Susan Lenox Her Fall and Rise Part 133

"It got me the money to make my first play for respectability.

I couldn't have got it any other way. I had extravagant tastes--and the leader has to be always giving up to help this fellow and that out of the hole. And I never did have luck with the cards and the horses."

"Why did you want to be respectable?" she asked.

"Because that's the best graft," explained he. "It means the most money, and the most influence. The coyotes that raid the sheep fold don't get the big share--though they may get a good deal. No, it's the shepherds and the owners that pull off the most. I've been leader of coyotes. I'm graduating into shepherd and proprietor."

"I see," said Susan. "You make it beautifully clear."

He bowed and smiled. "Thank you, kindly. Then, I'll go on.

I'm deep in the contracting business now. I've got a pot of money put away. I've cut out the cards--except a little gentlemen's game now and then, to help me on with the right kind of people. Horses, the same way. I've got my political pull copper-riveted. It's as good with the Republicans as with Democrats, and as good with the reform crowd as with either. My next move is to cut loose from the gang. I've put a lot of lieutenants between me and them, instead of dealing with them direct. I'm putting in several more fellows I'm not ashamed to be seen with in Delmonico's."

"What's become of Jim?" asked Susan.

"Dead--a kike shot him all to pieces in a joint in Seventh Avenue about a month ago. As I was saying, how do these big multi-millionaires do the trick? They don't tell somebody to go steal what they happen to want. They tell somebody they want it, and that somebody else tells somebody else to get it, and that somebody else pa.s.ses the word along until it reaches the poor devils who must steal it or lose their jobs. I studied it all out, and I've framed up my game the same way.

Nowadays, every dollar that comes to me has been thoroughly cleaned long before it drops into my pocket. But you're wondering where _you_ come in."

"Women are only interested in what's coming to them," said Susan.

"Sensible men are the same way. The men who aren't--they work for wages and salaries. If you're going to live off of other people, as women and the rich do, you've got to stand steady, day and night, for Number One. And now, here's where _you_ come in. You've no objection to being respectable?"

"I've no objection to not being disreputable."

"That's the right way to put it," he promptly agreed.

"Respectable, you know, doesn't mean anything but appearances.

People who are really respectable, who let it strike in, instead of keeping it on the outside where it belongs--they soon get poor and drop down and out."

Palmer's revelation of himself and of a philosophy which life as it had revealed itself to her was incessantly urging her to adopt so grappled her attention that she altogether forgot herself. A man on his way to the scaffold who suddenly sees and feels a cataclysm rocking the world about him forgets his own plight. Unconsciously he was epitomizing, unconsciously she was learning, the whole story of the progress of the race upward from beast toward intellect--the brutal and b.l.o.o.d.y building of the highway from the caves of darkness toward the peaks of light. The source from which springs, and ever has sprung, the cruelty of man toward man is the struggle of the ambition of the few who see and insist upon better conditions, with the inertia and incompetence of the many who have little sight and less imagination. Ambition must use the inert ma.s.s--must persuade it, if possible, must compel it by trick or force if persuasion fails. But Palmer and Susan Lenox were, naturally, not seeing the thing in the broad but only as it applied to themselves.

"I've read a whole lot of history and biography," Freddie went on, "and I've thought about what I read and about what's going on around me. I tell you the world's full of cant. The people who get there don't act on what is always preached.

The preaching isn't all lies--at least, I think not. But it doesn't fit the facts a man or a woman has got to meet."

"I realized that long ago," said Susan.

"There's a saying that you can't touch pitch without being defiled. Well--you can't build without touching pitch--at least not in a world where money's king and where those with brains have to live off of those without brains by making 'em work and showing 'em what to work at. It's a h.e.l.l of a world, but _I_ didn't get it up."

"And we've got to live in it," said she, "and get out of it the things we want and need."

"That's the talk!" cried Palmer. "I see you're 'on.' Now--to make a long story short--you and I can get what we want. We can help each other. You were better born than I am--you've had a better training in manners and dress and all the cla.s.sy sort of things. I've got the money--and brains enough to learn with--and I can help you in various ways. So--I propose that we go up together."

"We've got--pasts," said Susan.

"Who hasn't that amounts to anything? Mighty few. No one that's made his own pile, I'll bet you. I'm in a position to do favors for people--the people we'd need. And I'll get in a position to do more and more. As long as they can make something out of us--or hope to--do you suppose they'll nose into our pasts and root things up that'd injure them as much as us?"

"It would be an interesting game, wouldn't it?" said Susan.

She was reflectively observing the handsome, earnest face before her--an incarnation of intelligent ambition, a Freddie Palmer who was somehow divesting himself of himself--was growing up--away from the rotten soil that had nourished him--up into the air--was growing strongly--yes, splendidly!

"And we've got everything to gain and nothing to lose,"

pursued he. "We'd not be adventurers, you see. Adventurers are people who haven't any money and are looking round to try to steal it. We'd have money. So, we'd be building solid, right on the rock." The handsome young man--the strongest, the most intelligent, the most purposeful she had ever met, except possibly Brent--looked at her with an admiring tenderness that moved her, the forlorn derelict adrift on the vast, lonely, treacherous sea. "The reason I've waited for you to invite you in on this scheme is that I tried you out and I found that you belong to the mighty few people who do what they say they'll do, good bargain or bad. It'd never occur to you to shuffle out of trying to keep your word."

"It hasn't--so far," said Susan.

"Well--that's the only sort of thing worth talking about as morality. Believe me, for I've been through the whole game from chimney pots to cellar floor."

"There's another thing, too," said the girl.

"What's that?"

"Not to injure anyone else."

Palmer shook his head positively. "It's believing that and acting on it that has kept you down in spite of your brains and looks."

"That I shall never do," said the girl. "It may be weakness--I guess it is weakness. But--I draw the line there."

"But I'm not proposing that you injure anyone--or proposing to do it myself. As I said, I've got up where I can afford to be good and kind and all that. And I'm willing to jump you up over the stretch of the climb that can't be crossed without being--well, anything but good and kind."

She was reflecting.

"You'll never get over that stretch by yourself. It'll always turn you back."

"Just what do you propose?" she asked.

It gave her pleasure to see the keen delight her question, with its implication of hope, aroused in him. Said he:

"That we go to Europe together and stay over there several years--as long as you like as long as it's necessary. Stay till our pasts have disappeared--work ourselves in with the right sort of people. You say you're not married?"

"Not to the man I'm with."

"To somebody else?"

"I don't know. I was."

"Well--that'll be looked into and straightened out. And then we'll quietly marry."

Susan laughed. "You're too fast," said she. "I'll admit I'm interested. I've been looking for a road--one that doesn't lead toward where we've come from. And this is the first road that has offered. But I haven't agreed to go in with you yet--haven't even begun to think it over. And if I did agree--which I probably won't--why, still I'd not be willing to marry. That's a serious matter. I'd want to be very, very sure I was satisfied."

Palmer nodded, with a return of the look of admiration. "I understand. You don't promise until you intend to stick, and once you've promised all h.e.l.l couldn't change you."

"Another thing--very unfortunate, too. It looks to me as if I'd be dependent on you for money."

Freddie's eyes wavered. "Oh, we'd never quarrel about that,"

said he with an attempt at careless confidence.

"No," replied she quietly. "For the best of reasons. I'd not consider going into any arrangement where I'd be dependent on a man for money. I've had my experience. I've learned my lesson. If I lived with you several years in the sort of style you've suggested--no, not several years but a few months--you'd have me absolutely at your mercy. You'd thought of that, hadn't you?"

His smile was confession.

"I'd develop tastes for luxuries and they'd become necessities." Susan shook her head. "No--that would be foolish--very foolish."