The Deluge Part 6

"The job's out of my line," he protested.

"I know better," said I. "I've always seen the parlor under the stable in you. We'll begin right away. What do you think of these clothes?"

"Well--they're not exactly noisy," he said. "But--they're far from silent.

That waistcoat--" He stopped and gave me another nervous, timid look. He found it hard to believe a man of my sort, so self-a.s.sured, would stand the truth from a man of his second-fiddle sort.

"Go on!" I commanded. "Speak out! Mowbray Langdon had on one twice as loud the other day at the track."

"But, perhaps you'll remember, it was only his waistcoat that was loud--not he himself. Now, a man of your manner and voice and--you've got a look out of the eyes that'd wake the dead all by itself. People can feel you coming before they hear you. When they feel and hear and see all together--it's like a bra.s.s band in scarlet uniform, with a seven-foot, sky-blue drum major. If your hair wasn't so black and your eyes so steel-blue and sharp, and your teeth so big and strong and white, and your jaw such a--such a--_jaw_--"

"I see the point," said I. And I did. "You'll find you won't need to tell me many things twice. I've got a busy day before me here; so we'll have to suspend this until you come to dine with me at eight--at my rooms.

I want you to put in the time well. Go to my house in the country and then up to my apartment; take my valet with you; look through all my belongings--shirts, ties, socks, trousers, waistcoats, clothes of every kind. Throw out every rag you think doesn't fit in with what I want to be.

How's my grammar?"

I was proud of it; I had been taking more or less pains with my mode of speech for a dozen years. "Rather too good," said he. "But that's better than making the breaks that aren't regarded as good form."

"Good form!" I exclaimed. "That's it! That's what I want! What does 'good form' mean?"

He laughed. "You can search me," said he. "I could easier tell you--anything else. It's what everybody recognizes on sight, and n.o.body knows how to describe. It's like the difference between a cultivated 'jimson' weed and a wild one."

"Like the difference between Mowbray Langdon and me," I suggested good-naturedly. "How about my manners?"

"Not so bad," said he. "Not so rotten bad. But--when you're polite, you're a little too polite; when you're not polite, you--"

"Show where I came from too plainly?" said I. "Speak right out--hit good and hard. Am I too frank for 'good form'?"

"You needn't bother about that," he a.s.sured me. "Say whatever comes into your head--only, be sure the right sort of thing comes into your head.

Don't talk too much about yourself, for instance. It's good form to think about yourself all the time; it's bad form to let people see it--in your talk. Say as little as possible about your business and about what you've got. Don't be lavish with the I's and the my's."

"That's harder," said I. "I'm a man who has always minded his own business, and cared for nothing else. What could I talk about, except myself?"

"Blest if I know," replied he. "Where you want to go, the last thing people mind is their own business--in talk, at least. But you'll get on all right if you don't worry too much about it. You've got natural independence, and an original way of putting things, and common sense. Don't be afraid."

"Afraid!" said I. "I never knew what it was to be afraid."

"Your nerve'll carry you through," he a.s.sured me. "Nerve'll take a man anywhere."

"You never said a truer thing in your life," said I. "It'll take him wherever he wants, and, after he's there, it'll get him whatever he wants."

And with that, I, thinking of my plans and of how sure I was of success, began to march up and down the office with my chest thrown out--until I caught myself at it. That stopped me, set me off in a laugh at my own expense, he joining in with a kind of heartiness I did not like, though I did not venture to check him.

So ended the first lesson--the first of a long series. I soon saw that Monson was being most useful to me--far more useful than if he were a "perfect gentleman" with nothing of the track and stable and back stairs about him. Being a sort of betwixt and between, he could appreciate my needs as they could not have been appreciated by a fellow who had never lived in the rough-and-tumble I had fought my way up through. And being at bottom a real gentleman, and not one of those nervous, sn.o.bbish make-believes, he wasn't so busy trying to hide his own deficiencies from me that he couldn't teach me anything. He wasn't afraid of being found out, as Sam--or perhaps, even Langdon--would have been in the same circ.u.mstances. I wonder if there is another country where so many gentlemen and ladies are born, or another where so many of them have their natural gentility educated out of them.

VIII. ON THE TRAIL OF LANGDON

I had Monson with me twice each week-day--early in the morning and again after business hours until bed-time. Also he spent the whole of every Sat.u.r.day and Sunday with me. He developed astonishing dexterity as a teacher, and as soon as he realized that I had no false pride and was thoroughly in earnest, he handled me without gloves--like a boxing teacher who finds that his pupil has the grit of a professional. It was easy enough for me to grasp the theory of my new business--it was nothing more than "Be natural." But the rub came in making myself naturally of the right sort.

I had--as I suppose every man of intelligence and decent instincts has--a disposition to be friendly and simple. But my manner was by nature what you might call abrupt. My not very easy task was to learn the subtle difference between the abrupt that injects a tonic into social intercourse, and the abrupt that makes the other person shut up with a feeling of having been insulted.

Then, there was the matter of good taste in conversation. Monson found, as I soon saw, that my everlasting self-a.s.sertiveness was beyond cure. As I said to him: "I'm afraid you might easier succeed in reducing my chest measure." But we worked away at it, and perhaps my readers may discover even in this narrative, though it is necessarily egotistic, evidence of at least an honest effort not to be baldly boastful. Monson would have liked to make of me a self-deprecating sort of person--such as he was himself, with the result that the other fellow always got the prize and he got left.

But I would have none of it.

"How are people to know about you, if you don't tell 'em?" I argued. "Don't you yourself admit that men take a man at his own valuation less a slight discount, and that women take him at his own valuation plus an allowance for his supposed modesty?"

"Cracking yourself up is vulgar, nevertheless," declared the Englishman.

"It's the chief reason why we on the other side look on you Americans as a lot of vulgarians--"

"And are in awe of our superior cleverness," I put in.

He laughed.

"Well, do the best you can," said he. "Only, you really must not brag and swagger, and you must get out of the habit of talking louder than any one else."

In the matter of dress, our task was easy. I had a fancy for bright colors and for strong contrasts; but I know I never indulged in clashes and discords. It was simply that in clothes I had the same taste as in pictures--the taste that made me prefer Rubens to Rembrandt. We cast out of my wardrobe everything in the least doubtful; and I gave away my jeweled canes, my pins and links and b.u.t.tons for shirts and waistcoats except plain gold and pearls. I even left off the magnificent diamond I had worn for years on my little finger--but I didn't give away that stone; I put it by for resetting into an engagement ring. However, when I was as quietly dressed as it was possible for a gentleman to be, he still studied me dubiously, when he thought I wasn't seeing him. And I recall that he said once: "It's your face, Blacklock. If you could only manage to look less like a Spanish bull dashing into the ring, gazing joyfully about for somebody to gore and toss!"

"But I can't," said I. "And I wouldn't if I could--because that's _me_!"

One Sat.u.r.day he brought a dancing master down to my country place--Dawn Hill, which I bought of the Dumont estate and completely remodeled. I saw what the man's business was the instant I looked at him. I left him in the hall and took Monson into my den.

"Not for me!" I protested. "There's where I draw the line."

"You don't understand," he urged. "This fellow, this Alphonse Lynch, out in the hall there, isn't going to teach you dancing so that you may dance, but so that you shall be less awkward in strange company."

"My walk suits me," said I. "And I don't fall over furniture or trip people up."

"True enough," he answered. "But you haven't the complete control of your body that'll make you unconscious of it when you're suddenly shot by a butler into a room full of people you suspect of being unfriendly and critical."

Not until he used his authority as trainer-in-full-charge, did I yield. It may seem absurd to some for a serious man like me solemnly to caper about in imitation of a sc.r.a.ping, grimacing French-Irishman; but Monson was right, and I haven't in the least minded the ridicule he has brought on me by tattling this and the other things everywhere, since he turned against me. It's nothing new under the sun for the crowds of chuckleheads to laugh where they ought to applaud; their habit is to laugh and to applaud in the wrong places. There's no part of my career that I'm prouder of than the whole of this thorough course of education in the trifles that are yet not trifles. To have been ignorant is no disgrace; the disgrace comes when one persists in ignorance and glories in it.

Yet those who make the most pretensions in this topsy-turvy of a world regard it as a disgrace to have been obscure and ignorant, and pride themselves upon their persistence in their own kind of obscurity and ignorance! No wonder the few strong men do about as they please with such a race of nincomp.o.o.pery. If they didn't grow old and tired, what would they not do?

All this time I was giving myself--or thought I was giving myself--chiefly to my business, as usual. I know now that the new interests had in fact crowded the things down town far into the background, had impaired my judgment, had suspended my common sense; but I had no inkling of this then, The most important matter that was occupying me down town was pushing Textile up toward par. Langdon's doubts, little though they influenced me, still made enough of an impression to cause me to test the market. I sold for him at ninety, as he had directed; I sold in quant.i.ty every day. But no matter how much I unloaded, the price showed no tendency to break.

"This," said I to myself, "is a testimonial to the skill with which I prepared for my bull campaign." And that seemed to me--all unsuspicious as I then was--a sufficient explanation of the steadiness of the stock which I had worked to establish in the public confidence.

I felt that, if my matrimonial plans should turn out as I confidently expected, I should need a much larger fortune than I had--for I was determined that my wife should have an establishment second to none.

Accordingly, I enlarged my original plan. I had intended to keep close to Langdon in that plunge; I believed I controlled the market, but I hadn't been in Wall Street twenty years without learning that the worst thunderbolts fall from cloudless skies. Without being in the least suspicious of Langdon, and simply acting on the general principle that surprise and treachery are part of the code of high finance, I had prepared to guard, first, against being taken in the rear by a secret change of plan on Langdon's part, and second, against being involved and overwhelmed by a sudden secret attack on him from some a.s.sociate of his who might think he had laid himself open to successful raiding.

The market is especially dangerous toward Christmas and in the spring--toward Christmas the big fellows often juggle the stocks to get the money for their big Christmas gifts and alms; toward spring the motive is, of course, the extra summer expenses of their families and the commencement gifts to colleges. It was now late in the spring.

I say, I had intended to be cautious. I abandoned caution and rushed in boldly, feeling that the market was, in general, safe and that Textile was under my control--and that I was one of the kings of high finance, with my lucky star in the zenith. I decided to continue my bull campaign on my own account for two weeks after I had unloaded for Langdon, to continue it until the stock was at par. I had no difficulty in pushing it to ninety-seven, and I was not alarmed when I found myself loaded up with it, quoted at ninety-eight for the preferred and thirty for the common. I a.s.sumed that I was practically its only supporter and that it would slowly settle back as I slowly withdrew my support.

To my surprise, the stock did not yield immediately under my efforts to depress it. I sold more heavily; Textile continued to show a tendency to rise. I sold still more heavily; it broke a point or two, then steadied and rose again. Instead of sending out along my secret lines for inside information, as I should have done, and would have done had I not been in a state of hypnotized judgment--I went to Langdon! I who had been studying those scoundrels for twenty-odd years, and dealing directly with and for them for ten years!

He wasn't at his office; they told me there that they didn't know whether he was at his town house or at his place in the country--"probably in the country," said his down-town secretary, with elaborate carelessness. "He wouldn't be likely to stay away from the office or not to send for me, if he were in town, would he?"