The Deluge Part 14

"Won't you give us tea, mother?" said Anita, on her surface not a trace of the cyclone that must still have been raging hi her.

"Congratulate me, Mrs. Ellersly," said I. "Your daughter has consented to marry me."

Instead of speaking, Mrs. Ellersly began to cry--real tears. And for a moment I thought there was a real heart inside of her somewhere. But when she spoke, that delusion vanished.

"You must forgive me, Mr. Blacklock," she said in her hard, smooth, politic voice. "It is the shock of realizing I'm about to lose my daughter." And I knew that her tears were from joy and relief--Anita had "come up to the scratch;" the hideous menace of "genteel poverty" had been averted.

"Do give us tea, mama," said Anita. Her cold, sarcastic tone cut my nerves and her mother's like a razor blade. I looked sharply at her, and wondered whether I was not making a bargain vastly different from that my pa.s.sion was picturing.

XV. SOME STRANGE LAPSES OF A LOVER

But before there was time for me to get a distinct impression, that ugly shape of cynicism had disappeared.

"It was a shadow I myself cast upon her," I a.s.sured myself; and once more she seemed to me like a clear, calm lake of melted snow from the mountains.

"I can see to the pure white sand of the very bottom," thought I. Mystery there was, but only the mystery of wonder at the apparition of such beauty and purity in such a world as mine. True, from time to time, there showed at the surface or vaguely outlined in the depths, forms strangely out of place in those unsullied waters. But I either refused to see or refused to trust my senses. I had a fixed ideal of what a woman should be; this girl embodied that ideal.

"If you'd only give up your cigarettes," I remember saying to her when we were a little better acquainted, "you'd be perfect."

She made an impatient gesture. "Don't!" she commanded almost angrily. "You make me feel like a hypocrite. You tempt me to be a hypocrite. Why not be content with woman as she is--a human being? And--how could I--any woman not an idiot--be alive for twenty-five years without learning--a thing or two? Why should any man want it?"

"Because to know is to be spattered and stained," said I. "I get enough of people who know, down-town. Up-town--I want a change of air. Of course, you think you know the world, but you haven't the remotest conception of what it's really like. Sometimes when I'm with you, I begin to feel mean and--and unclean. And the feeling grows on me until it's all I can do to restrain myself from rushing away."

She looked at me critically.

"You've never had much to do with women, have you?" she finally said slowly in a musing tone.

"I wish that were true--almost," replied I, on my mettle as a man, and resisting not without effort the impulse to make some vague "confessions"--boastings disguised as penitential admissions--after the customary masculine fashion.

She smiled--and one of those disquieting shapes seemed to me to be floating lazily and repellently downward, out of sight. "A man and a woman can be a great deal to each other, I believe," said she; "can be--married, and all that--and remain as strange to each other as if they had never met--more hopelessly strangers."

"There's always a sort of mystery," I conceded. "I suppose that's one of the things that keep married people interested."

She shrugged her shoulders--she was in evening dress, I recall, and there was on her white skin that intense, transparent, bluish tinge one sees on the new snow when the sun comes out.

"Mystery!" she said impatiently. "There's no mystery except what we ourselves make. It's useless--perfectly useless," she went on absently.

"You're the sort of man who, if a woman cared for him, or even showed friendship for him by being frank and human and natural with him, he'd punish her for it by--by despising her."

I smiled, much as one smiles at the efforts of a precocious child to prove that it is a Methuselah in experience.

"If you weren't like an angel in comparison with the others I've known,"

said I, "do you suppose I could care for you as I do?"

I saw my remark irritated her, and I fancied it was her vanity that was offended by my disbelief in her knowledge of life. I hadn't a suspicion that I had hurt and alienated her by slamming in her very face the door of friendship and frankness her honesty was forcing her to try to open for me.

In my stupidity of imagining her not human like the other women and the men I had known, but a creature apart and in a cla.s.s apart, I stood day after day gaping at that very door, and wondering how I could open it, how penetrate even to the courtyard of that vestal citadel. So long as my old-fashioned belief that good women were more than human and bad women less than human had influenced me only to a sharper lookout in dealing with the one species of woman I then came in contact with, no harm to me resulted, but on the contrary good--whoever got into trouble through walking the world with sword and sword arm free? But when, under the spell of Anita Ellersly, I dragged the "superhuman goodness" part of my theory down out of the clouds and made it my guardian and guide--really, it's a miracle that I escaped from the pit into which that lunacy pitched me headlong. I was not content with idealizing only her; I went on to seeing good, and only good, in everybody! The millennium was at hand; all Wall Street was my friend; whatever I wanted would happen. And when Roebuck, with an air like a benediction from a bishop backed by a cathedral organ and full choir, gave me the tip to buy coal stocks, I canonized him on the spot. Never did a Jersey "jay" in Sunday clothes and tallowed boots respond to a bunco steerer's greeting with a gladder smile than mine to that pious old past-master of craft.

I will say, in justice to myself, though it is also in excuse, that if I had known him intimately a few years earlier, I should have found it all but impossible to fool myself. For he had not long been in a position where he could keep wholly detached from the crimes committed for his benefit and by his order, and where he could disclaim responsibility and even knowledge. The great lawyers of the country have been most ingenious in developing corporate law in the direction of making the corporation a complete and secure shield between the beneficiary of a crime and its consequences; but before a great financier can use this shield perfectly, he must build up a system--he must find lieutenants with the necessary coolness, courage and cunning; he must teach them to understand his hints; he must educate them, not to point out to him the disagreeable things involved in his orders, but to execute unquestioningly, to efface completely the trail between him and them, whether or not they succeed in covering the roundabout and faint trail between themselves and the tools that nominally commit the crimes.

As nearly as I can get at it, when Roebuck was luring me into National Coal he had not for nine years been open to attack, but had so far hedged himself in that, had his closest lieutenants been trapped and frightened into "squealing," he would not have been involved; without fear of exposure and with a clear conscience he could--and would!--have joined in the denunciation of the man who had been caught, and could--and would!--have helped send him to the penitentiary or to the scaffold. With the security of an honest man and the serenity of a Christian he planned his colossal thefts and reaped their benefits; and whenever he was accused, he could have explained everything, could have got his accuser's sympathy and admiration. I say, could have explained; but he would not. Early in his career, he had learned the first principle of successful crime--silence. No matter what the provocation or the seeming advantage, he uttered only a few generous general phrases, such as "those misguided men," or "the Master teaches us to bear with meekness the calumnies of the wicked," or "let him that is without sin cast the first stone." As to the crime itself--silence, and the dividends.

A great man, Roebuck! I doff my hat to him. Of all the dealers in stolen goods under police protection, who so shrewd as he?

Wilmot was the instrument he employed to put the coal industry into condition for "reorganization." He bought control of one of the coal railroads and made Wilmot president of it. Wilmot, taught by twenty years of his service, knew what was expected of him, and proceeded to do it. He put in a "loyal" general freight agent who also needed no instructions, but busied himself at destroying his own and all the other coal roads by a system of secret rebates and rate cuttings. As the other roads, one by one, descended toward bankruptcy, Roebuck bought the comparatively small blocks of stock necessary to give him control of them. When he had power over enough of them to establish a partial monopoly of transportation in and out of the coal districts, he was ready for his lieutenant to attack the mining properties. Probably his orders to Wilmot were nothing more definite or less innocent than: "Wilmot, my boy, don't you think you and I and some others of our friends ought to buy some of those mines, if they come on the market at a fair price? Let me know when you hear of any attractive investments of that sort."

That would have been quite enough to "tip it off" to Wilmot that the time had come for reaching out from control of railway to control of mine. He lost no time; he easily forced one mining property after another into a position where its owners were glad--were eager--to sell all or part of the wreck of it "at a fair price" to him and Roebuck and "our friends." It was as the result of one of these moves that the great Manasquale mines were so hemmed in by ruinous freight rates, by strike troubles, by floods from broken machinery and mysteriously leaky dams, that I was able to buy them "at a fair price"--that is, at less than one-fifth their value. But at the time--and for a long time afterward--I did not know, on my honor did not suspect, what was the cause, the sole cause, of the change of the coal region from a place of peaceful industry, content with fair profits, to an industrial chaos with ruin impending.

Once the railways and mining companies were all on the verge of bankruptcy, Roebuck and his "friends" were ready to buy, here control for purposes of speculation, there ownership for purposes of permanent investment. This is what is known as the reorganizing stage. The processes of high finance are very simple--first, buy the comparatively small holdings necessary to create confusion and disaster; second, create confusion and disaster, buying up more and more wreckage; third, reorganize; fourth, offer the new stocks and bonds to the public with a mighty blare of trumpets which produces a boom market; fifth, unload on the public, pa.s.s dividends, issue unfavorable statements, depress prices, buy back cheap what you have sold dear. Repeat ad infinitum, for the law is for the laughter of the strong, and the public is an eager a.s.s. To keep up the fiction of "respectability,"

the inside ring divides into two parties for its campaigns--one party to break down, the other to build up. One takes the profits from destruction and departs, perhaps to construct elsewhere; the other takes the profits from construction and departs, perhaps to destroy elsewhere. As their collusion is merely tacit, no conscience need twitch. I must add that, at the time of which I am writing, I did not realize the existence of this conspiracy. I knew, of course, that many lawless and savage things were done, that there were rascals among the high financiers, and that almost all financiers now and then did things that were more or less rascally; but I did not know, did not suspect, that high finance was through and through brigandage, and that the high financier, by long and unmolested practice of brigandage, had come to look on it as legitimate, lawful business, and on laws forbidding or hampering it as outrageous, socialistic, anarchistic, "attacks upon the social order!"

I was sufficiently infected with the spirit of the financier, I frankly confess, to look on the public as a sort of cow to milk and send out to gra.s.s that it might get itself ready to be driven in and milked again. Does not the cow produce milk not for her own use but for the use of him who looks after her, provides her with pasturage and shelter and saves her from the calamities in which her lack of foresight and of other intelligence would involve her, were she not looked after? And is not the fact that the public--beg pardon, the cow--meekly and even cheerfully submits to the milking proof that G.o.d intended her to be the servant of the Roebucks--beg pardon again, of man?

Plausible, isn't it?

Roebuck had given me the impression that it would be six months, at least, before what I was in those fatuous days thinking of as "_our_" plan for "putting the coal industry on a sound business basis" would be ready for the public. So, when he sent for me shortly after I became engaged to Miss Ellersly, and said: "Melville will publish the plan on the first of next month and will open the subscription books on the third--a Thursday,"

I was taken by surprise and was anything but pleased. His words meant that, if I wished to make a great fortune, now was the time to buy coal stocks, and buy heavily--for on the very day of the publication of the plan every coal stock would surely soar. Buy I must; not to buy was to throw away a fortune. Yet how could I buy when I was gambling in Textile up to my limit of safety, if not beyond?

I did not dare confess to Roebuck what I was doing in Textile. He was bitterly opposed to stock gambling, denouncing it as both immoral and unbusinesslike. No gambling for him! When his business sagacity and foresight(?) informed him a certain stock was going to be worth a great deal more than it was then quoted at, he would buy outright in large quant.i.ties; when that same sagacity and foresight of the fellow who has himself marked the cards warned him that a stock was about to fall, he sold outright. But gamble--never! And I felt that, if he should learn that I had staked a large part of my entire fortune on a single gambling operation, he would straightway cut me off from his confidence, would look on me as too deeply tainted by my long career as a "bucket-shop" man to be worthy of full rank and power as a financier. Financiers do not gamble. Their only vice is grand larceny.

All this was flashing through my mind while I was thanking him.

"I am glad to have such a long forewarning," I was saying. "Can I be of use to you? You know my machinery is perfect--I can buy anything and in any quant.i.ty without starting rumors and drawing the crowd."

"No thank you, Matthew," was his answer. "I have all of those stocks I wish--at present."

Whether it is peculiar to me, I don't know--probably not--but my memory is so const.i.tuted that it takes an indelible and complete impression of whatever is sent to it by my eyes and ears; and just as by looking closely you can find in a photographic plate a hundred details that escape your glance, so on those memory plates of mine I often find long afterward many and many a detail that escaped me when my eyes and ears were taking the impression. On my memory plate of that moment in my interview with Roebuck, I find details so significant that my failing to note them at the time shows how unfit I then was to guard my interests. For instance, I find that just before he spoke those words declining my a.s.sistance and implying that he had already increased his holdings, he opened and closed his hands several times, finally closed and clinched them--a sure sign of energetic nervous action, and in that particular instance a sign of deception, because there was no energy in his remark and no reason for energy. I am not superst.i.tious, but I believe in palmistry to a certain extent. Even more than the face are the hands a sensitive recorder of what is pa.s.sing in the mind.

But I was then too intent upon my dilemma carefully to study a man who had already lulled me into absolute confidence in him. I left him as soon as he would let me go. His last words were, "No gambling, Matthew! No abuse of the opportunity G.o.d is giving us. Be content with the just profits from investment. I have seen gamblers come and go, many of them able men--very able men. But they have melted away, and where are they? And I have remained and have increased, blessed be G.o.d who has saved me from the temptations to try to reap where I had not sown! I feel that I can trust you. You began as a speculator, but success has steadied you, and you have put yourself on the firm ground where we see the solid men into whose hands G.o.d has given the development of the abounding resources of this beloved country of ours."

Do you wonder that I went away with a heart full of shame for the gambling projects my head was planning upon the information that good man had given me?

I shut myself in my private office for several hours of hard thinking--as I can now see, the first real attention I had given my business in two months. It soon became clear enough that my Textile plunge was a folly; but it was too late to retrace. The only question was, could and should I a.s.sume additional burdens? I looked at the National Coal problem from every standpoint--so I thought. And I could see no possible risk. Did not Roebuck's statement make it certain as sunrise that, as soon as the reorganization was announced, all coal stocks would rise? Yes, I should be risking nothing; I could with absolute safety stake my credit; to make contracts to buy coal stocks at present prices for future delivery was no more of a gamble than depositing cash in the United States Treasury.

"You've gone back to gambling lately, Matt," said I to myself. "You've been on a bender, with your head afire. You must get out of this Textile business as soon as possible. But it's good sound sense to plunge on the coal stocks. In fact, your profits there would save you if by some mischance Textile should rise instead of fall. Acting on Roebuck's tip isn't gambling, it's insurance."

I emerged to issue orders that soon threw into the National Coal venture all I had not staked on a falling market for Textiles. I was not content--as the pious gambling-hater, Roebuck, had begged me to be--with buying only what stock I could pay for; I went plunging on, contracting for many times the amount I could have bought outright.

The next time I saw Langdon I was full of enthusiasm for Roebuck. I can see his smile as he listened.

"I had no idea you were an expert on the trumpets of praise, Blacklock,"

said he finally. "A very showy accomplishment," he added, "but rather dangerous, don't you think? The player may become enchanted by his own music."

"I try to look on the bright side of things." said I, "even of human nature."

"Since when?" drawled he.