XV. SOME STRANGE LAPSES OF A LOVER
But before there was time for me to get a distinct impression, that uglyshape of cynicism had disappeared.
"It was a shadow I myself cast upon her," I assured myself; and once moreshe 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. Mysterythere was, but only the mystery of wonder at the apparition of such beautyand purity in such a world as mine. True, from time to time, there showedat the surface or vaguely outlined in the depths, forms strangely out ofplace in those unsullied waters. But I either refused to see or refused totrust my senses. I had a fixed ideal of what a woman should be; this girlembodied that ideal.
"If you'd only give up your cigarettes," I remember saying to her when wewere a little better acquainted, "you'd be perfect."
She made an impatient gesture. "Don't!" she commanded almost angrily. "Youmake me feel like a hypocrite. You tempt me to be a hypocrite. Why not becontent with woman as she is--a human being? And--how could I--any womannot an idiot--be alive for twenty-five years without learning--a thing ortwo? Why should any man want it?"
"Because to know is to be spattered and stained," said I. "I get enough ofpeople 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 ofwhat it's really like. Sometimes when I'm with you, I begin to feel meanand--and unclean. And the feeling grows on me until it's all I can do torestrain myself from rushing away."
She looked at me critically.
"You've never had much to do with women, have you?" she finally said slowlyin a musing tone.
"I wish that were true--almost," replied I, on my mettle as a man, andresisting not without effort the impulse to make some vague"confessions"--boastings disguised as penitential admissions--after thecustomary masculine fashion.
She smiled--and one of those disquieting shapes seemed to me to be floatinglazily and repellently downward, out of sight. "A man and a woman can be agreat deal to each other, I believe," said she; "can be--married, and allthat--and remain as strange to each other as if they had never met--morehopelessly strangers."
"There's always a sort of mystery," I conceded. "I suppose that's one ofthe things that keep married people interested."
She shrugged her shoulders--she was in evening dress, I recall, and therewas on her white skin that intense, transparent, bluish tinge one sees onthe new snow when the sun comes out.
"Mystery!" she said impatiently. "There's no mystery except what weourselves 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 showedfriendship for him by being frank and human and natural with him, he'dpunish her for it by--by despising her."
I smiled, much as one smiles at the efforts of a precocious child to provethat 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 wasoffended by my disbelief in her knowledge of life. I hadn't a suspicionthat I had hurt and alienated her by slamming in her very face the door offriendship 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 themen I had known, but a creature apart and in a class apart, I stood dayafter 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 myold-fashioned belief that good women were more than human and bad womenless than human had influenced me only to a sharper lookout in dealingwith the one species of woman I then came in contact with, no harm to meresulted, but on the contrary good--whoever got into trouble throughwalking the world with sword and sword arm free? But when, under the spellof Anita Ellersly, I dragged the "superhuman goodness" part of my theorydown out of the clouds and made it my guardian and guide--really, it's amiracle that I escaped from the pit into which that lunacy pitched meheadlong. I was not content with idealizing only her; I went on to seeinggood, and only good, in everybody! The millennium was at hand; all WallStreet was my friend; whatever I wanted would happen. And when Roebuck,with an air like a benediction from a bishop backed by a cathedral organand full choir, gave me the tip to buy coal stocks, I canonized him on thespot. Never did a Jersey "jay" in Sunday clothes and tallowed boots respondto a bunco steerer's greeting with a gladder smile than mine to that piousold past-master of craft.
I will say, in justice to myself, though it is also in excuse, that if Ihad known him intimately a few years earlier, I should have found it allbut impossible to fool myself. For he had not long been in a position wherehe could keep wholly detached from the crimes committed for his benefitand by his order, and where he could disclaim responsibility and evenknowledge. The great lawyers of the country have been most ingenious indeveloping corporate law in the direction of making the corporation acomplete and secure shield between the beneficiary of a crime and itsconsequences; but before a great financier can use this shield perfectly,he must build up a system--he must find lieutenants with the necessarycoolness, courage and cunning; he must teach them to understand his hints;he must educate them, not to point out to him the disagreeable thingsinvolved in his orders, but to execute unquestioningly, to effacecompletely the trail between him and them, whether or not they succeed incovering the roundabout and faint trail between themselves and the toolsthat nominally commit the crimes.
As nearly as I can get at it, when Roebuck was luring me into National Coalhe had not for nine years been open to attack, but had so far hedgedhimself in that, had his closest lieutenants been trapped and frightenedinto "squealing," he would not have been involved; without fear of exposureand with a clear conscience he could--and would!--have joined in thedenunciation of the man who had been caught, and could--and would!--havehelped send him to the penitentiary or to the scaffold. With the securityof an honest man and the serenity of a Christian he planned his colossalthefts and reaped their benefits; and whenever he was accused, he couldhave explained everything, could have got his accuser's sympathy andadmiration. I say, could have explained; but he would not. Early in hiscareer, he had learned the first principle of successful crime--silence. Nomatter what the provocation or the seeming advantage, he uttered only a fewgenerous general phrases, such as "those misguided men," or "the Masterteaches us to bear with meekness the calumnies of the wicked," or "let himthat 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 stolengoods under police protection, who so shrewd as he?
Wilmot was the instrument he employed to put the coal industry intocondition for "reorganization." He bought control of one of the coalrailroads and made Wilmot president of it. Wilmot, taught by twenty yearsof his service, knew what was expected of him, and proceeded to do it. Heput 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 asystem of secret rebates and rate cuttings. As the other roads, one by one,descended toward bankruptcy, Roebuck bought the comparatively small blocksof stock necessary to give him control of them. When he had power overenough of them to establish a partial monopoly of transportation in and outof the coal districts, he was ready for his lieutenant to attack the miningproperties. Probably his orders to Wilmot were nothing more definite orless innocent than: "Wilmot, my boy, don't you think you and I and someothers of our friends ought to buy some of those mines, if they come on themarket at a fair price? Let me know when you hear of any attractiveinvestments of that sort."
That would have been quite enough to "tip it off" to Wilmot that the timehad come for reaching out from control of railway to control of mine. Helost no time; he easily forced one mining property after another into aposition where its owners were glad--were eager--to s
ell all or part of thewreck of it "at a fair price" to him and Roebuck and "our friends." It wasas the result of one of these moves that the great Manasquale mines wereso hemmed in by ruinous freight rates, by strike troubles, by floods frombroken 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 thetime--and for a long time afterward--I did not know, on my honor did notsuspect, what was the cause, the sole cause, of the change of the coalregion from a place of peaceful industry, content with fair profits, to anindustrial 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 ofspeculation, there ownership for purposes of permanent investment. Thisis what is known as the reorganizing stage. The processes of high financeare very simple--first, buy the comparatively small holdings necessaryto create confusion and disaster; second, create confusion and disaster,buying up more and more wreckage; third, reorganize; fourth, offer thenew stocks and bonds to the public with a mighty blare of trumpets whichproduces a boom market; fifth, unload on the public, pass dividends, issueunfavorable statements, depress prices, buy back cheap what you have solddear. Repeat ad infinitum, for the law is for the laughter of the strong,and the public is an eager ass. To keep up the fiction of "respectability,"the inside ring divides into two parties for its campaigns--one party tobreak down, the other to build up. One takes the profits from destructionand departs, perhaps to construct elsewhere; the other takes the profitsfrom construction and departs, perhaps to destroy elsewhere. As theircollusion is merely tacit, no conscience need twitch. I must add that, atthe time of which I am writing, I did not realize the existence of thisconspiracy. I knew, of course, that many lawless and savage things weredone, that there were rascals among the high financiers, and that almostall financiers now and then did things that were more or less rascally; butI did not know, did not suspect, that high finance was through and throughbrigandage, and that the high financier, by long and unmolested practice ofbrigandage, had come to look on it as legitimate, lawful business, and onlaws forbidding or hampering it as outrageous, socialistic, anarchistic,"attacks upon the social order!"
I was sufficiently infected with the spirit of the financier, I franklyconfess, to look on the public as a sort of cow to milk and send out tograss that it might get itself ready to be driven in and milked again. Doesnot the cow produce milk not for her own use but for the use of him wholooks after her, provides her with pasturage and shelter and saves her fromthe calamities in which her lack of foresight and of other intelligencewould involve her, were she not looked after? And is not the fact that thepublic--beg pardon, the cow--meekly and even cheerfully submits to themilking proof that God intended her to be the servant of the Roebucks--begpardon 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_" planfor "putting the coal industry on a sound business basis" would be readyfor the public. So, when he sent for me shortly after I became engaged toMiss Ellersly, and said: "Melville will publish the plan on the first ofnext 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 everycoal stock would surely soar. Buy I must; not to buy was to throw away afortune. Yet how could I buy when I was gambling in Textile up to my limitof safety, if not beyond?
I did not dare confess to Roebuck what I was doing in Textile. He wasbitterly opposed to stock gambling, denouncing it as both immoral andunbusinesslike. No gambling for him! When his business sagacity andforesight(?) informed him a certain stock was going to be worth a greatdeal more than it was then quoted at, he would buy outright in largequantities; when that same sagacity and foresight of the fellow who hashimself marked the cards warned him that a stock was about to fall, he soldoutright. But gamble--never! And I felt that, if he should learn that I hadstaked a large part of my entire fortune on a single gambling operation, hewould straightway cut me off from his confidence, would look on me as toodeeply tainted by my long career as a "bucket-shop" man to be worthy offull rank and power as a financier. Financiers do not gamble. Their onlyvice 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 useto you? You know my machinery is perfect--I can buy anything and in anyquantity without starting rumors and drawing the crowd."
"No thank you, Matthew," was his answer. "I have all of those stocks Iwish--at present."
Whether it is peculiar to me, I don't know--probably not--but my memoryis so constituted that it takes an indelible and complete impression ofwhatever is sent to it by my eyes and ears; and just as by looking closelyyou can find in a photographic plate a hundred details that escape yourglance, so on those memory plates of mine I often find long afterward manyand many a detail that escaped me when my eyes and ears were taking theimpression. 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 timeshows how unfit I then was to guard my interests. For instance, I findthat just before he spoke those words declining my assistance and implyingthat he had already increased his holdings, he opened and closed his handsseveral times, finally closed and clinched them--a sure sign of energeticnervous action, and in that particular instance a sign of deception,because there was no energy in his remark and no reason for energy. I amnot superstitious, but I believe in palmistry to a certain extent. Evenmore than the face are the hands a sensitive recorder of what is passing inthe mind.
But I was then too intent upon my dilemma carefully to study a man who hadalready lulled me into absolute confidence in him. I left him as soon ashe would let me go. His last words were, "No gambling, Matthew! No abuseof the opportunity God is giving us. Be content with the just profits frominvestment. I have seen gamblers come and go, many of them able men--veryable men. But they have melted away, and where are they? And I haveremained and have increased, blessed be God who has saved me from thetemptations to try to reap where I had not sown! I feel that I can trustyou. You began as a speculator, but success has steadied you, and you haveput yourself on the firm ground where we see the solid men into whose handsGod has given the development of the abounding resources of this belovedcountry of ours."
Do you wonder that I went away with a heart full of shame for the gamblingprojects my head was planning upon the information that good man had givenme?
I shut myself in my private office for several hours of hard thinking--asI can now see, the first real attention I had given my business in twomonths. 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 Iassume additional burdens? I looked at the National Coal problem fromevery standpoint--so I thought. And I could see no possible risk. Did notRoebuck's statement make it certain as sunrise that, as soon as thereorganization was announced, all coal stocks would rise? Yes, I shouldbe risking nothing; I could with absolute safety stake my credit; to makecontracts to buy coal stocks at present prices for future delivery was nomore of a gamble than depositing cash in the United States Treasury.
"You've gone back to gambling lately, Matt," said I to myself. "You'vebeen on a bender, with your head afire. You must get out of this Textilebusiness as soon as possible. But it's good sound sense to plunge onthe coal stocks. In fact, your profits there would save you if by somemischance Textile should rise instead of fall. Acting on Roebuck's tipisn't gambling, it's insurance."
I emerged to issue orders that soon threw into the National Coal ventureall I had not staked on a falling market for Textiles. I was notcontent--as the pious gambling-hater, Roebuck, had begged me t
o be--withbuying only what stock I could pay for; I went plunging on, contracting formany times the amount I could have bought outright.
The next time I saw Langdon I was full of enthusiasm for Roebuck. I can seehis 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 ratherdangerous, don't you think? The player may become enchanted by his ownmusic."
"I try to look on the bright side of things." said I, "even of humannature."
"Since when?" drawled he.
I laughed--a good, hearty laugh, for this shy reference to my affair of theheart tickled me. I enjoyed to the full only in long retrospect the look hegave me.
"As soon as a man falls in love," said he, "trustees should be appointed totake charge of his estate."
"You're wrong there, old man," I replied. "I've never worked harder or witha clearer head than since I learned that there are"--I hesitated, and endedlamely--"other things in life."
Langdon's handsome face suddenly darkened, and I thought I saw in his eyesa look of savage pain. "I envy you," said he with an effort at his wontedlightness and cynicism. But that look touched my heart; I talked no more ofmy own happiness. To do so, I felt would be like bringing laughter into thehouse of grief.