Various

By David Graham Phillips

[FOR SYNOPSIS OF PREVIOUS INSTALLMENTS SEE PRECEDING PAGE]

XV—(Continued).

When Roebuck lived near Chicago, he had a huge house, a sort of crude palace such as so many of our millionaires built for themselves in the first excitement of their new wealth—a house with porches and balconies and towers and minarets and all sorts of gingerbread effects to compel the eye of the passer-by. But when he became enormously rich, so rich that his name was one of the synonyms for wealth, so rich that people said “rich as Roebuck” where they used to say “rich as Croesus,” he cut away every kind of ostentation, and avoided attention more eagerly than he had once sought it. He took advantage of his having to remove to New York, where his vast interests centered; he bought a small and commonplace and, for a rich man, even mean house in East Fifty-second Street—one of a row and an almost dingy looking row at that. There he had an establishment a man with one-fiftieth of his fortune would have felt like apologizing for. The dishes on his table, for example, were cheap and almost coarse, and the pictures on his walls were photographs or atrocious bargain-counter paintings. To his few intimates who were intimate enough to question him about his come-down from his Chicago splendors, he explained that with advancing years he was seeing with clearer eyes his responsibilities as a steward of the Lord, that luxury was sinful, and no man had the right to waste the Lord’s gifts that way. The general theory about him was that advancing years had developed his natural closeness into the stingiest avariciousness. But my notion is he was impelled by the fear of exciting envy, by the fear of assassination—the fear that made his eyes roam restlessly whenever strangers were near him, and so dried up the inside of his body that his dry tongue was constantly sliding along his dry lips. I have seen a convict stand in the door of his cell and, though it was impossible that anyone could be behind him, look nervously over his shoulder every moment or so. Roebuck had the same trick—only his dread, I suspect, was not the officers of the law, even of the divine law, but the many, many victims of his merciless execution of “the Lord’s will.” This state of mind is more common than is generally supposed, among the very rich men, especially those who have come up from poverty. Those who have inherited great wealth, and have always been used to it, get into the habit of looking upon the mass of mankind as inferiors, and move about with no greater sense of peril than a man has in venturing among a lot of dogs with tails wagging. But those who were born poor and have risen under the stimulus of a furious envy of the comfortable and the rich, fancy that everybody who isn’t rich has the same savage hunger which they themselves had, and is ready to use the same desperate methods in gratifying it. Thus, where the rich of the Langdon sort are supercilious, the rich of the Roebuck sort are nervous and often become morbid on the subject of assassination as they grow richer and richer.

The door of Roebuck’s house was opened for me by a maid—a manservant would have been a “sinful” luxury, a manservant might be an assassin or might be hired by plotters against his life. I may add that she looked the cheap maid-of-all-work, and her manners were of the free and fresh sort which indicates that a servant feels he or she should get as high, or higher, wages, and less to do, elsewhere. “I don’t think you can see Mr. Roebuck,” she said.

“Take my card to him,” I ordered, “and I’ll wait in the parlor.”

“Parlor’s in use,” she retorted, with a sarcastic grin, which I was soon to understand.

So I stood by the old-fashioned coat and hat rack while she went in at the hall door of the back parlor. Soon Roebuck himself came out, his glasses on his nose, a family Bible under his arm. “Glad to see you, Matthew,” said he, with saintly kindliness, giving me a friendly hand. “We are just about to offer up our evening prayer. Come right in.”

I followed him into the back parlor. Both it and the front parlor were lighted; in a sort of circle extending into both rooms were all the Roebucks and the four servants. “This is my friend, Matthew Blacklock,” said he, and the Roebucks in the circle gravely bowed. He drew up a chair for me, and we seated ourselves. Amid a solemn hush, he read a chapter from the big Bible spread out upon his lean lap. My glance wandered from face to face of the Roebucks, as plainly dressed as were their servants. I was able to look freely, mine being the only eyes not bent upon the floor. It was the first time in my life that I had witnessed family prayers. When I was a boy at home, my mother had taken literally a Scriptural injunction to pray in secret—in a closet, I think the passage of the Bible said. Many times each day she used to retire to a closet under the stairway and spend from one to twenty minutes shut in there. But we had no family prayers. I was therefore deeply interested in what was going on in those countrified parlors of one of the richest and most powerful men in the world—and this right in the heart of that district of New York where palaces stand in rows and in blocks, and where such few churches as there are resemble social clubs for snubbing climbers and patronizing the poor.

It was astonishing how much every Roebuck in that circle, even the old lady, looked like old Roebuck himself—the same smug piety, the same underfed appearance that, by the way, more often indicates a starved soul than a starved body. One difference—where his face had the look of power that compels respect and, to the shrewd, reveals relentless strength relentlessly used, the expressions of the others were simply small and mean and frost-nipped. And that is the rule—the second generation of a plutocrat inherits, with his money, the meanness that enabled him to hoard it, but not the greatness that enabled him to make it.

So absorbed was I in the study of the influence of his terrible master-character upon those closest to it, that I started when he said: “Let us pray.” I followed the example of the others, and knelt. The audible prayer was offered up by his oldest daughter, Mrs. Wheeler, a widow. Roebuck punctuated each paragraph in her series of petitions with a loudly whispered amen. When she prayed for “the stranger whom Thou hast led seemingly by chance into our little circle,” he whispered the amen more fervently and repeated it. And well he might, the old robber and assassin by proxy! The prayer ended and us on our feet, the servants withdrew, then all the family except Roebuck. That is, they closed the doors between the two rooms and left him and me alone in the front parlor.

“I shall not detain you long, Mr. Roebuck,” said I. “A report reached me this evening that sent me to you at once.”

“If possible, Matthew,” said he, and he could not hide his uneasiness, “put off business until to-morrow. My mind—yours, too, I trust—is not in the frame for that kind of thoughts now.”

“Is the Coal reorganization to be announced the first of July?” I demanded. It has always been, and always shall be, my method to fight in the open. This, not from principle, but from expediency. Some men fight best in the brush; I don’t. So I always begin battle by shelling the woods.

“No,” he said, amazing me by his instant frankness. “The announcement has been postponed.”

Why did he not lie to me? Why did he not put me off the scent, as he might easily have done, with some shrewd evasion? I suspect I owe it to my luck in catching him at family prayers. For I know that the general impression of him is erroneous; he is not merely a hypocrite before the world, but also a hypocrite before himself. A more profoundly, piously conscientious man never lived. Never was there a truer epitaph than the one implied in the sentence carved over his niche in the magnificent Roebuck mausoleum he built: “Fear naught but the Lord.”

“When will the reorganization be announced?” I asked.

“I cannot say,” he answered. “Some difficulties—chiefly labor difficulties—have arisen. Until they are settled, nothing can be done. Come to me tomorrow, and we’ll talk about it.”

“That is all I wished to know,” said I. And, with a friendly, easy smile, I put out my hand. “Good-night.”

It was his turn to be astonished—and he showed it, where I had given not a sign. “What was the report you heard?” he asked, to detain me.

“That you and Mowbray Langdon had conspired to ruin me,” said I, laughing.

He echoed my laugh rather hollowly. “It was hardly necessary for you to come to me about such a—a statement.”

“Hardly,” I answered, dryly. Hardly, indeed. For I was seeing now all that I had been hiding from myself since I became infatuated with Anita, and made marrying her my only real business in life.

We faced each other, each measuring the other. And as his glance quailed before mine, I turned away to conceal my exultation. In a comparison of resources this man who had plotted to crush me was to me as giant to midget. But I had the joy of realizing that man to man, I was the stronger. He had craft, but I had daring. His vast wealth aggravated his natural cowardice—crafty men are invariably cowards, and their audacities under the compulsion of their insatiable greed are like a starving jackal’s dashes into danger for food. My wealth belonged to me, not I to it; and, stripped of it, I would be like the prize-fighter stripped for the fight. Finally, he was old while I was young. And there was the chief reason for his quailing. He knew that he must die long before me, that my turn must come, that I could dance upon his grave.

As I drove away, I was proud of myself. I had listened to my death sentence with a face so smiling that he must almost have believed me unconscious; and also, it had not even entered my head, as I listened, to beg for mercy. Not that there would have been the least use in begging—as well try to pray a statue into life as try to soften that set will and purpose. Still, another sort of man than I would have weakened, and I felt—justly, I think—proud that I had not weakened. But when I was once more in my apartment—in our apartment—perhaps I did show that there was a weak streak through me. I fought against the impulse to see her once more that night; but I fought in vain. I knocked at the door of her sitting room—a timid knock, for me. No answer. I knocked again, more loudly—then a third time, still more loudly. The door opened and she stood there, like one of the angels that guarded the gates of Eden after the fall. Only, instead of a flaming sword, hers was of ice. She was in a dressing gown or tea gown, white and clinging and full of intoxicating hints and glimpses of all the beauties of her figure. Her face softened as she continued to look at me, and I entered.“No—please don’t turn on any more lights,” I said, as she moved toward the electric buttons. “I just came in to—to see if I could do anything for you.” In fact, I had come, longing for her to do something for me, to show in look or tone or act some sympathy for me in my loneliness and trouble.

“No, thank you,” she said. Her voice was that of a stranger who wished to remain a stranger. And she was evidently waiting for me to go. You will see what a mood I was in when I say I felt as I had not since I, a very small boy indeed, ran away from home—it was one evening after I had been put to bed; I came back through the chilly night to take one last glimpse of the family that would soon be realizing how foolishly and wickedly unappreciative they had been of such a treasure as I; and when I saw them sitting about the big fire in the lamp light, heartlessly comfortable and unconcerned, it was all I could do to keep back the tears of self-pity—and I never saw them again.

“I’ve seen Roebuck,” said I to Anita, because I must say something, if I was to stay on.

“Roebuck?” she inquired. Her tone reminded me that his name conveyed nothing to her.

“He and I are in an enterprise together,” I explained. “He is the one man who could seriously cripple me.”

“Oh,” she said, and her indifference, forced though I thought it, wounded.

“Well,” said I, “your mother was right.”

She turned full toward me, and even in the dimness I saw her quick and full sympathy—an impulsive flash that was instantly gone. But it had been there!

“I came in here,” I went on, “to say that—Anita, it doesn’t in the least matter. No one in this world, no one and nothing, could hurt me except through you. So long as I have you, they—the rest—all of them together—can’t touch me.”

We were both silent for several minutes. Then she said, and her voice was like the smooth surface of the river where the boiling rapids run deep:

“But you haven’t me—and never shall have. I’ve told you that. I warned you long ago. No doubt you will pretend, and people will say, that I left you because you lost your money. But it won’t be so.”

I was beside her instantly, was looking into her face. “What do you mean?” I asked, and I did not speak gently.

She gazed at me without flinching. “And I suppose,” she said, satirically, “you wonder why I—why you—are repellent to me. Haven’t you learned that, while I may have been made into a moral coward, I’m not a physical coward? Don’t bully and threaten. It’s useless.”

I put my hand strongly on her shoulder—taunts and jeers do not turn me aside. “What do you mean?” I repeated.

“Take your hand off me,” she commanded.

“What did you mean?” I repeated, strongly. “Don’t be afraid to answer me.”

She was very young—so the taunt stung her. “I was about to tell you,” said she, “when you began to bluster.”

I took advantage of this to extricate myself from the awkward position in which she had put me—I took my hand from her shoulder.

“I am going to leave you,” she went on. “I am ready to go at any time. But if you wish it, I shall not go until my plans are arranged.”

“What plans?” I demanded.

“That is no concern of yours.”

“You forget that you are my wife,” said I, my brain on fire.

“I am not your wife,” was her answer, and if she had not looked so young and childlike, there in the moonlight all in white, I could not have held myself in check, so insolent was the tone and so hopeless of ever being able to win her did she make me feel.

“You are my wife, and you will stay here with me,” I reiterated.

“I am my own, and I shall go where I please, and do what I please,” was her contemptuous retort. “Why won’t you be reasonable? Why won’t you see how utterly unsuited we are? I don’t ask you to be a gentleman—but just a man, and be ashamed even to wish to detain a woman against her will.”

I drew up a chair so close to her that, to retreat, she was forced to sit in the broad window seat. Then I seated myself. “By all means, let us be reasonable,” said I. “Now, let me explain my position. I have heard you and your friends discussing the views of marriage you’ve just been expressing. Their views may be right, may be more civilized, more ‘advanced,’ than mine. No matter. They are not mine. I hold by the old standards—and you are my wife—mine. Do you understand?” All this as tranquilly as if we were discussing fair weather. “And you will live up to the obligation which the marriage service has put upon you.”

She might have been a marble statue pedestaled in that window seat.

“You married me of your own free will—for you could have protested to the preacher, and he would have sustained you. You put certain conditions on our marriage. I assented to them. I have respected them. I shall continue to respect them. But—when you married me, you didn’t marry a dawdling dude chattering ‘advanced ideas’ with his head full of libertinism. You married a man. And that man is your husband.”

I waited, but she made no comment—not even by gesture or movement. She simply sat, her hands interlaced in her lap, her eyes straight upon mine.

“You say, let us be reasonable,” I went on. “Well, let us be reasonable. There may come a time when a woman can be free and independent, but that time is a long way off yet. The world is organized on the basis of every woman having a protector—of every decent woman having a husband, unless she remains in the home of some of her blood relations. There may be women strong enough to set the world at defiance. But you are not one of them—and you know it. You have shown it to yourself again and again in the last forty-eight hours. Further, though you do not know it, your bringing up has made you more of a child than most of the inexperienced women. If you tried to assert your so-called independence, you would be the easy prey of a scoundrel or scoundrels. When I, who have lived in the thick of the fight all my life, who have learned by many a surprise and defeat never to sleep except sword and gun in hand, and one eye open—when I have been trapped as Roebuck and Langdon have just trapped me—what chance would a woman like you have?”

She did not answer, or change expression.

“Is what I say reasonable or unreasonable?” I asked, gently.

“Reasonable—from your standpoint,” she said.

She gazed out into the moonlight, up into the sky. And at the look in her face, the primeval savage in me strained to close round that slender white throat of hers and crush and crush until it had killed in her the thought of that other man which was transforming her from marble to flesh that glowed and blood that surged. I pushed back my chair with a sudden noise that startled her; by the way she trembled, I gauged how tense her nerves must have been. I rose and, in a fairly calm tone, said: “We understand each other?”

“Yes,” she answered. “As before.”

I ignored this. “Think it over, Anita,” I urged—she seemed to me so like a sweet, spoiled child again. I longed to go straight at her about that other man. I stood for a moment with Tom Langdon’s name on my lips, but I could not trust myself. I went away to my own rooms.

I thrust thoughts of her from my mind. I spent the night gnawing upon the ropes with which Mowbray Langdon and Roebuck had bound me, hand and foot.

XVI.

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 the fear or the cupidity of his assailants, for men fight either to protect that which they have or to gain that which they feel they must have. So 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 even explain to my satisfaction Langdon’s activities against me. I felt that Anita was somehow 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.

“I’m glad you like her,” said I. “Why don’t you take her down to our place on Long Island? 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 a new and deeper plot under an apparently harmless suggestion.

“Then I’ll not see you again for several days,” said I, most business-like. “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 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 which 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 downtown 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 warpath, 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 should 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 go and 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 & Co. 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 a 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 an 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 dispatch and clear away each matter the instant it was presented to him. Many things could be read in the powerful form, bolt upright in that stiff chair, and in 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 a 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 the millionaire who is not 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 the 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 resuming that idol-like pose. But although there was only repose and deliberation in his manner, and not a suggestion of haste, I, like everyone 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 anyone to be brief and pointed.

“I shall have to go to the wall today,” 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 has 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 this lockout is settled and the reorganization is announced. I leave it to your sense of justice to decide 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?” And I then thought that the grim smile was associated with his remark. I was soon to know that it was an affirmation of my shrewd guess about Manasquale.

“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 that 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 dispatched, his consent without argument did not stir suspicion in me.

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 were 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 cried. “We were ruined!”

And he sat down, and buried his face and cried like a child—and 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. I registered a vow never to gamble again—not with stocks, not with cards, not at all. And I’ve kept faith with myself.

“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 dilemma 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. Then I started up—and sat down again. “No, I’ll deny myself the pleasure,” said I. “I’ll let Roebuck find out when the claws catch in that tough old hide of his.”

XVII.

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 further 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.“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 insulting me. 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—non-existent! 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 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, cannot 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.”

The old man settled back, partially reassured. “Why do you not make the settlement direct?” he asked.

“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. Why won’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—to you.” 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 which I doubt if anyone 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 anyone 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 the 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 resist you.”

“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—she is 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 her 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 believe I 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 the moment, her side of the story.

XVIII.

It was the next day, I think, that I met Mowbray Langdon and his brother Tom in the entrance to 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 woman really cares for,” I would say to myself, “is the measure of her true self. But not the kind of man she imagines she 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. But see a “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 barnyard, poisons the watch dog, bores an auger hole in the granary, and takes to his heels at the first 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 thought 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 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 study out 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 venomous 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 the mighty palaces of finance and commerce from which business men have been ousted by the cormorant “captains of industry.” I must use my 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, “I can be getting good and ready.”

TO BE CONTINUED.