The Deluge Part 8

"I'd like to get my holdings back," said he. "I can't buy until it's down.

And I know none of my people would dare support it."

You will notice he did not say directly that he was not himself supporting the market; he simply so answered me that I, not suspecting him, would think he rea.s.sured me. There is another of those mysteries of conscience.

Had it been necessary, Langdon would have told me the lie flat and direct, would have told it without a tremor of the voice or a blink of the eye, would have lied to me as I have heard him, and almost all the big fellows, lie under oath before courts and legislative committees; yet, so long as it was possible, he would thus lie to me with lies that were not lies. As if negative lies are not falser and more cowardly than positive lies, because securer and more deceptive.

"Well, then, the price must break," said I, "It won't be many days before the public begins to realize that there isn't anybody under Textile."

"No sharp break!" he said carelessly. "No panic!"

"I'll see to that," replied I, with not a shadow of a notion of the subtlety behind his warning.

"I hope it will break soon," he then said, adding in his friendliest voice with what I now know was malignant treachery: "You owe it to me to bring it down." That meant that he wished me to increase my already far too heavy and dangerous line of shorts.

Just then a voice--a woman's voice--came from the salon. "May I come in? Do I interrupt?" it said, and its tone struck me as having in it something of plaintive appeal.

"Excuse me a moment, Blacklock," said he, rising with what was for him haste.

But he was too late. The woman entered, searching the room with a piercing, suspicious gaze. At once I saw, behind that look, a jealousy that pounced on every object that came into its view, and studied it with a hope that feared and a fear that hoped. When her eyes had toured the room, they paused upon him, seemed to be saying: "You've baffled me again, but I'm not discouraged. I shall catch you yet."

"Well, my dear?" said Langdon, whom she seemed faintly to amuse. "It's only Mr. Blacklock. Mr. Blacklock, my wife."

I bowed; she looked coldly at me, and her slight nod was more than a hint that she wished to be left alone with her husband.

I said to him: "Well, I'll be off. Thank you for--"

"One moment," he interrupted. Then to his wife: "Anything special?"

She flushed. "No--nothing special. I just came to see you. But if I am disturbing you--as usual--"

"Not at all," said he. "When Blacklock and I have finished, I'll come to you. It won't be longer than an hour--or so."

"Is that all?" she said almost savagely. Evidently she was one of those women who dare not make "scenes" with their husbands in private and so are compelled to take advantage of the presence of strangers to ease their minds. She was an extremely pretty woman, would have been beautiful but for the worn, strained, nervous look that probably came from her jealousy. She was small in stature; her figure was approaching that stage at which a woman is called "well rounded" by the charitable, fat by the frank and accurate. A few years more and she would be hunting down and destroying early photographs. There was in the arrangement of her hair and in the details of her toilet--as well as in her giving way to her tendency to fat--that carelessness that so many women allow themselves, once they are safely married to a man they care for.

"Curious," thought I, "that being married to him should make her feel secure enough of him to let herself go, although her instinct is warning her all the time that she isn't in the least sure of him. Her laziness must be stronger than her love--her laziness or her vanity."

While I was thus sizing her up, she was reluctantly leaving. She didn't even give me the courtesy of a bow--whether from self-absorption or from haughtiness I don't know; probably from both. She was a Western woman, and when those Western women do become perverts to New York's gospel of sn.o.bbishness, they are the worst sn.o.bs in the push. Langdon, regardless of my presence, looked after her with a faintly amused, faintly contemptuous expression that--well, it didn't fit in with _my_ notion of what const.i.tutes a gentleman. In fact, I didn't know which of them had come off the worse in that brief encounter in my presence. It was my first glimpse of a fashionable behind-the-scenes, and it made a profound impression upon me--an impression that has grown deeper as I have learned how much of the typical there was in it. Dirt looks worse in the midst of finery than where one naturally expects to find it--looks worse, and is worse.

When we were seated again, Langdon, after a few reflective puffs at his cigarette, said: "So you're about to marry?"

"I hope so," said I. "But as I haven't asked her yet, I can't be quite sure." For obvious reasons I wasn't so enamored of the idea of matrimony as I had been a few minutes before.

"I trust you're making a sensible marriage," said he. "If the part that may be glamour should by chance rub clean away, there ought to be something to make one feel he wasn't wholly an a.s.s."

"Very sensible," I replied with emphasis. "I want the woman. I need her."

He inspected the coal of his cigarette, lifting his eyebrows at it.

Presently he said: "And she?"

"I don't know how she feels about it--as I told you," I replied curtly. In spite of myself, my eyes shifted and my skin began to burn. "By the way, Langdon, what's the name of your architect?"

"Wilder and Marcy," said he. "They're fairly satisfactory, if you tell 'em exactly what you want and watch 'em all the time. They're perfectly conventional and so can't distinguish between originality that's artistic and originality that's only bizarre. They're like most people--they keep to the beaten track and fight tooth and nail against being drawn out of it and against those who do go out of it."

"I'll have a talk with Marcy this very day," said I.

"Oh, you're in a hurry!" He laughed. "And you haven't asked her. You remind me of that Greek philosopher who was in love with Lais. They asked him: 'But does she love you?' And he said: 'One does not inquire of the fish one likes whether it likes one.'"

I flushed. "You'll pardon me, Langdon," said I, "but I don't like that. It isn't my att.i.tude at all toward--the right sort of women."

He looked half-quizzical, half-apologetic. "Ah, to be sure," said he. "I forgot you weren't a married man."

"I don't think I'll ever lose the belief that there's a quality in a good woman for a man to--to respect and look up to."

"I envy you," said he, but his eyes were mocking still. I saw he was a little disdainful of my rebuking _him_--and angry at me, too.

"Woman's a subject of conversation that men ought to avoid," said I easily--for, having set myself right, I felt I could afford to smooth him down.

"Well, good-by--good luck--or, if I may be permitted to say it to one so touchy, the kind of luck you're bent on having, whether it's good or bad."

"If my luck ain't good, I'll make it good," said I with a laugh.

And so I left him, with a look in his eyes that came back to me long afterward when I realized the full meaning of that apparently almost commonplace interview.

That same day I began to plunge on Textile, watching the market closely, that I might go more slowly should there be signs of a dangerous break--for no more than Langdon did I want a sudden panicky slump. The price held steady, however; but I, fool that I was, certain the fall must come, plunged on, digging the pit for my own destruction deeper and deeper.

X. TWO "PILLARS OF SOCIETY"

I was neither seeing nor hearing from the Ellerslys, father or son; but, as I knew why, I was not disquieted. I had made them temporarily easy in their finances just before that dinner, and they, being fatuous, incurable optimists, were probably imagining they would never need me again. I did not disturb them until Monson and I had got my education so well under way that even I, always severe in self-criticism and now merciless, was compelled to admit to myself a distinct change for the better. You know how it is with a boy at the "growing age"--how he bursts out of clothes and ideas of life almost as fast as they are supplied him, so swiftly is he transforming into a man. Well, I think it is much that way with us Americans all our lives; we continue on and on at the growing age. And if one of us puts his or her mind hard upon growth in some particular direction, you see almost overnight a development fledged to the last tail-feathers and tip of top-knot where there was nothing at all. What miracles can be wrought by an open mind and a keen sense of the c.u.mulative power of the unwasted minute! All this apropos of a very trivial matter, you may be thinking. But, be careful how you judge what is trivial and what important in a universe built up of atoms.

However--When my education seemed far enough advanced, I sent for Sam.

He, after his footless fashion, didn't bother to acknowledge my note. His margin account with me was at the moment straight; I turned to his father.

I had my cashier send him a formal, type-written letter signed Blacklock & Co., informing him that his account was overdrawn and that we "would be obliged if he would give the matter his immediate attention." The note must have reached him the following morning; but he did not come until, after waiting three days, "we" sent him a sharp demand for a check for the balance due us.

A pleasing, aristocratic-looking figure he made as he entered my office, with his air of the man whose hands have never known the stains of toil, with his manner of having always received deferential treatment. There was no pretense in my curt greeting, my tone of "despatch your business, sir, and be gone"; for I was both busy and much irritated against him.

"I guess you want to see our cashier," said I, after giving him a hasty, absent-minded hand-shake. "My boy out there will take you to him."

The old do-nothing's face lost its confident, condescending expression. His lip quivered, and I think there were tears in his bad, dim, gray-green eyes. I suppose he thought his a profoundly pathetic case; no doubt he hadn't the remotest conception what he really was--and no doubt, also, there are many who would honestly take his view. As if the fact that he was born with all possible advantages did not make him and his plight inexcusable. It pa.s.ses my comprehension why people of his sort, when suffering from the calamities they have deliberately brought upon themselves by laziness and self-indulgence and extravagance, should get a sympathy that is withheld from those of the honest human rank and file falling into far more real misfortunes not of their own making.

"No, my dear Blacklock," said he, cringing now as easily as he had condescended--how to cringe and how to condescend are taught at the same school, the one he had gone to all his life. "It is you I want to talk with. And, first, I owe you my apologies. I know you'll make allowances for one who was never trained to business methods. I've always been like a child in those matters."

"You frighten me," said I. "The last 'gentleman' who came throwing me off my guard with that plea was shrewd enough to get away with a very large sum of my hard-earned money. Besides"--and I was laughing, though not too good-naturedly--"I've noticed that you 'gentlemen' become vague about business only when the balance is against you. When it's in your favor, you manage to get your minds on business long enough to collect to the last fraction of a cent."

He heartily echoed my laugh. "I only wish I _were_ clever," said he.

"However, I've come to ask your indulgence. I'd have been here before, but those who owe me have been putting me off. And they're of the sort of people whom it's impossible to press."