the wonderful canyon of Broadway, whose walls are those mighty palaces of finance and commerce from which business men have been ousted by cormorant “captains of industry.” I mustusemy strength. How could I better use it than by fluttering these vultures on their roosts, and perhaps bringing down a bird or two?
I decided, however, that it was better to wait until they had stopped rattling their beaks and claws on my shell in futile attack. “Meanwhile,” I reasoned carefully, “I can be getting good and ready.”
Their first new move, after my little talk with Langdon, was intended as a mortal blow to my credit Melville requested me to withdraw mine and Blacklock and Company's accounts from the National Industrial Bank; and the fact that this huge and powerful institution had thus branded me was slyly given to the financial reporters of the newspapers. Far and wide it was published; and the public was expected to believe that this was one more and drastic measure in the “campaign of the honorable men of finance to clean the Augean Stables of Wall Street.” My daily letter to investors next morning led off with this paragraph—the first notice I had taken publicly of their attacks on me:
“In the effort to discredit the only remaining uncontrolled source of financial truth, the big bandits have ordered my accounts out of their chief gambling-house. I have transferred the accounts to the Discount and Deposit National, where Leonidas Thornley stands guard against the new order that seeks to make business a synonym for crime.”
Thornley was of the type that was dominant in our commercial life before the “financiers” came—just as song birds were common in our trees until the noisy, brawling, thieving sparrows drove them out. His oldest son was about to marry Joe's daughter—Alva. Many a Sunday I have spent at his place near Morristown—a charming combination of city comfort with farm freedom and fresh air. I remember, one Sunday, saying to him, after he had seen his wife and daughters off to church: “Why haven't you got rich? Why haven't you looked out for establishing these boys and girls of yours?”
“I don't want my girls to be sought for money,” said he, “I don't want my boys to rely on money. Perhaps I've seen too much of wealth, and have come to have a prejudice against it. Then, too, I've never had the chance to get rich.”
I showed that I thought that he was simply jesting.
“I mean it,” said he, looking at me with eyes as straight as a well-brought-up girl's. “How could my mind be judicial if I were personally interested in the enterprises people look to me for advice about?”
And not only did he keep himself clear and his mind judicial but also he was, like all really good people, exceedingly slow to believe others guilty of the things he would as soon have thought of doing as he would have thought of slipping into the teller's cage during the lunch hour and pocketing a package of bank-notes. He gave me his motto—a curious one: “Believe in everybody; trust in nobody.”
“Only a thief wishes to be trusted,” he explained, “and only a fool trusts. I let no one trust me; I trust no one. But I believe evil of no man. Even when he has been convicted, I see the mitigating circumstances.”
How Thornley did stand by me! And for no reason except that it was as necessary for him to be fair and just as to breathe. I shall not say he resisted the attempts to compel him to desert me—they simply made no impression on him. I remember, when Roebuck himself, a large stock-holder in the bank, left cover far enough personally to urge him to throw me over, he replied steadfastly:
“If Mr. Blacklock is guilty of circulating false stories against commercial enterprises, as his enemies allege, the penal code can be used to stop him. But as long as I stay at the head of this bank, no man shall use it for personal vengeance. It is a chartered public institution, and all have equal rights to its facilities. I would lend money to my worst enemy, if he came for it with the proper security. I would refuse my best friend, if he could not give security. The funds of a bank are a trust fund, and my duty is to see that they are employed to the best advantage. If you wish other principles to prevail here, you must get another president.”
That settled it. No one appreciated more keenly than did Roebuck that character is as indispensable in its place as is craft where the situation demands craft—and is far harder to get.
I shall not relate in detail that campaign against me. It failed not so much because I was strong as because it was weak. Perhaps, if Roebuck and Langdon could have directed it in person, or had had the time to advise with their agents before and after each move, it might have succeeded. They would not have let exaggeration dominate it and venom show upon its surface; they would not have neglected to follow up advantages, would not have persisted in lines of attack that created public sympathy for me. They would not have so crudely exploited my unconventional marriage and my financial relations with old Ellersly. But they dared not go near the battle-field; they had to trust to agents whom their orders and suggestions reached by the most roundabout ways; and they were busier with their enterprises that involved immediate and great gain or loss of money.
When Galloway died, they learned that the Coal stocks with which they thought I was loaded down were part of his estate. They satisfied themselves that I was in fact as impregnable as I had warned Langdon. They reversed tactics; Roebuck tried to make it up with me. “If he wants to see me,” was my invariable answer to the intimations of his emissaries, “let him come to my office, just as I would go to his, if I wished to see him.”
“He is a big man—a dangerous big man,” cautioned Joe.
“Big—yes. But strong only against his own kind,” replied I. “One mouse can make a whole herd of elephants squeal for mercy.”
“It isn't prudent, it isn't prudent,” persisted Joe.
“It is not,” replied I. “Thank God, I'm at last in the position I've been toiling to achieve. I don't have to be prudent. I can say and do what I please, without fear of the consequences. I can freely indulge in the luxury of being a man. That's costly, Joe, but it's worth all it could cost.”
Joe didn't understand me—he rarely did. “I'm a hen. You're an eagle,” said he.