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

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.”