Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 5, June 1905

“How is your culture class?” I inquired, deliberately malicious, in my impatience and nervousness. “And do you still take conversation lessons?”

She was furiously annoyed. “Oh, those old jokes of Joe’s,” she said, affecting disdainful amusement.

In fact, they were anything but jokes. On Mondays and Thursdays she used to attend a class for women who, like herself, wished to be “up-to-date on culture and all that sort of thing.” They hired a teacher to cram them with odds and ends about art and politics and the “latest literature, heavy and light.” On Tuesdays and Fridays she had an “indigent gentlewoman,” whatever that may be, come to her to teach her how to converse and otherwise conduct herself according to the “standards of polite society.” Joe used to give imitations of those conversation lessons that raised roars of laughter round the poker table, the louder because so many of the other men had wives with the same ambitions and the same methods of attaining them.

Mrs. Ball came back to the subject of Anita. “I am glad you are going to settle with such a charming girl. She comes of such a charming family. I have never happened to meet any of them. We are in the West Side set, you know, while they move in the East Side set, and New York is so large that one almost never meets anyone outside one’s own set.” This smooth snobbishness, said in the affected “society” tone, was as out of place in her as rouge and hair dye in a wholesome, honest old grandmother.

I began to pace the floor. “Can it be,” I fretted aloud, “that Joe’s racing round looking for an Episcopalian preacher, when there was a Methodist at hand?”

“I’m sure he wouldn’t bring anything but a Church of England priest,” Mrs. Ball assured me, loftily. “Why, Miss Ellersly wouldn’t think she was married, if she hadn’t a priest of her own church.”

My temper got the bit in its teeth. I stopped before her, and fixed her with an eye that must have had some fire in it. “I’m not marrying a fool, Mrs. Ball,” said I. “You mustn’t judge her by her bringing up – by her family. Children have a way of bringing themselves up, in spite of damn fool parents.”

She weakened so promptly that I was ashamed of myself. My only excuse for getting out of patience with her is that I had seen her seldom in the last few years, had forgotten how matter-of-surface her affectation and snobbery were, and how little they interfered with her being a good mother and a good wife, up to the limits of her brain capacity.

“I’m sure, Mr. Blacklock,” she said, plaintively, “I only wished to say what was pleasant and nice about your fiancée. I know she’s a lovely girl. I’ve often admired her at the opera. She goes a great deal in Mrs. Langdon’s box, and Mrs. Langdon and I are together on the board of managers of the Magdalene Home, and also on the board of the Hospital for Unfortunate Gentlefolk.” And so on, and on.

I walked up and down among those wrapped-up, ghostly chairs and tables and cabinets and statues many times before Joe arrived with the minister – and he was a Methodist, McCabe by name. You should have seen Mrs. Ball’s look as he advanced his portly form and round face with its shaven upper lip into the drawing room. She tried to be cordial, but she couldn’t – her mind was on Anita, and the horror which would fill her when she discovered that she was to be married by a preacher of a sect unknown to fashionable circles.

“All I ask of you,” said I, “is that you cut it as short as possible. Miss Ellersly is tired and nervous.” This while we were shaking hands after Joe’s introduction.

“You can count on me, sir,” said McCabe, giving my hand an extra shake before dropping it. “I’ve no doubt, from what my young neighbor here tells me, that your marriage is already made in your hearts and with all solemnity. The form is an incident – important, but only an incident.”

I liked that, and I liked his unaffected way of saying it. His voice had more of the homely, homelike, rural twang in it than I had heard in New York in many a day. I mentally added fifty dollars to the fee I had intended to give him. And now Anita and Alva were coming down the stairway. I was amazed at sight of her. Her evening dress had given place to a pretty blue street suit with a short skirt – white showing at her wrists, at her neck and through slashings in the coat over her bosom; and on her head was a hat to match. I looked at her feet – the slippers had been replaced by boots. “And they’re just right for her,” said Alva, who was following my glance, “though I’m not so tall as she.”

But what amazed me most, and delighted me, was that Anita seemed to be almost in good spirits. It was evident she had formed with Joe’s daughter one of those sudden friendships so great and so vivid that they rarely live long after the passing of the heat of the emergency which bred them. Mrs. Ball saw it, also, and was straightway giddied into a sort of ecstasy. You can imagine the visions it conjured. I’ve no doubt she talked house on the east side of the park to Joe that very night, before she let him sleep. However, Anita’s face was serious enough when we took our places before the minister, with his little, black-bound book open. And as he read in a voice that was genuinely impressive those words that no voice could make unimpressive, I watched her, saw her paleness blanch into pallor, saw the dusk creep round her eyes until they were like stars waning somberly before the gray face of dawn. When they closed and her head began to sway, I steadied her with my arm. And so we stood, I with my arm round her, she leaning lightly against my shoulder. Her answers were mere movements of the lips.

At the end, when I kissed her cheek, she said: “Is it over?”

“Yes,” McCabe answered – she was looking at him. “And I wish you all happiness, Mrs. Blacklock.”

She stared at him with great wondering eyes. Her form relaxed. I carried her to a chair. Joe came with a glass of champagne; she drank some of it, and it brought life back to her face, and some color. With a naturalness that deceived even me for the moment, she smiled up at Joe as she handed him the glass. “Is it bad luck,” she asked, “for me to be the first to drink my own health?” And she stood, looking tranquilly at everyone – except me.

I took McCabe into the hall and paid him off. When we came back, I said: “Now we must be going.”

“Oh, but surely you’ll stay for supper!” cried Joe’s wife.

“No,” replied I, in a tone which made it impossible to insist. “We appreciate your kindness, but we’ve imposed on it enough.” And I shook hands with her and with Allie and the minister, and, linking Joe’s arm in mine, made for the door. I gave the necessary directions to my chauffeur while we were waiting for Anita to come down the steps. Joe’s daughter was close beside her, and they kissed each other good-by, Alva on the verge of tears, Anita not suggesting any emotion of any sort. “To-morrow – sure,” Anita said to her. And she answered: “Yes, indeed – as soon as you telephone me.” And so we were off, a shower of rice rattling on the roof of the brougham – the slatternly manservant had thrown it from the midst of the group of servants.

Neither of us spoke. I watched her face without seeming to do so, and by the light of occasional street lamps saw her studying me furtively. At last she said: “I wish to go to my uncle’s now.”

“We are going home,” said I.

“But the house will be shut up,” said she, “and everyone will be in bed. It’s nearly midnight. Besides, they might not – ” She came to a full stop.

“We are going home,” I repeated. “To the Willoughby.”

She gave me a look that was meant to scorch – and it did. But I showed at the surface no sign of how I was wincing and shrinking.

She drew further into her corner, and out of its darkness came, in a low voice: “How I hate you!” like the whisper of a bullet.

I kept silent until I had control of myself. Then, as if talking of a matter which had been finally and amicably settled, I began: “The apartment isn’t exactly ready for us, but Joe’s just about now telephoning my man that we are coming, and telephoning your people to send your maid down there.”

“I wish to go to my uncle’s,” she repeated.

“My wife will go with me,” said I, quietly and gently. “I am considerate of her, not of her unwise impulses.”

A long pause, then from her, in icy calmness: “I am in your power just now, but I warn you that, if you do not take me to my uncle’s, you will wish you had never seen me.”

“I’ve wished that many times already,” said I, sadly. “I’ve wished it from the bottom of my heart this whole evening, when step by step fate has been forcing me on to do things that are even more hateful to me than to you. For they not only make me hate myself, but make you hate me, too.” I laid my hand on her arm and held it there, though she tried to draw away. “Anita,” I said, “I would do anything for you – live for you, die for you. But there’s that something inside me – you’ve felt it – and when it says ‘must,’ I can’t disobey – you know I can’t. And, though you might break my heart, you could not break that will. It’s as much your master as it is mine.”

“We shall see – to-morrow,” she said.

“Do not put me to the test,” I pleaded. Then I added what I knew to be true: “But you will not. You know it would take some one stronger than your uncle, stronger than your parents, to drive me from what I believe right for you and for me.” From the moment that I found the bogy of conventionality potent enough with her to frighten her into keeping her word and marrying me, I had no fear for “to-morrow.” The hour when she could defy me had passed.

A long, long silence, the electric speeding southward under the arching trees of the West Drive. I remember it was as we skirted the lower end of the Mall that she said evenly: “You have made me hate you so that it terrifies me. I am afraid of the consequences that must come to you and to me.”

“And well you may be,” I answered, gently. “For you’ve seen enough of me to get at least a hint of what I would do, if you drove me to it. Hate is terrible, Anita, but love can be more terrible.”

At the Willoughby she let me help her descend from the electric, waited until I sent it away, walked beside me into the building. My man, Sanders, had evidently been listening for the elevator; the door opened without my ringing, and there he was, bowing low. She acknowledged his welcome with that regard for “appearances” which training had made instinctive. In the center of my – our – drawing-room table was a mass of gorgeous roses. “Where did you get ’em?” I asked him, in an aside.

“The elevator boy’s brother, sir,” he replied, “works in the florist’s shop just across the street, next to the church. He happened to be downstairs when I got your message, sir. So I was able to get a few flowers. I’m sorry, sir, I hadn’t a little more time.”

“You’ve done noble,” said I, and I shook hands with him warmly.

Anita was greeting those flowers as if they were a friend suddenly appearing in a time of need. She turned now and beamed on Sanders. “Thank you,” she said; “thank you.” And Sanders was hers.

“Anything I can do – ma’am – sir?” asked Sanders.

“Nothing – except send my maid as soon as she comes,” she replied.

“I shan’t need you,” said I.

“Mr. Monson is still here,” he said, lingering. “Shall I send him away, sir, or do you wish to see him?”

“I’ll speak to him myself in a moment,” I answered.

When Sanders was gone, she seated herself and absently played with the buttons of her glove.

“Shall I bring Monson?” I asked. “You know, he’s my – factotum.”

“I do not wish to see him,” she answered.

“You do not like him?” said I.

After a brief hesitation she answered, “No.”

I restrained a strong impulse to ask her why, for instinct told me she had some especial reason that somehow concerned me. I said merely: “Then I shall get rid of him.”

“Not on my account,” she replied, indifferently. “I care nothing about him one way or the other.”

“He goes at the end of his month,” said I.

She was now taking off her gloves. “Before your maid comes,” I went on, “let me explain about the apartment. This room and the two leading out of it are yours. My own suit is on the other side of our private hall there.”

She colored high, paled. I saw that she did not intend to speak.

I stood awkwardly, waiting for something further to come into my own head. “Good-night,” said I, finally, bowing as if I were taking leave of a formal acquaintance at the end of a formal call.

She did not answer.

I left the room, closing the door behind me. I paused an instant, heard the key click in the lock. And I burned in a hot flush of shame – shame that she should have thought so basely of me. For I did not then realize how far apart we were, and utterly in the dark, each toward the other. I joined Monson in my little smoking room. “Congratulate you,” he began, with his nasty, supercilious grin, which of late had been getting on my nerves severely.

“Thanks,” I replied, curtly, paying no attention to his outstretched hand. “I want you to put a notice of the marriage in to-morrow morning’s Herald.”

“Give me the facts – clergyman’s name – place, and so on,” said he.

“Unnecessary,” I answered. “Just our names and the date – that’s all. You’d better step lively. It’s late, and it’ll be too late if you delay.”

With an irritating show of deliberation he lit a fresh cigarette before setting out. I heard her maid come. After about an hour I went into the hall – no light showed through the transoms of her suit. I returned to my own part of the flat and went to bed in the spare room to which Sanders had hastily moved my personal belongings. And almost as soon as my head touched the pillow I was asleep. That day which began in disaster – in what a blaze of triumph it had ended! Anita – she was my wife, and under my roof! But stronger than the sense of victory won was a new emotion – a sense of a duty done, of a responsibility begun.

XIV

Joe got to the office rather later than usual the next morning. They told him I was already there, but he wouldn’t believe it until he had come into my private den and with his own eyes had seen me. “Well, I’m jiggered!” said he. “It seems to have made less impression on you than it did on us. My missus and the little un wouldn’t let me go to bed till after two. They sat on and on, questioning me and discussing.”

I laughed – partly because I knew that Joe, like most men, was as full of gossip and as eager for it as a convalescent old maid, and that, whoever might have been the first at his house to make the break for bed, he was the last to leave off talking. But the chief reason for my laugh was that, just before he came in on me, I was almost pinching myself to see whether I was dreaming it all, and he had made me feel how vividly true it was.

“Why don’t you ease down, Blacklock?” he went on. “Everything’s smooth. The business – at least, my end of it, and I suppose your end, too – was never in better shape, never growing so fast. You could go off for a week or two, just as well as not.”

And he honestly thought it, so little did I let him know about the larger enterprises of Blacklock & Co. I could have spoken a dozen words, and he would have been floundering like a caught fish in a basket. There are men – a very few – who work more swiftly and more surely when they know they’re on the brink of ruin; but not Joe. One glimpse of our real National Coal account, and all my power over him couldn’t have kept him from showing the whole Street that Blacklock & Co. was shaky. And whenever the Street begins to think a man is shaky, he must be strong indeed to escape the fate of the wolf that stumbles as it runs with the pack.

“No holiday at present, Joe,” was my reply to his suggestion. “Perhaps the second week in July; but our marriage was so sudden that we haven’t had the time to get ready for a trip.”

“Yes – it was sudden, wasn’t it?” said Joe, curiosity twitching his nose like a dog’s at scent of a rat. “How did it happen?”

“Oh, I’ll tell you some time,” replied I. “I must go to work now.”

And work a-plenty there was. Before me rose a huge sheaf of clamorous telegrams from our out-of-town customers and our agents; and soon my anteroom was crowded with my local following, sore and shorn. I suppose a score or more of the habitual heavy plungers on my tips were ruined and hundreds of others were thousands and tens of thousands out of pocket. “Do you want me to talk to these people?” inquired Joe, with the kindly intention of giving me a chance to shift the unpleasant duty to him.

“Certainly not,” said I. “When the place is jammed, let me know. I’ll jack ’em up.”

It made Joe uneasy for me even to talk of using my “language” – he would have crawled from the Battery to Harlem to keep me from using it on him. So he silently left me alone. My system of dealing face to face with the speculating and investing public had many great advantages over that of all the other big operators – the system of decoying the public from behind cleverly contrived screens and slaughtering it without showing so much as the tip of a gun or nose that could be identified. But to my method there was a disadvantage that made men, who happen to have more hypocrisy and less nerve than I, shrink from it – when one of my tips miscarried, down upon me would swoop the bad losers in a body to give me a turbulent and interesting quarter of an hour.

Toward ten o’clock, my boy came in and said: “Mr. Ball thinks it’s about time for you to see some of these people.”

I went into the main room, where the tickers and blackboards were. As I approached through my outer office I could hear the noise the crowd was making – as they cursed me. If you want to rile the very inmost soul of the average human being, don’t take his reputation or his wife; just cause him to lose money. There were among my customers many with the true, even-tenored sporting instinct. These were bearing their losses with philosophy – none of them was there. Of the perhaps three hundred who had come to ease their anguish by tongue-lashing me, every one was mad through and through – those who had lost a few hundred dollars as infuriated as those whom my misleading tip had cost thousands and tens of thousands; those whom I had helped to win all they had in the world more savage than those new to my following.

I took my stand in the doorway, a step up from the floor of the main room. I looked all round until I had met each pair of angry eyes. They say I can give my face an expression that is anything but agreeable; such talent as I have in that direction I exerted then. The instant I appeared a silence fell; but I waited until the last pair, of claws drew in. Then I said, in the quiet tone the army officer uses when he tells the mob that the machine guns will open up in two minutes by the watch: “Gentlemen, in the effort to counteract my warning to the public, the Textile crowd rocketed the stock yesterday. Those who heeded my warning and sold got excellent prices. Those who did not should sell to-day. Not even the powerful interests behind Textile can long maintain yesterday’s prices.”

A wave of restlessness passed over the crowd. Many shifted their eyes from me and began to murmur.

I raised my voice slightly as I went on: “The speculators, the gamblers, are the only people who were hurt. Those who sold what they didn’t have are paying for their folly. I have no sympathy for them. Blacklock & Co. wishes none such in its following, and seizes every opportunity to weed them out. We are in business only for the bona fide investing public, and we are stronger with that public to-day than we have ever been.”

Again I looked from coward to coward of that mob, changed from three hundred strong to three hundred weak. Then I bowed and withdrew, leaving them to mutter and disperse. I felt well content with the trend of events – I who wished to impress the public and the financiers that I had broken with speculation and speculators, could I have had a better than this unexpected opportunity sharply to define my new course? And as Textiles, unsupported, fell toward the close of the day, my content rose toward my normal high spirits. There was no whisper in the Street that I was in trouble; on the contrary, the idea was gaining ground that I had really long ceased to be a stock gambler and deserved a much better reputation than I had. Reputation is a matter of diplomacy rather than of desert. In all my career I was never less entitled to a good reputation than in those June days; yet the disastrous gambling follies, yes, and worse, I then committed, formed the secure foundation of my reputation for conservatism and square dealing. From that time dates the decline of the habit the newspapers had of speaking of me as “Black Matt” or “Matt” Blacklock. In them, and therefore in the public mind, I began to figure as “Mr. Blacklock” and “the well-known authority on finance.”

No doubt, my marriage had something to do with this. Probably one couldn’t borrow much money directly in New York on the strength of a fashionable marriage; but, so all-pervading is the snobbishness there, one can get, by making a fashionable marriage, any quantity of that deferential respect from rich people which is, in some circumstances, easily convertible into cash and credit.

I waited with a good deal of anxiety, as you may imagine, for the early editions of the afternoon papers. The first article my eye chanced upon was a mere wordy elaboration of the brief and vague announcement Monson had put in the Herald. Later came an interview with old Ellersly. “Not at all mysterious,” he had said to the reporters. “Mr. Blacklock found he would have to go abroad on business soon – he didn’t know just when. On the spur of the moment they decided to marry.” A good enough story, and I confirmed it when I admitted the reporters. I read their estimates of my fortune and of Anita’s with rather bitter amusement – she whose father was living from hand to mouth; I who could not have emerged from a forced settlement with enough to enable me to keep a trap. Still, when one is rich, the reputation of being rich is heavily expensive; but when one is poor the reputation of being rich can be made a wealth-giving asset.

Even as I was reading these fables of my millions, there lay on the desk before me a statement of the exact posture of my affairs – a memorandum made by myself for my own eyes, and to be burned as soon as I mastered it. On the face of the figures the balance against me was appalling. My chief asset, indeed my only asset that measured up toward my debts, was my Coal stocks, those bought and those contracted for; and, while their par value far exceeded my liabilities, they had to appear in my memorandum at their actual market value on that day. I looked at the calendar – seventeen days until the reorganization scheme would be announced, only seventeen days!

Less than three business weeks, and I should be out of the storm and sailing safer and smoother seas than I had ever known. “To indulge hopes is bad,” thought I, “but not to indulge a hope, when one has only it between him and the pit.” And I proceeded to plan on the not unwarranted assumption that my coal hope was a present reality. Indeed, what alternative had I? To put it among the future’s uncertainties was to put myself among the utterly ruined. Using as collateral the Coal stocks I had bought outright, I borrowed more money, and with it went still deeper into the Coal venture.

The morality of these and many of my other doings in those days will no doubt be severely condemned. By no one more severely than by myself – now that the necessities which then compelled me have passed. There is no subject on which men talk, and think, more humbug than on that subject of morality. As a matter of fact, except in those personal relations which are governed by the affections, what is morality but the mandate of policy, and what is policy but the mandate of necessity? My criticism of Roebuck and the other “high financiers” is not upon their morality, but upon their policy, which is shortsighted and stupid and base. The moral difference between me and them is that, while I merely assert and maintain my right to live, they deny the right of any but themselves to live. I say I criticise them; but that does not mean that I sympathize with the public at large in its complainings against them. The public, its stupidity and cupidity, creates the conditions that breed and foster these men. A rotten cheese reviling the maggots it has bred!