Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 6, July 1905

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.