After three years the Tower Woolen Mill was filling orders from as far away as Springfield and Worcester. And Simeon was tired of it. He looked around for a buyer, and soon found one. He sold the mill for fifteen thousand dollars, but out of a trace of superstition and sentimentality he retained a small interest in it. He moved at last to New York, as he had always meant to do. He went to Slate and Hatch, the brokers who handled his modest investments, and bought himself an interest in the firm.
Then he applied himself single-heartedly and successfully to speculation, and gradually, like many another enterprising young man in those expansive years, he accumulated a fortune, and he followed very much the same pattern as the others. Cheap railroad stock scooped up for a song in the panic of 1857, and later sold at great profit. Shares in industries which during the Civil War years provided dazzling army contracts, fatly padded. City politicians cunningly placated with the object of mutual and pleasing exploitation. Simeon, like Drew, Gould, Fisk, Vanderbilt, and a dozen other successful men, believed in expediency. Business ethics were founded on expediency and nobody expected them to conform to the vague moralities one learned at Sunday School.
It was necessary for the financial titans to throw plums to Big Bill Tweed as he rose to power by means of the most corrupt politics ever known in New York. Simeon deplored the politics, but he saw the wisdom of friendship with the Tammany Boss as soon as any of them. He accompanied Tweed on the latter’s gaudy yacht to Americus Club outings in Greenwich, Connecticut, just as matter-of-factly as he accompanied Jim Fisk to the ‘bower of love’ on Twenty-Fourth Street where Fisk kept his luscious Josie Mansfield.
So Simeon made a great deal of money, and he anxiously forced himself through the various motions which he believed the public expected from its millionaires. He acquired horses, though he did not much like them, and a villa at Long Branch. He gave supper parties for prominent actresses and endowed worthy charities. He also acquired a hobby—all rich men had them. He collected strange or historical jewels, particularly those which were reputed to have belonged to famous people. It gave him comfort and a curious security to hold crushed in his hand a carnelian amulet said to have been carried by Napoleon, or a rock-crystal cross which had belonged to Catherine the Great. The Napoleons, the Catherines, the George Washingtons—reduced to a keepsake which Simeon Tower could own. He had built cases in the library for his gem collection, and he spent much time with it, more pleasurable hours than the social ones which dissatisfied him, since he was increasingly aware that the company he was able to command was distinctly second-rate. Society ignored Simeon Tower.
In the February of 1868, when Fey saw him at the Arcadia, he was beginning to realize that he was lonely and discontented. The making of money no longer required so much attention. The fortune snowballed along by itself. There was nothing to stop it, no taxes, no government restrictions, not even as yet much public indignation or censure.
Simeon began to think, not for the first time, of marriage. Two things had so far held him back. The strongest of these was an unconscious fear.
When he had been nineteen in Bridgeport and working at the Stanley House, he had fallen in love with an older girl, Mellie Reynolds. Her father was a banker and she moved in the city’s highest social circles. He had been delirious with excitement to find her receptive. Even he, diffident and inexperienced as he was, had presently realized that she was more than receptive to his love-making. She was eager. Then one summer night on the sand by the edge of the Sound, there had been an episode of unbearable humiliation. He had utterly failed to accomplish that which they had both ardently desired, and she had turned on him in a fury, jeering at his looks and his stammer, pitilessly mimicking certain little mannerisms which he hadn’t known he had. He had been too young and horribly mortified to realize that her savagery sprang from her own disappointment;. He knew only that she was jeering at his failure as a man; that she had seen that, after all, he was nothing but ‘Little T-t-t-Tombstone’—a hopeless outsider.
His conscious mind soon buried this episode, but its ghost writhed upward whenever he thought of marriage. He did not know it, but he was afraid, and he had never felt real passion.
The other factor which kept him from marriage was his mistress, Pansy Miggs. With her there was no fear of inferiority or failure, because whatever he did or did not do was all right with Pansy. She adored him to the limits of her stupid loving nature. She had been a fifteen-year-old shuttle girl in his mill on the Saugatuck when he first noticed her fresh blonde comeliness.
They had drifted into an easy relationship, and soon after he had moved to New York, he had sent for Pansy and set her up in three rooms on Eleventh Street. Here she was perfectly happy. When his wealth increased, he tried to move her to more pretentious surroundings, but she had cried so much, big tears spilling from her prominent eyes, that he let her be. Her rooms were cluttered with heavy red upholstered walnut furniture decorated whenever possible with satin bows. There was hardly room to walk between her whatnots loaded with souvenirs, china figures, wax-flower pieces and shells, and the tabourets, footstools, and rockers. She had a canary and a fat taffy-colored spaniel which resembled her. The Eleventh Street flat was her home and she wanted no other. She was always good-tempered and anxious to please. Sometimes Simeon did not visit her for weeks, but she seldom questioned. When he did come, she was acquiescent to his infrequent sexual needs if that were what he wanted, but if he did not, she fixed him a nice little meal instead.
Simeon was fond of her and always shrank from the thought of disturbing such a comfortable arrangement. He was, in fact, thinking of visiting Pansy that evening at the precise moment of the October afternoon that Fey entered the granite building at 57 Wall Street.
It is seldom in life that one knows that a coming event is to be of crucial importance. This foreknowledge gives advantage, it allows time for previsioning and meeting difficulties, for studying the best approach, and for acquiring inner poise. These factors all helped Fey, but her greatest advantage was her complete ignorance. She knew nothing of social or business conventions. Except for Bleecker Street, a Bowery concert hall, and the Infirmary, she knew nothing about New York.
She quite naturally saw her visit to Simeon Tower in terms of Santa Fe, and the patriarchal system. Here the richest men in town were entirely approachable. The humblest peon might request an interview with Don Diego Seña and get it. Wealth and position which have been assured for generations do not need protection nor the trappings of superiority.
Fey, therefore, was not nervous as she entered the rather dingy granite building in Wall Street.
The brokerage firm of Slate and Hatch had once occupied the top floor, but now, Tower, Slate and Hatch had taken over the whole building. In those thirteen years, Slate had died, Hatch retired, and Simeon had thrown their second-floor offices together to make an elaborate one for himself.
There were three rings of fortifications around Simeon, and Fey swept through two of them because she did not know that they existed.
‘Where is Mr. Tower’s office?’ she asked calmly of the grizzled old doorman. His jaw dropped as she rustled past him. Young stylish ladies never rustled through the front doors of Tower, Slate and Hatch. He’d hardly ever seen a lady on Wall Street at all.
‘Upstairs, but ye can’t-’ he began uncertainly.
‘Thank you,’ said Fey, and glided over to the stairs.
She had mounted one step when a startled junior clerk reached her. ‘Where are you going, madam?’ he asked.
‘To meet Mr. Tower,’ murmured Fey sweetly.
‘You have an appointment?’ said the clerk, falling back on the time-honored defense.
Even Fey recognized that a negative answer was unwise. ‘If he’s busy, I’ll wait,’ she said, and giving the young clerk a brilliant melting smile, she ascended the stairs. He was dazzled by the smile and he was completely at sea. He was used to the dozens of importunates who daily tried to see Mr. Tower. Most of t
hem he could classify at a glance. There were the deadbeats and the panhandlers. There were ward bosses and job-seekers. Occasionally there were furious competitors, and once in a while a frightened man whose small business had been incontinently devoured by the Tower interests. There were all these, but they were not women. The only women he had ever seen here had been two strong-jawed matrons, who demanded a contribution to the Temperance Union. They had been dealt with downstairs. The few others who had been sifted out and allowed upstairs had then encountered Mr. Lemming. Noah Lemming was Tower’s confidential secretary. Very few people got past him.
Well, thought the clerk uneasily, old fox Noah’ll deal with that girl, whoever she is. He was uneasy because Lemming did not like mistakes.
But even Noah Lemming was baffled by Fey. From the door of his small office which flanked Simeon’s, he saw her standing uncertainly in the hall. She actually had her hand raised to knock upon the mahogany door which she correctly assumed to be Simeon’s, when Lemming rushed at her. ‘Madam!’ he cried, his voice shrilled in outrage. ‘What are you doing here!’
Fey lowered her hand, she turned, and they looked at each other.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I did not know there was anyone else up here. I want to talk to Mr. Tower.’
Lemming’s sharp face darkened. What’s going on here? he thought. Brazen effrontery.
‘What’s your name, madam—and your business with Mr. Tower? ’ He tried by a gesture to get her out of the hall and into his own office. Fey did not move. Her brilliant eyes rested coldly on his tight, angry face. She did not like him, and she knew that he did not like her.
‘I am Mrs. Dillon. Santa Fe Cameron Dillon. And my business with Mr. Tower, I will not tell you.’
Lemming gasped. ‘Preposterous! I’ll have you know, madam, that I’m Mr. Tower’s confidential secretary. No one can see him unless I choose!’
‘That I cannot believe,’ said Fey. ‘Lobo does not permit that coyotes should command him.’
She’s mad, thought Lemming, to whom this Mexican proverb was gibberish. He grabbed her silk-covered arm and at his touch her face blazed. She shook him off with a violent motion and knocked sharply on the mahogany door.
‘Madam! ’ cried Lemming. He lunged again for her arm. Fey spat several words at him in Spanish and, eluding him in one sinuous twist, turned the knob and threw open the door.
Simeon, behind his enormous rosewood desk, looked up in amazement.
He saw his cool, efficient secretary turned purple in the face and sputtering, and he saw a girl in brown whose bosom was heaving and whose gray eyes were snapping with anger. She did not wait for him to speak, but ran straight to his desk. ‘He says no one may see you unless he chooses. Is it true he is so important?’ She pointed over her shoulder at Lemming.
Fey had anticipated no difficulty in getting in to see Tower, but she had been realist enough to know that the first sentences of the interview were important. She had lain sleepless for many hours on her Infirmary bed and rehearsed opening gambits. They ranged from the politely dignified to the pleadingly frank in tone. Not one of them would have riveted Simeon’s attention or pierced his guard as did this indignant question. Simeon had lately, and without giving the matter his complete attention, been resenting his secretary. The man was becoming arrogant and he knew too much.
Simeon said nothing for a full minute. He had long ago learned the value of impassive silence when confronted by emotion in others, and it was by this trick, too, that he had conquered the stammer. The tableau before him began to dissolve. Fey lowered her arm and took a quick breath. Lemming gave himself a mental shake, his sharp face resumed its usual mask of cold watchfulness.
‘Now, what is all this?’ said Simeon pleasantly.
‘This young woman forced her way in, sir,’ said Lemming. ‘She has no business here.’
‘How do you know that?’ said Simeon. ‘Did you ask me?'
Lemming flushed. ‘No, but I——’ He clamped his mouth shut.
‘No, but you’ve made it your business to find out everything that concerns me, haven’t you?’ Simeon leaned back in his mahogany swiveled chair, crossed his legs, and laughed easily. He had not decided how to treat the man’s officiousness, and this was no moment to raise an issue with an employee. ‘Run along, Lemming,’ he said, with a quick smile. ‘I’ll deal with the young lady.’
Lemming shot Fey a venomous look and went. Neither the easy laugh nor the smile had deceived him, as they would have a casual observer. But he won’t give me the sack, thought Lemming, as he strode back to his own office. Gould would pay plenty for the figures on that Transic deal. Besides, he’d never get another man’d do his dirty work for him as well as I do. So Lemming soothed himself. He had little feeling for his employer, but he passionately liked his job. Easy pickings, reflected glory. ‘You got to grease Lemming if you want to get at Tower’—that’s what they said on the Street, only Tower hadn’t known it because there’d never been a mistake before. It was all smooth and subtle, outward deference. Only that damn girl——He glared at the great closed door across the hall.
He picked up his pen and tried to continue the letter he had been writing to James E. King’s Sons on a matter of foreign exchange. I’ll find out who she is and what she wanted, he thought. I can always find out, like I found out about that wench he keeps on Eleventh Street.
Inside Tower’s magnificent office, Simeon also was wondering who the girl was and what she wanted. But he did not hurry her.
‘Will you sit down, Miss—Mrs.—?’ he said, genially indicating a yellow plush armchair in front of his desk.
‘Mrs. Dillon,’ said Fey, and complied slowly. She was still shaken, and all her speeches had deserted her. She gave him a nervous, apologetic little smile and instinctively waited for him to speak while she collected herself. As this was Simeon’s own technique, the result was silence.
They sat and looked at each other, the small, vivid girl in brown, and the heavy, nearly middle-aged man.
Simeon was seldom genuinely amused, and lately little had interested him, but now he bit his blond mustache and raised his eyebrows quizzically.
‘Well, Mrs. Dillon? To what exactly do I owe this honor?’ Some kind of adventuress, he thought; no, guess not. She’s awfully young. Actress wanting a job? No. Advice on investments? But she wouldn’t have the nerve to force her way in here to me.
‘Well, Mrs. Dillon,’ he repeated a trifle impatiently, ‘why did you want so badly to see me? ’
Fey looked down at her lap, her eyes followed a thread of the feuille morte grosgrain until it disappeared under her tightly clasped hand. She raised her head and looked again full at Simeon.
‘Because you are a great rich man, and I wanted to meet you.’
So, this is something new in approaches, thought Simeon. He spoke even more slowly than usual.
‘There are many rich men in the city. I assume you want something, my dear young lady. Will you tell me why you picked on me?’
‘Because I saw you once, and I have learned a good deal about you, and I think we would like each other,’ answered Fey. She told the truth because it was natural for her to do so. But she was not so naive that she could not see that she had made a mistake. His face tightened. His eyes, which had been amused, became guarded.
‘That is a trifle crude,’ he said coldly. ‘Will you kindly state your business.’ His blunt, well-manicured hand made a slight gesture, the prelude to dismissal. His glance wandered to the small lever under his desk. It pulled a wire which rang a bell in Lemming’s office.
Fey correctly interpreted his glance and felt a sinking dismay. She had for so long built her hopes on this interview. Ever since February so many of her thoughts had been concentrated on the man who sat across the desk that it seemed incredible that he shouldn’t feel it.
‘I—I do want help,’ she said. There was a faltering simplicity about this, and Simeon looked at her quickly and frowned.
?
??I’ve been asked for money in a lot of different ways,’ he said, ‘but most of them thought up a good story first.’ He was disappointed and bored again. There had seemed to be something different about the little thing, a fire and refinement, too. He by now had noted the slight foreign intonation in her voice. French probably, maybe Creole. Plenty of them drifted up from New Orleans to work the big city. War widows, they usually called themselves. Lemming was quite right, he thought wearily.
‘Well, Mrs. Dillon,’ he said, ‘ I like nerve, and you’ve got plenty of it.’ He slid open an upper desk drawer where he kept some cash. ‘ I’ll give you a hundred and we’ll skip the hard-luck tale—with thanks.’
‘No!’cried Fey. ‘You don’t understand!’ In her panic she jumped up and put her hand out across the desk to stop him. Her mind worked frantically, and she could not hear herself speak. ‘You have—you have a collection of jewels!’ she cried breathlessly. ‘ I read about it in the newspaper. Would you be interested in this?’
Simeon, amazed, watched her unbutton the top of her bodice and jerk out a blue lump of stone on a gold string. She took it off over her head and held it out to him across the desk. Her hand trembled, and she looked into his astonished face with a sort of anguish.
‘My dear young lady——’ said Simeon. He stared at the sky-blue stone in her hand, and then at the white triangle of skin which showed at her unbuttoned collar. The skin looked soft and smooth. She was leaning so near him that a faint perfume came to him from her body.
He took the stone slowly from her and his fingers touched her hand. This tiny contact gave him a shock of pleasure and sudden warmth. He was not a voluptuary and this type of unexpected sensation was new to him.
He looked at the full high outline of her breasts under the leaf-brown silk, at the wide coral-tinted mouth.