The Deluge Part 9

"I'd like to accommodate you further," said I, shedding that last little hint as a cliff sheds rain, "but your account has been in an unsatisfactory state for nearly a month now."

"I'm sure you'll give me a few days longer," was his easy reply, as if we were discussing a trifle. "By the way, you haven't been to see us yet. Only this morning my wife was wondering when you'd come. You quite captivated her, Blacklock. Can't you dine with us to-morrow night--no, Sunday--at eight? We're having in a few people I think you'd like to meet."

If any one imagines that this bald, businesslike way of putting it set my teeth on edge, let him dismiss the idea; my nerves had been too long accustomed to the feel of the harsh facts of life. It is evidence of the shrewdness of the old fellow at character-reading that he wasted none of his silk and velvet pretenses upon me, and so saved his time and mine.

Probably he wished me to see that I need have no timidity or false shame in dealing with him, that when the time came to talk business I was free to talk it in my own straight fashion.

"Glad to come," said I, wishing to be rid of him, now that my point was gained. "We'll let the account stand open for the present--I rather think your stocks are going up. Give my regards to--the ladies, please, especially to Miss Anita."

He winced, but thanked me graciously; gave me his soft, fine hand to shake and departed, as eager to be off as I to be rid of him. "Sunday next--at eight," were his last words. "Don't fail us"--that in the tone of a king addressing some obscure person whom he had commanded to court. It may be that old Ellersly was wholly unconscious of his superciliousness, fancied he was treating me as if I were almost an equal; but I suspect he rather accentuated his natural manner, with the idea of impressing upon me that in our deal he was giving at least as much as I.

I recall that I thought about him for several minutes after he was gone--philosophized on the folly of a man's deliberately weaving a net to entangle himself. As if any man was ever caught in any net not of his own weaving and setting; as if I myself were not just then working at the last row of meshes of a net in which I was to ensnare myself.

My petty and inevitable success with that helpless creature added amazingly, ludicrously, to that dangerous elation which, as I can now see, had been growing in me ever since the day Roebuck yielded so readily to my demands as to National Coal. The whole trouble with me was that up to that time I had won all my victories by the plainest kind of straightaway hard work. I was imagining myself victor in contests of wit against wit, when, in fact, no one with any especial equipment of brains had ever opposed me; all the really strong men had been helping me because they found me useful.

Too easy success--there is the clue to the wild folly of my performances in those days, a folly that seems utterly inconsistent with the reputation for shrewdness I had, and seemed to have earned.

I can find a certain small amount of legitimate excuse for my falling under Langdon's spell. He had, and has, fascinations, through personal magnetism, which it is hardly in human nature to resist. But for my self-hypnotism in the case of Roebuck, I find no excuse whatever for myself.

He sent for me and told me what share in National Coal they had decided to give me for my Manasquale mines. "Langdon and Melville," said he, "think me too liberal; far too liberal, my boy. But I insisted--in your case I felt we could afford to be generous as well as just." All this with an air that was a combination of the pastor and the parent.

I can't even offer the excuse of not having seen that he was a hypocrite.

I felt his hypocrisy at once, and my first impulse was to jump for my breastworks. But instantly my vanity got behind me, held me in the open, pushed me on toward him. If you will notice, almost all "confidence" games rely for success chiefly upon enlisting a man's vanity to play the traitor to his judgment. So, instead of reading his liberality as plain proof of intended treachery, I read it as plain proof of my own greatness, and of the fear it had inspired in old Roebuck. Laugh _with_ me if you like; but, before you laugh _at_ me, think carefully--those of you who have ever put yourselves to the test on the field of action--think carefully whether you have never found that your head decoration which you thought a crown was in reality the peaked and belled cap of the fool.

But my vanity was not done with me. Led on by it, I proceeded to have one of those ridiculous "generous impulses"--I persuaded myself that there must be some decency in this liberality, in addition to the prudence which I flattered myself was the chief cause. "I have been unjust to Roebuck," I thought. "I have been misjudging his character." And incredible though it seems, I said to him with a good deal of genuine emotion: "I don't know how to thank you, Mr. Roebuck. And, instead of trying, I want to apologize to you. I have thought many hard things against you; have spoken some of them. I had better have been attending to my own conscience, instead of criticizing yours."

I had often thought his face about the most repulsive, hypocrisy-glozed concourse of evil pa.s.sions that ever fronted a fiend in the flesh. It had seemed to me the fitting result of a long career which, according to common report, was stained with murder, with rapacity and heartless cruelty, with the most brutal secret sensuality, and which had left in its wake the ruins of lives and hearts and fortunes innumerable. I had looked on the vast wealth he had heaped mountain high as a monument to devil-daring--other men had, no doubt, dreamed of doing the ferocious things he had done, but their weak, human hearts failed when it came to executing such horrible acts, and they had to be content with smaller fortunes, with the comparatively small fruits of their comparatively small infamies. He had dared all, had won; the most powerful bowed with quaking knees before him, and trembled lest they might, by a blundering look or word, excite his anger and cause him to s.n.a.t.c.h their possessions from them.

Thus I had regarded him, accepting the universal judgment, believing the thousand and one stories. But as his eyes, softened by his hugely generous act, beamed upon me now, I was amazed that I had so misjudged him. In that face which I had thought frightful there was, to my hypnotized gaze, the look of strong, sincere--yes, holy--beauty and power--the look of an archangel.

"Thank you, Blacklock," said he, in a voice that made me feel as if I were a little boy in the crossroads church, believing I could almost see the angels floating above the heads of the singers in the choir behind the preacher. "Thank you. I am not surprised that you have misjudged me. G.o.d has given me a great work to do, and those who do His will in this wicked world must expect martyrdom. I should never have had the courage to do what I have done, what He has done through me, had He not guided my every step.

You are not a religious man?"

"I try to do what's square," said I. "But I'd prefer not to talk about it."

"That's right! That's right!" he approved earnestly. "A man's religion is a matter between himself and his G.o.d. But I hope, Matthew, you will never forget that, unless you have daily, hourly communion with Almighty G.o.d, you will never be able to bear the great burdens, to do the great work fearlessly, disregarding the lies of the wicked, and, hardest of all to endure, the honestly-mistaken judgments of honest men."

"I'll look into it," said I. And I don't know to what lengths of foolish speech I should have gone had I not been saved by an office boy interrupting with a card for him.

"Ah, here's Walters now," said he. Then to the boy: "Bring him in when I ring."

I rose to go.

"No, sit down, Blacklock," he insisted. "You are in with us now, and you may learn something by seeing how I deal with the larger problems that face men in these large undertakings, the problems that have faced me in each new enterprise I have inaugurated to the glory of G.o.d."

Naturally, I accepted with enthusiasm.

You would not believe what a mood I had by this time been worked into by my rampant and raging vanity and emotionalism and by his snake-like charming.

"Thank you," I said, with an energetic warmth that must have secretly amused him mightily.

"When my reorganization of the iron industry proved such a great success, and G.o.d rewarded my labors with large returns," he went on, "I looked about me to see what new work He wished me to undertake, how He wished me to invest His profits. And I saw the coal industry and the coal-carrying railroads in confusion, with waste on every side, and G.o.dless compet.i.tion.

Thousands of widows and orphans who had invested in coal railways and mines were getting no returns. Labor was fitfully employed, owing to alternations of over-production and no production at all. I saw my work ready for my hand. And now we are bringing order out of chaos. This man Walters, useful up to a certain point, has become insolent, corrupt, a stumbling-block in our way." Here he pressed the b.u.t.ton of his electric bell.

XI. WHEN A MAN IS NOT A MAN

Walters entered. He was one of the great railway presidents, was universally regarded as a power, though I, of course, knew that he, like so many other presidents of railways, of individual corporations, of banks, of insurance companies, and high political officials in cities, states and the nation, was little more than a figurehead put up and used by the inside financial ring. As he shifted from leg to leg, holding his hat and trying to steady his twitching upper lip, he looked as one of his smallest section-bosses would have looked, if called up for a wigging.

Roebuck shook hands cordially with him, responded to his nervous glance at me with:

"Blacklock is practically in our directory." We all sat, then Roebuck began in his kindliest tone:

"We have decided, Walters, that we must give your place to a stronger man.

Your gross receipts, outside of coal, have fallen rapidly and steadily for the past three quarters. You were put into the presidency to bring them up. They have shown no change beyond what might have been expected in the natural fluctuations of freight. We calculated on resuming dividends a year ago. We have barely been able to meet the interest on our bonds."

"But, Mr. Roebuck," pleaded Walters, "you doubled the bonded indebtedness of the road just before I took charge."

"The money went into improvements, into increasing your facilities, did it not?" inquired Roebuck, his paw as soft as a playful tiger's.

"Part of it," said Walters. "But you remember the reorganizing syndicate got five millions, and then the contracts for the new work had to be given to construction companies in which directors of the road were silent partners. Then they are interested in the supply companies from which I must buy. You know what all that means, Mr. Roebuck."

"No doubt," said Roebuck, still smooth and soft. "But if there was waste, you should have reported--"

"To whom?" demanded Walters. "Every one of our directors, including yourself, Mr. Roebuck, is a stock-holder--a large stock-holder--in one or more of those companies."

"Have you proof of this, Walters?" asked Roebuck, looking profoundly shocked. "It's a very grave charge--a criminal charge."

"Proof?" said Walters, "You know how that is. The real books of all big companies are kept in the memories of the directors--and mighty treacherous memories they are." This with a nervous laugh. "As for the holdings of directors in construction and supply companies--most of those holdings are in other names--all of them are disguised where the connection is direct."

Roebuck shook his head sadly. "You admit, then, that you have allowed millions of the road's money to be wasted, that you made no complaint, no effort to stop the waste; and your only defense is that you _suspect_ the directors of fraud. And you accuse them to excuse yourself--accuse them with no proof. Were you in any of those companies, Walters?"

"No," he said, his eyes shifting.

Roebuck's face grew stern. "You bought two hundred thousand dollars of the last issue of government bonds, they tell me, with your two years' profits from the Western Railway Construction Company."

"I bought no bonds," bl.u.s.tered Walters. "What money I have I made out of speculating in the stock of my road--on legitimate inside information."

"Your uncle in Wilkesbarre, I meant," pursued Roebuck.

Walters reddened, looked straight at Roebuck without speaking.

"Do you still deny?" demanded Roebuck.

"I saw everybody--_everybody_--grafting," said Walters boldly, "and I thought I might as well take my share. It's part of the business." Then he added cynically: "That's the way it is nowadays. The lower ones see the higher ones raking off, and they rake off, too--down to conductors and brakemen. We caught some trackwalkers in a conspiracy to dispose of the discarded ties and rails the other day." He laughed. "We jailed _them_."

"If you can show that any director has taken anything that did not belong to him, if you can show that a single contract you let to a construction or a supply company--except, of course, the contracts you let to yourself--of them I know nothing, suspect much--if you can show one instance of these criminal doings, Mr. Walters, I shall back you up with all my power in prosecution."

"Of course I can't show it," cried Walters. "If I tried, wouldn't they ruin and disgrace me, perhaps send me to the penitentiary? Wasn't I the one that pa.s.sed on and signed their contracts? And wouldn't they--wouldn't you, Mr.