I shall not estimate the vast sums it cost the Roebuck-Langdon clique to maintain the prices of National Coal, and so give plausibility to the fiction that the public was buying eagerly. In the third week of my campaign, Melville was so deeply involved that he had to let the two others take the whole burden upon themselves.
In the fourth week, Langdon came to me.
The interval between his card and himself gave me a chance to recover from my amazement. When he entered he found me busily writing. Though I had nerved myself, it was several seconds before I ventured to look at him. There he stood, probably as handsome, as fascinating as ever, certainly as self-assured. But I could now, beneath that manner I had once envied, see the puny soul, with its brassy glitter of the vanity of luxury and show. I had been somewhat afraid of myself—afraid the sight of him would stir up in me a tempest of jealousy and hate; as I looked, I realized that I did not know my own nature. “She does not love this man,” I thought. “If she did or could, she would not be the woman I love. He deceived her inexperience as he deceived mine.”
“What can I do for you?” said I to him politely, much as if he were a stranger making an untimely interruption.
My look had disconcerted him; my tone threw him into confusion. “You keep out of the way, now that you've become famous,” he began, with a halting but heroic attempt at his customary easy superiority. “Are you living up in Connecticut, too? Sam Ellersly tells me your wife is stopping there with old Howard Forrester. Sam wants me to use my good offices in making it up between you two and her family.”
I was completely taken aback by this cool ignoring of the real situation between him and me. Impudence or ignorance?—I could not decide. It seemed impossible that Anita had not told him; yet it seemed impossible, too, that he would come to me if she had told him. “Have you anybusinesswith me?” said I.
His eyelids twitched nervously, and he adjusted his lips several times before he was able to say:
“You and your wife don't care to make it up with the Ellerslys? I fancied so, and told Sam you'd simply think me meddlesome. The other matter is the Travelers Club. I've smoothed things out there. I'm going to put you up and rush you through.”
“No, thanks,” said I. It seemed incredible to me that I had ever cared about that club and the things it represented, as I could remember I undoubtedly did care. It was like looking at an outgrown toy and trying to feel again the emotions it once excited.
“I assure you, Matt, there won't be the slightest difficulty.” His manner was that of a man playing the trump card in a desperate game—he feels it can not lose, yet the stake is so big that he can not but be a little nervous.
“I do not care to join the Travelers Club,” said I, rising. “I must ask you to excuse me. I am exceedingly busy.”
A flush appeared in his cheeks and deepened and spread until his whole body must have been afire. He seated himself. “You know what I've come for,” he said sullenly, and humbly, too.
All his life he had been enthroned upon his wealth. Without realizing it, he had claimed and had received deference solely because he was rich. He had thought himself, in his own person, most superior; now, he found that like a silly child he had been standing on a chair and crying: “See how tall I am.” And the airs, the cynicism, the graceful condescension, which had been so becoming to him, were now as out of place as crown and robes on a king taking a swimming lesson.
“What are your terms, Blacklock? Don't be too hard on an old friend,” said he, trying to carry off his frank plea for mercy with a smile.
I should have thought he would cut his throat and jump off the Battery wall before he would get on his knees to any man for any reason. And he was doing it for mere money—to try to save, not his fortune, but only an imperiled part of it. “If Anita could see him now!” I thought.
To him I said, the more coldly because I did not wish to add to his humiliation by showing him that I pitied him: “I can only repeat, Mr. Langdon, you will have to excuse me. I have given you all the time I can spare.”
His eyes were shifting and his hands trembling as he said: “I will transfer control of the Coal combine to you.”
His tones, shameful as the offer they carried, made me ashamed for him. For money—just for money! And I had thought him a man. If he had been a self-deceiving hypocrite like Roebuck, or a frank believer in the right of might, like Updegraff, I might possibly, in the circumstances, have tried to release him from my net. But he had never for an instant deceived himself as to the real nature of the enterprises he plotted, promoted and profited by; he thought it “smart” to be bad, and he delighted in making the most cynical epigrams on the black deeds of himself and his associates.
“Better sell out to Roebuck,” I suggested. “I control all the Coal stock I need.”
“I don't care to have anything further to do with Roebuck,” Langdon answered. “I've broken with him.”
“When a man lies to me,” said I, “he gives me the chance to see just how much of a fool he thinks I am, and also the chance to see just how much of a fool he is. I hesitate to think so poorly of you as your attempt to fool me seems to compel.”
But he was unconvinced. “I've found he intends to abandon the ship and leave me to go down with it,” he persisted. “He believes he can escape and denounce me as the arch rascal who planned the combine, and can convince people that I foozled him into it.”
Ingenious; but I happened to know that it was false. “Pardon me, Mr. Langdon,” said I with stiff courtesy. “I repeat, I can do nothing for you. Good morning.” And I went at my work as if he were already gone.
Had I been vindictive, I would have led him on to humiliate himself more deeply, if greater depths of humiliation there are than those to which he voluntarily descended. But I wished to spare him; I let him see the uselessness of his mission. He looked at me in silence—the look of hate that can come only from a creature weak as well as wicked. I think it was all his keen sense of humor could do to save him from a melodramatic outbreak. He slipped into his habitual pose, rose and withdrew without another word. All this fright and groveling and treachery for plunder, the loss of which would not impair his fortune—plunder he had stolen with many a jest and gibe at his helpless victims. Like most of our debonair dollar chasers, he was a good sportsman only when the game was with him.
That afternoon he threw his Coal holdings on the market in great blocks. His treachery took Roebuck completely by surprise—for Roebuck believed in this fair-weather “gentleman,” foul-weather coward, and neglected to allow for that quicksand that is always under the foundation of the man who has inherited, not earned, his wealth. But for the blundering credulity of rascals, would honest men ever get their dues? Roebuck's brokers had bought many thousands of Langdon's shares at the high artificial price before Roebuck grasped the situation—that it was not my followers recklessly gambling to break the prices, but Langdon unloading on his “pal.” As soon as he saw, he abruptly withdrew from the market. When the Stock Exchange closed, National Coal securities were offered at prices ranging from eleven for the bonds to two for the common and three for the preferred—offered, and no takers.
“Well, you've done it,” said Joe, coming with the news that Thornley, of the Discount and Deposit Bank, had been appointed receiver.
“I've made a beginning,” replied I. And the last sentence of my next morning's “letter” was:
“To-morrow the first chapter of the History of the Industrial National Bank.”
“I have felt for two years,” said Roebuck to Schilling, who repeated it to me soon afterward, “that Blacklock was about the most dangerous fellow in the country. The first time I set eyes on him, I saw he was a born iconoclast. And I've known for a year that some day he would use that engine of publicity of his to cannonade the foundations of society.”
“He knew me better than I knew myself,” was my comment to Schilling. And I meant it—for I had not finished the demolition of the Coal combine when I began to realize that, whatever I might have thought of my own ambitions, I could never have tamed myself or been tamed into a devotee of dollars and of respectability. I simply had been keeping quiet until my tools were sharp and fate spun my opportunity within reach. But I must, in fairness, add, it was lucky for me that, when the hour struck, Roebuck was not twenty years younger and one-twentieth as rich. It's a heavy enough handicap, under the best of circumstances, to go to war burdened with years; add the burden of a monster fortune, and it isn't in human nature to fight well. Youth and a light knapsack!
But—to my fight on the big bank.
Until I opened fire, the public thought, in a general way, that a bank was an institution like Thornley's Discount and Deposit National—a place for the safe-keeping of money and for accommodating business men with loans to be used in carrying on and extending legitimate and useful enterprises. And there were many such banks. But the real object of the banking business, as exploited by the big bandits who controlled it and all industry, was to draw into a mass the money of the country that they might use it to manipulate the markets, to wreck and reorganize industries and wreck them again, to work off inflated bonds and stocks upon the public at inflated prices, to fight among themselves for rights to despoil, making the people pay the war budgets—in a word, to finance the thousand and one schemes whereby they and their friends and relatives, who neither produce nor help to produce, appropriate the bulk of all that is produced.
And before I finished with the National Industrial Bank, I had shown that it and several similar institutions in the big cities throughout the country were, in fact, so many dens to which rich and poor were lured for spoliation. I then took up the Universal Life, as a type. I showed how insuring was, with the companies controlled by the bandits, simply the decoy; that the real object was the same as the real object of the big bandit banks. When I had finished my series on the Universal Life I had named and pilloried Roebuck, Langdon, Melville, Wainwright, Updegraff, Van Steen, Epstein—the seven men of enormous wealth, leaders of the seven cliques that had the political and industrial United States at their mercy, and were plucking the people through an ever-increasing army of agents. The agents kept some of the feathers—“The Seven” could afford to pay liberally. But the bulk of the feather crop was passed on to “The Seven.”
I shall answer in a paragraph the principal charges that were made against me. They say I bribed employees on the telegraph companies, and so got possession of incriminating telegrams that had been sent by “The Seven” in the course of their worst campaigns. I admit the charge. They say I bribed some of their confidential men to give me transcripts and photographs of secret ledgers and reports. I admit the charge. They say I bought translations of stenographic notes taken by eavesdroppers on certain important secret meetings. I admit the charge. But what was the chief element in my success in thus getting proofs of their crimes? Not the bribery, but the hatred that all the servants of such men have for them. I tempted no one to betray them.Every item, of information I got was offered to me. And I shall add these facts:
First, in not a single case did they suspect and discharge the “guilty” persons.
Second, I have to-day as good means of access to their secrets as I ever had—and, if they discharged all who now serve them, I should be able soon to reestablish my lines; men of their stripe can not hope to be served faithfully.
Third, I had offers from all but three of “The Seven” to “peach” on the others in return for immunity. There may be honor among some thieves, but not among “respectable” thieves. Hypocrisy and honor will be found in the same character when the sun shines at night—not before.
It was the sardonic humor of fate that Langdon, for all his desire to keep out of my way, should have compelled me to center my fire upon him; that I, who wished to spare him, if possible, should have been compelled to make of him my first “awful example.”
I had decided to concentrate upon Roebuck, because he was the richest and most powerful of “The Seven.” For, in my pictures of the three main phases of “finance”—the industrial, the life-insurance and the banking—he, as arch plotter in every kind of respectable skulduggery, was necessarily in the foreground. My original intention was to demolish the Power Trust—or, at least, to compel him to buy back all of its stock which he had worked off on the public. I had collected many interesting facts about it, facts typical of the conditions that “finance” has established in so many of our industries.
For instance, I was prepared to show that the actual earnings of the Power Trust were two and a half times what its reports to stock-holders alleged; that the concealed profits were diverted into the pockets of Roebuck, his sons, eleven other relatives and four of “The Seven,” the lion's share going, of course, to the lion. Like almost all the great industrial enterprises, too strong for the law and too remote for the supervision of their stock-holders, it gathered in enormous revenues to disburse them chiefly in salaries and commissions and rake-offs on contracts to favorites. I had proof that in one year it had “written off” twelve millions of profit and loss, ten millions of which had found its way to Roebuck's pocket. That pocket! That “treasury of the Lord”!
Dishonest? Roebuck and most of the other leaders of the various gangs, comprising, with all their ramifications, the principal figures in religious, philanthropic, fashionable society, did not for an instant think their doings dishonest. They had no sense of trusteeship for this money intrusted to them as captains of industry bankers, life-insurance directors. They felt that it was theirs to do with as they pleased.
And they felt that their superiority in rank and in brains entitled them to whatever remuneration they could assign to themselves without rousing the wrath of a public too envious to admit the just claims of the “upper classes.” They convinced themselves that without them crops would cease to grow, sellers and buyers would be unable to find their way to market, barbarism would spread its rank and choking weeds over the whole garden of civilization. And, so brainless is the parrot public, they have succeeded in creating a very widespread conviction that their own high opinion of their services is not too high, and that some dire calamity would come if they were swept from between producer and consumer! True, thieves are found only where there is property; but who but a chucklebrain would think the thieves made the property?
Roebuck was the keystone of the arch that sustained the structure of chicane. To dislodge him was the direct way to collapse it. I was about to set to work when Langdon, feeling that he ought to have a large supply of cash in the troublous times I was creating, increased the capital stock of his already enormously overcapitalized Textile Trust and offered the new issue to the public. As the Textile Trust was even better bulwarked, politically, than the Power Trust, it was easily able to declare tempting dividends out of its lootings. So the new stock could not be attacked in the one way that would make the public instantly shun it—I could not truthfully charge that it would not pay the promised dividends. Yet attack I must—for that issue was, in effect, a bold challenge of my charges against “The Seven.” From all parts of the country inquiries poured in upon me: “What do you think of the new Textile issue? Shall we invest? Is the Textile Company sound?”
I had no choice. I must turn aside from Roebuck; I must first show that, while Textile was, in a sense, sound just at that time, it had been unsound, and would be unsound again as soon as Langdon had gathered in a sufficient number of lambs to make a battue worth the while of a man dealing in nothing less than seven figures. I proceeded to do so.
The market yielded slowly. Under my first day's attack Textile preferred fell six points, Textile common three. While I was in the midst of dictating my letter for the second day's attack, I suddenly came to a full stop. I found across my way this thought: “Isn't it strange that Langdon, after humbling himself to you, should make this bold challenge? It's a trap!”
“No more at present,” said I, to my stenographer. “And don't write out what I've already dictated.”
I shut myself in and busied myself at the telephone. Half an hour after I set my secret machinery in motion, a messenger brought me an envelop, the address type-written. It contained a sheet of paper on which appeared, in type-writing; these words, and nothing more:
“He is heavily short of Textiles.”
It was indeed a trap. The new issue was a blind. He had challenged me to attack his stock, and as soon as I did, he had begun secretly to sell it for a fall. I worked at this new situation until midnight, trying to get together the proofs. At that hour—for I could delay no longer, and my proofs were not quite complete—I sent my newspapers two sentences:
“To-morrow I shall make a disclosure that willsend Textiles up. Do not sell Textiles!”
Next day Langdon's stocks wavered, going up a little, going down a little, closing at practically the same figures at which they had opened. Then I sprang my sensation—that Langdon and his particular clique, though they controlled the Textile Trust, did not own so much as one-fiftieth of its voting stock. True “captains of industry” that they were, they made their profits not out of dividends, but out of side schemes that absorbed about two-thirds of the earnings of the Trust, and out of gambling in its bonds and stocks. I said in conclusion:
“The largest owner of the stock is Walter G. Edmunds, of Chicago—an honest man. Send your voting proxies to him, and he can take the Textile Company away from those now plundering it.”
As the annual election of the Trust was only six weeks away, Langdon and his clique were in a panic. They rushed into the market and bought frantically, the public bidding against them. Langdon himself went to Chicago to reason with Edmunds—that is, to try to find out at what figure he could be bought. And so on, day after day, I faithfully reporting to the public the main occurrences behind the scenes. The Langdon attempt to regain control by purchases of stock failed. He and his allies made what must have been to them appalling sacrifices; but even at the high prices they offered, comparatively little of the stock appeared.
“I've caught them,” said I to Joe—the first time, and the last, during that campaign that I indulged in a boast.
“If Edmunds sticks to you,” replied cautious Joe.
But Edmunds did not. I do not know at what price he sold himself. Probably it was pitifully small; cupidity usually snatches the instant bait tickles its nose. But I do know that my faith in human nature got its severest shock.
“You are down this morning,” said Thornley, when I looked in on him at his bank. “I don't think I ever before saw you show that you were in low spirits.”
“I've found out a man with whom I'd have trusted my life,” said I. “Sometimes I think all men are dishonest. I've tried to be an optimist like you, and have told myself that most men must be honest or ninety-five per cent. of the business couldn't be done on credit as it is.”
Thornley smiled, like an old man at the enthusiasm of a youngster. “That proves nothing as to honesty,” said he. “It simply shows that men can be counted on to do what it is to their plain interest to do. The truth is—and a fine truth, too—most men wish and try to be honest. Give 'em a chance to resist their own weaknesses. Don't trust them. Trust—that's the making of false friends and the filling of jails.”
“And palaces,” I added.
“And palaces,” assented he. “Every vast fortune is a monument to the credulity of man. Instead of getting after these heavy-laden rascals, Matthew, you'd better have turned your attention to the public that has made rascals of them by leaving its property unguarded.”
Fortunately, Edmunds had held out, or, rather, Langdon had delayed approaching him, long enough for me to gain my main point. The uproar over the Textile Trust had become so great that the national Department of Commerce dared not refuse an investigation; and I straightway began to spread out in my daily letters the facts of the Trust's enormous earnings and of the shameful sources of those earnings. Thanks to Langdon's political pull, the president appointed as investigator one of those rascals who carefully build themselves good reputations to enable them to charge higher prices for dirty work. But, with my facts before the people, whitewash was impossible.
I was expecting emissaries from Langdon, for I knew he must now be actually in straits. Even the Universal Life didn't dare lend him money; and was trying to call in the millions it had loaned him. But I was astounded when my private door opened and Mrs. Langdon ushered herself in.
“Don't blame your boy, Mr. Blacklock,” cried she gaily, exasperatingly confident that I was as delighted with her as she was with herself. “I told him you were expecting me and didn't give him a chance to stop me.”
I assumed she had come to give me wholly undeserved thanks for revenging her upon her recreant husband. I tried to look civil and courteous, but I felt that my face was darkening—her very presence forced forward things I had been keeping in the far background of my mind, “How can I be of service to you, Madam?” said I.
“I bring you good news,” she replied—and I noted that she no longer looked haggard and wretched, that her beauty was once more smiling with a certain girlishness, like a young widow's when she finds her consolation. “Mowbray and I have made it up,” she explained.
I simply listened, probably looking as grim as I felt.
“I knew you would be interested,” she went on. “Indeed, it means almost as much to you as to me. It brings peace totwofamilies.”
Still I did not relax.
“And so,” she continued, a little uneasy, “I came to you immediately.”
I continued to listen, as if I were waiting for her to finish and depart.
“If you want, I'll go to Anita.” Natural feminine tact would have saved her from this rawness; but, convinced that she was a “great lady” by the flattery of servants and shopkeepers and sensational newspapers and social climbers, she had discarded tact as worthy only of the lowly and of the aspiring before they “arrive.”
“You are too kind,” said I. “Mrs. Blacklock and I feel competent to take care of our own affairs.”
“Please, Mr. Blacklock,” she said, realizing that she had blundered, “don't take my directness the wrong way. Life is too short for pose and pretense about the few things that really matter. Why shouldn't we be frank with each other?”
“I trust you will excuse me,” said I, moving toward the door—I had not seated myself when she did. “I think I have made it clear that we have nothing to discuss.”
“You have the reputation of being generous and too big for hatred. That is why I have come to you,” said she, her expression confirming my suspicion of the real and only reason for her visit. “Mowbray and I are completely reconciled—completely, you understand. And I want you to be generous, and not keep on with this attack. I am involved even more than he. He has used up his fortune in defending mine. Now, you are simply trying to ruin me—not him, butme. The president is a friend of Mowbray's, and he'll call off this horrid investigation, and everything'll be all right, if you'll only stop.”
“Who sent you here?” I asked.
“I came of my own accord,” she protested. Then, realizing from the sound of her voice that she could not have convinced me with a tone so unconvincing, she hedged with: “It was my own suggestion, really it was.”
“Your husband permittedyouto come—and tome?”
She flushed.
“And you have accepted his overtures when you knew he made them only because he needed your money?”
She hung her head. “I love him,” she said simply. Then she looked straight at me and I liked her expression. “A woman has no false pride when love is at stake,” she said. “We leave that to you men.”
“Love!” I retorted, rather satirically, I imagine. “How much had your own imperiled fortune to do with your being so forgiving?”
“Something,” she admitted. “You must remember I have children. I must think of their future. I don't want them to be poor. I want them to have the station they were born to.” She went to one of the windows overlooking the street. “Look here!” she said.
I stood beside her. The window was not far above the street level. Just below us was a handsome victoria, coachman, harness, horses, all most proper, a footman rigid at the step. A crowd had gathered round—in those stirring days when I was the chief subject of conversation wherever men were interested in money—and where are they not?—there was almost always a crowd before my offices. In the carriage sat two children, a boy and a girl, hardly more than babies. They were gorgeously overdressed, after the vulgar fashion of aristocrats and apers of aristocracy. They sat stiffly, like little scions of royalty, with that expression of complacent superiority which one so often sees on the faces of the little children of the very rich—and some not so little, too. The thronging loungers, most of them either immigrant peasants from European caste countries or the un-disinfected sons of peasants, were gaping in true New York “lower class” awe; the children were literally swelling with delighted vanity. If they had been pampered pet dogs, one would have laughed. As they were human beings, it filled me with sadness and pity. What ignorance, what stupidity to bring up children thus in democratic America—democratic to-day, inevitably more democratic to-morrow! What a turning away from the light! What a crime against the children!
“For their sake, Mr. Blacklock,” she pleaded, her mother love wholly hiding from her the features of the spectacle that for me shrieked like scarlet against a white background.
“Your husband has deceived you about your fortune, Mrs. Langdon,” I said gently, for there is to me something pathetic in ignorance and I was not blaming her for her folly and her crime against her children. “You can tell him what I am about to say, or not, as you please. But my advice is that you keep it to yourself. Even if the present situation develops as seems probable, develops as Mr. Langdon fears, you will not be left without a fortune—a very large fortune, most people would think. But Mr. Langdon will have little or nothing—indeed, I think he is practically dependent on you now.”
“What I have is his,” she said.
“That is generous,” replied I, not especially impressed by a sentiment, the very uttering of which raised a strong doubt of its truth. “But is it prudent? You wish to keep him—securely. Don't tempt him by a generosity he would only abuse.”
She thought it over. “The idea of holding a man in that way is repellent to me,” said she, now obviously posing.
“If the man happens to be one that can be held in no other way,” said I, moving significantly toward the door, “one must overcome one's repugnance—or be despoiled and abandoned.”
“Thank you,” she said, giving me her hand. “Thank you—more than I can say.” She had forgotten entirely that she came to plead for her husband. “And I hope you will soon be as happy as I am.” That last in New York's funniest “great lady” style.
I bowed, and when there was the closed door between us, I laughed, not at all pleasantly. “This New York!” I said aloud. “This New York that dabbles its slime of sordidness and snobbishness on every flower in the garden of human nature. New York that destroys pride and substitutes vanity for it. New York with its petty, mischievous class-makers, the pattern for the rich and the 'smarties' throughout the country. These 'cut-out' minds and hearts, the best of them incapable of growth and calloused wherever the scissors of conventionality have snipped.”
I took from my pocket the picture of Anita I always carried. “Areyoulike that?” I demanded of it. And it seemed to answer: “Yes,—I am.” Did I tear the picture up? No. I kissed it as if it were the magnetic reality. “I don't care what you are!” I cried. “I want you! I want you!”
“Fool!” you are saying. Precisely what I called myself. And you? Is it the one yououghtto love that you give your heart to? Is it the one that understands you and sympathizes with you? Or is it the one whose presence gives you visions of paradise and whose absence blots out the light?
I loved her. Yet I will say this much for myself: I still would not have taken her on any terms that did not make her really mine.
Now that Updegraff is dead, I am free to tell of our relations.
My acquaintance with him was more casual than with any other of “The Seven.” From the outset of my career I made it a rule never to deal with understrappers, always to get in touch with the man who had the final say. Thus, as the years went by, I grew into intimacy with the great men of finance where many with better natural facilities for knowing them remained in an outer circle. But with Updegraff, interested only in enterprises west of the Mississippi and keeping Denver as his legal residence and exploiting himself as a Western man who hated Wall Street, I had a mere bowing acquaintance. This was unimportant, however, as each knew the other well by reputation. Our common intimacies made us intimates for all practical purposes.
Our connection was established soon after the development of my campaign against the Textile Trust had shown that I was after a big bag of the biggest game. We happened to have the same secret broker; and I suppose it was in his crafty brain that the idea of bringing us together was born. Be that as it may, he by gradual stages intimated to me that Updegraff would convey me secrets of “The Seven” in exchange for a guarantee that I would not attack his interests. I do not know what his motive in this treachery was—probably a desire to curb the power of his associates in industrial despotism.
Each of “The Seven” hated and feared and suspected the other six with far more than the ordinary and proverbial rich man's jealous dislike of other rich men. There was not one of them that did not bear the ever-smarting scars of vicious wounds, front and back, received from his fellows; there was not one that did not cherish the hope of overthrowing the rule of Seven and establishing the rule of One. At any rate, I accepted Updegraff's proposition; henceforth, though he stopped speaking to me when we happened to meet, as did all the other big bandits and most of their parasites and procurers, he kept me informed of every act “The Seven” resolved upon.
Thus I knew all about their “gentlemen's agreement” to support the stock market, and that they had made Tavistock their agent for resisting any and all attempts to lower prices, and had given him practically unlimited funds to draw upon as he needed. I had Tavistock sounded on every side, but found no weak spot. There was no rascality he would not perpetrate for whoever employed him; but to his employer he was as loyal as a woman to a bad man. And for a time it looked as if “The Seven” had checkmated me. Those outsiders who had invested heavily in the great enterprises through which “The Seven” ruled were disposing of their holdings—cautiously, through fear of breaking the market. Money would pile up in the banks—money paid out by “The Seven” for their bonds and stocks, of which the people had become deeply suspicious. Then these deposits would be withdrawn—and I knew they were going into real estate investments, because news of booms in real estate and in building was coming in from everywhere. But prices on the Stock Exchange continued to advance.
“They are too strong for you,” said Joe. “They will hold the market up until the public loses faith in you. Then they will sell out at top-notch prices as the people rush in to buy.”
I might have wavered had I not been seeing Tavistock every day. He continued to wear his devil-may-care air; but I observed that he was aging swiftly—and I knew what that meant. Fighting all day to prevent breaks in the crucial stocks; planning most of the night how to prevent breaks the next day; watching the reserve resources of “The Seven” melt away. Those reserves were vast; also, “The Seven” controlled the United States Treasury, and were using its resources as their own; they were buying securities that would be almost worthless if they lost, but if they won, would be rebought by the public at the old swindling prices, when “confidence” was restored. But there was I, cannonading incessantly from my impregnable position; as fast as they repaired breaches in their walls, my big guns of publicity tore new breaches. No wonder Tavistock had thinner hair and wrinkles and a drawn look about the eyes, nose and mouth.
With the battle thus raging all along the line, on the one side “The Seven” and their armies of money and mercenaries and impressed slaves, on the other side the public, I in command, you will say that my yearning for distraction must have been gratified. If the road from his cell were long enough, the condemned man would be fretting less about the gallows than about the tight shoe that was making him limp and wince at every step. Besides, in human affairs it is the personal, always the personal. I soon got used to the crowds, to the big head-lines in the newspapers, to the routine of cannonade and reply.
But the old thorn, pressing persistently—I could not get used to that. In the midst of the adulation, of the blares upon the trumpets of fame that saluted my waking and were wafted to me as I fell asleep at night—in the midst of all the turmoil, I was often in a great and brooding silence, longing for her, now with the imperious energy of passion, and now with the sad ache of love. What was she doing? What was she thinking? Now that Langdon had again played her false for the old price, with what eyes was she looking into the future?
Alva, settled in a West Side apartment not far from the ancestral white elephant, telephoned, asking me to come. I went, because she could and would give me news of Anita. But as I entered her little drawing-room, I said: “It was curiosity that brought me. I wished to see how you were installed.”
“Isn't it nice and small?” cried she. “Billy and I haven't the slightest difficulty in finding each other—as people so often have in the big houses.” And it was Billy this and Billy that, and what Billy said and thought and felt—and before they were married, she had called him William, and had declared “Billy” to be the most offensive combination of letters that ever fell from human lips.
“I needn't ask ifyouare happy,” said I presently, with a dismal failure at looking cheerful. “I can't stay but a moment,” I added, and if I had obeyed my feelings, I'd have risen up and taken myself and my pain away from surroundings as hateful to me as a summer sunrise in a death-chamber.
“Oh!” she exclaimed, in some confusion. “Then excuse me.” And she hastened from the room.
I thought she had gone to order, or perhaps to bring, the tea. The long minutes dragged away until ten had passed. Hearing a rustling in the hall, I rose, intending to take leave the instant she appeared. The rustling stopped just outside. I waited a few seconds, cried, “Well, I'm off. Next time I want to be alone, I'll know where to come,” and advanced to the door. It was not Alva hesitating there; it was Anita.
“I beg your pardon,” said I coldly.
If there had been room to pass I should have gone. What devil possessed me? Certainly in all our relations I had found her direct and frank, if anything, too frank. Doubtless it was the influence of my associations down town, where for so many months I had been dealing with the “short-card” crowd of high finance, who would hardly play the game straight even when that was the easy way to win. My long, steady stretch in that stealthy and sinuous company had put me in the state of mind in which it is impossible to credit any human being with a motive that is decent or an action that is not a dead-fall. Thus the obvious transformation in her made no impression on me. Her haughtiness, her coldness, were gone, and with them had gone all that had been least like her natural self, most like the repellent conventional pattern to which her mother and her associates had molded her. But I was saying to myself: “A trap! Langdon has gone back to his wife. She turns to me.” And I loved her and hated her. “Never,” thought I, “has she shown so poor an opinion of me as now.”
“My uncle told me day before yesterday that it was not he but you,” she said, lifting her eyes to mine. It is inconceivable to me now that I could have misread their honest story; yet I did.
“I had no idea your uncle's notion of honor was also eccentric,” said I, with a satirical smile that made the blood rush to her face.
“That is unjust to him,” she replied earnestly.
“He says he made you no promise of secrecy. And he confessed to me only because he wished to convince me that he had good reason for his high opinion of you.”
“Really!” said I ironically. “And no doubt he found you open wide to conviction—now.” This a subtlety to let her know that I understood why she was seeking me.
“No,” she answered, lowering her eyes. “I knew—better than he.”
For an instant this, spoken in a voice I had long given up hope of ever hearing from her, staggered my cynical conviction. But—“Possibly she thinks she is sincere,” reasoned my head with my heart; “even the sincerest women, brought up as was she, always have the calculator underneath; they deny it, they don't know it often, but there it is; with them, calculation is as involuntary and automatic as their pulse.” So, I said to her, mockingly: “Doubtless your opinion of me has been improving steadily ever since you heard that Mrs. Langdon had recovered her husband.”
She winced, as if I had struck her. “Oh!” she murmured. If she had been the ordinary woman, who in every crisis with man instinctively resorts to weakness' strongest weakness, tears, I might have a different story to tell. But she fought back the tears in which her eyes were swimming and gathered herself together. “That is brutal,” she said, with not a touch of haughtiness, but not humbly, either. “But I deserve it.”
“There was a time,” I went on, swept in a swift current of cold rage, “there was a time when I would have taken you on almost any terms. A man never makes a complete fool of himself about a woman but once in his life, they say. I have done my stretch—and it is over.”
She sighed wearily. “Langdon came to see me soon after I left your house, and went to my uncle,” she said. “I will tell you what happened.”
“I do not wish to hear,” replied I, adding pointedly, “I have been waiting ever since you left for news of your plans.”
She grew white, and my heart smote me. She came into the room and seated herself. “Won't you stop, please, for a moment longer?” she said. “I hope that, at, least, we can part without bitterness. I understand now that everything is over between us. A woman's vanity makes her belief that a man cares for her die hard. I am convinced now—I assure you, I am. I shall trouble you no more about the past. But I have the right to ask you to hear me when I say that Langdon came, and that I myself sent him away; sent him back to his wife.”
“Touching self-sacrifice,” said I ironically.
“No,” she replied. “I can not claim any credit. I sent him away only because you and Alva had taught me how to judge him better. I do not despise him as do you; I know too well what has made him what he is. But I had to send him away.”
My comment was an incredulous look and shrug. “I must be going,” I said.
“You do not believe me?” she asked.
“In my place, would you believe?” replied I. “You say I have taught you. Well, you have taught me, too—for instance, that the years you've spent on your knees in the musty temple of conventionality before false gods have made you—fit only for the Langdon sort of thing. You can't learn how to stand erect, and your eyes can not bear the light.”
“I am sorry,” she said slowly, hesitatingly, “that your faith in me died just when I might, perhaps, have justified it. Ours has been a pitiful series of misunderstandings.”
“A trap! A trap!” I was warning myself. “You've been a fool long enough, Blacklock.” And aloud I said: “Well, Anita, the series is ended now. There's no longer any occasion for our lying or posing to each other. Any arrangements your uncle's lawyers suggest will be made.”
I was bowing, to leave without shaking hands with her. But she would not have it so. “Please!” she said, stretching out her long, slender arm and offering me her hand.
What a devil possessed me that day! With every atom of me longing for her, I yet was able to take her hand and say, with a smile, that was, I doubt not, as mocking as my tone: “By all means let us be friends. And I trust you will not think me discourteous if I say that I shall feel safer in our friendship when we are both on neutral ground.”
As I was turning away, her look, my own heart, made me turn again. I caught her by the shoulders. I gazed into her eyes. “If I could only trust you, could only believe you!” I cried.
“You cared for me when I wasn't worth it,” she said. “Now that I am more like what you once imagined me, you do not care.”
Up between us rose Langdon's face—cynical, mocking, contemptuous. “Your heart ishis! You told me so! Don'tlieto me!” I exclaimed. And before she could reply, I was gone.
Out from under the spell of her presence, back among the tricksters and assassins, the traps and ambushes of Wall Street, I believed again; believed firmly the promptings of the devil that possessed me. “She would have given you a brief fool's paradise,” said that devil. “Then what a hideous awakening!” And I cursed the day when New York's insidious snobbishness had tempted my vanity into starting me on that degrading chase after “respectability.”
“If she does not move to free herself soon,” said I to myself, “I will put my own lawyer to work. My right eye offends me. I will pluck it out.”