The Deluge Part 31

"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 pa.s.sion 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 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 the 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 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 gla.s.s 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 that moment, _her_ side of the story.

XXVIII. BLACKLOCK SEES A LIGHT

It was next day, I think, that I met Mowbray Langdon and his brother Tom in the entrance of 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 a.s.sault 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 a.s.sault 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 att.i.tude 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 barn-yard, poisons the watch-dog, bores an auger-hole in the granary, and takes to his heels at a suspicious sound."

With his first full stop, I said: "I understand perfectly, Langdon. But I haven't the slightest interest in crooked enterprises now. I'm clear out of all you fellows' stocks. I've reinvested my property so that not even a panic would trouble me."

"That's good," he drawled. I saw he did not believe me--which was natural, as he knew nothing of my arrangement with Galloway and a.s.sumed I was laboring in heavy weather, with a bad cargo of Coal stocks and contracts.

"Come to lunch with me. I've got some interesting things to tell you about my trip."

A few months before, I should have accepted with alacrity. But I had lost interest in him. He had not changed; if anything, he was more dazzling than ever in the ways that had once dazzled me. It was I that had changed--my ideals, my point of view. I had no desire to feed my new-sprung contempt by watching him pump in vain for information to be used in his secret campaign against me. "No, thanks. Another day," I replied, and left him with a curt nod. I noted that he had failed to speak of my marriage, though he had not seen me since. "A sore subject with all the Langdons," thought I. "It must be very sore, indeed, to make a man who is all manners, neglect them."

My whole life had been a series of transformations so continuous that I had noted little about my advance, beyond its direction--like a man hurrying up a steep that keeps him bent, eyes down. But, as I turned away from Langdon, I caught myself in the very act of transformation. No doubt, the new view had long been there, its horizon expanding with every step of my ascent; but not until that talk with him did I see it. I looked about me in Wall Street; in my mind's eye I all in an instant saw my world as it really was.

I saw the great rascals of "high finance," their respectability stripped from them; saw them gathering in the spoils which their cleverly-trained agents, commercial and political and legal, filched with light fingers from the pockets of the crowd, saw the crowd looking up to these trainers and employers of pickpockets, hailing them "captains of industry"! They reaped only where and what others had sown; they touched industry only to plunder and to blight it; they organized it only that its profits might go to those who did not toil and who despised those who did. "Have I gone mad in the midst of sane men?" I asked myself. "Or have I been mad, and have I suddenly become sane in a lunatic world?"

I did not linger on that problem. For me action remained the essential of life, whether I was sane or insane. I resolved then and there to map a new course. By toiling like a sailor at the pump of a sinking ship, I had taken advantage to the uttermost of the respite Galloway's help had given me. My property was no longer in more or less insecure speculative "securities,"

but was, as I had told Langdon, in forms that would withstand the worst shocks. The attacks of my enemies, directed partly at my fortune, or, rather, at the stocks in which they imagined it was still invested, and partly at my personal character, were doing me good instead of harm. Hatred always forgets that its shafts, falling round its intended victim, spring up as legions of supporters for him. My business was growing rapidly; my daily letter to investors was read by hundreds of thousands where tens of thousands had read it before the Roebuck-Langdon clique began to make me famous by trying to make me infamous.

"I am strong and secure," said I to myself as I strode through the wonderful canyon of Broadway, whose walls are those mighty palaces of finance and commerce from which business men have been ousted by cormorant "captains of industry." I must _use_ my strength. How could I better use it than by fluttering these vultures on their roosts, and perhaps bringing down a bird or two?

I decided, however, that it was better to wait until they had stopped rattling their beaks and claws on my sh.e.l.l in futile attack. "Meanwhile," I reasoned carefully, "I can be getting good and ready."

Their first new move, after my little talk with Langdon, was intended as a mortal blow to my credit Melville requested me to withdraw mine and Blacklock and Company's accounts from the National Industrial Bank; and the fact that this huge and powerful inst.i.tution had thus branded me was slyly given to the financial reporters of the newspapers. Far and wide it was published; and the public was expected to believe that this was one more and drastic measure in the "campaign of the honorable men of finance to clean the Augean Stables of Wall Street." My daily letter to investors next morning led off with this paragraph--the first notice I had taken publicly of their attacks on me:

"In the effort to discredit the only remaining uncontrolled source of financial truth, the big bandits have ordered my accounts out of their chief gambling-house. I have transferred the accounts to the Discount and Deposit National, where Leonidas Thornley stands guard against the new order that seeks to make business a synonym for crime."

Thornley was of the type that was dominant in our commercial life before the "financiers" came--just as song birds were common in our trees until the noisy, brawling, thieving sparrows drove them out. His oldest son was about to marry Joe's daughter--Alva. Many a Sunday I have spent at his place near Morristown--a charming combination of city comfort with farm freedom and fresh air. I remember, one Sunday, saying to him, after he had seen his wife and daughters off to church: "Why haven't you got rich? Why haven't you looked out for establishing these boys and girls of yours?"

"I don't want my girls to be sought for money," said he, "I don't want my boys to rely on money. Perhaps I've seen too much of wealth, and have come to have a prejudice against it. Then, too, I've never had the chance to get rich."

I showed that I thought that he was simply jesting.

"I mean it," said he, looking at me with eyes as straight as a well-brought-up girl's. "How could my mind be judicial if I were personally interested in the enterprises people look to me for advice about?"

And not only did he keep himself clear and his mind judicial but also he was, like all really good people, exceedingly slow to believe others guilty of the things he would as soon have thought of doing as he would have thought of slipping into the teller's cage during the lunch hour and pocketing a package of bank-notes. He gave me his motto--a curious one: "Believe in everybody; trust in n.o.body."

"Only a thief wishes to be trusted," he explained, "and only a fool trusts.

I let no one trust me; I trust no one. But I believe evil of no man. Even when he has been convicted, I see the mitigating circ.u.mstances."

How Thornley did stand by me! And for no reason except that it was as necessary for him to be fair and just as to breathe. I shall not say he resisted the attempts to compel him to desert me--they simply made no impression on him. I remember, when Roebuck himself, a large stock-holder in the bank, left cover far enough personally to urge him to throw me over, he replied steadfastly: