The Deluge Part 34

Schilling gave me a genuine look of mingled pity and admiration. "I suppose you know what you're about," said he, "but I think you're making a mistake."

"Thanks, Ned," said I--he had been my head clerk a few years before, and I had got him the chance with Roebuck which he had improved so well. "I'm going to have some fun. Can't live but once."

"I know some people," said he significantly, "who would go to _any_ lengths to get an enemy out of the way." He had lived close enough to Roebuck to peer into the black shadows of that satanic mind, and dimly to see the dread shapes that lurked there.

"I'm the safest man on Manhattan Island for the present," said I.

"You remember Woodrow? I've always believed that he was murdered, and that the pistol they found beside him was a 'plant.'"

"You'd kill me yourself, if you got the orders, wouldn't you?" said I good-humoredly.

"Not personally," replied he in the same spirit, yet serious, too, at bottom. "Inspector Bradlaugh was telling me, the other night, that there were easily a thousand men in the slums of the East Side who could be hired to kill a man for five hundred dollars."

I suppose Schilling, as the directing spirit of a corporation that hid poison by the hogshead in low-priced foods of various kinds, was responsible for hundreds of deaths annually, and for misery of sickness beyond calculation among the poor of the tenements and cheap boarding-houses. Yet a better husband, father and friend never lived. He, personally, wouldn't have harmed a fly; but he was a wholesale poisoner for dividends.

Murder for dividends. Poison for dividends. Starve and freeze and maim for dividends. Drive parents to suicide, and sons and daughters to crime and prost.i.tution--for dividends. Not fair compet.i.tion, in which the stronger and better would survive, but cheating and swindling, lying and pilfering and bribing, so that the honest and the decent go down before the dishonest and the depraved. And the custom of doing these things so "respectable,"

the applause for "success" so undiscriminating, and men so unthinking in the rush of business activity, that criticism is regarded as a mixture of envy and idealism. And it usually is, I must admit.

Schilling lingered. "I hope you won't blame me for lining up against you, Matt," said he. "I don't want to, but I've got to."

"Why?"

"You know what'd become of me if I didn't."

"You might become an honest man and get self-respect," I suggested with friendly satire.

"That's all very well for you to say," was his laughing retort. "You've made yourself tight and tidy for the blow. But I've a family, and a d.a.m.ned expensive one, too. And if I didn't stand by this gang, they'd take everything I've got away from me. No, Matt, each of us to his own game.

What _is_ your game, anyhow?"

"Fun--just fun. Playing the pipe to see the big fellows dance."

But he didn't believe it. And no one has believed it--not even my most devoted followers. To this day Joe Ball more than half suspects that my real objective was huge personal gain. That any rich man should do anything except for the purpose of growing richer seems incredible. That any rich man should retain or regain the sympathies and viewpoint of the cla.s.s from which he sprang, and should become a "traitor" to the cla.s.s to which he belongs, seems preposterous. I confess I don't fully understand my own case. Who ever does?

My "daily letters" had now ceased to be advertis.e.m.e.nts, had become news, sought by all the newspapers of this country and of the big cities in Great Britain. I could have made a large saving by no longer paying my sixty-odd regular papers for inserting them. But I was looking too far ahead to blunder into that fatal mistake. Instead, I signed a year's contract with each of my papers, they guaranteeing to print my advertis.e.m.e.nts, I guaranteeing to protect them against loss on libel suits. I organized a dummy news bureau, and through it got contracts with the telegraph companies. Thus insured against the cutting of my communications with the public, I was ready for the real campaign.

It began with my "History of the National Coal Company." I need not repeat that famous history here. I need recall only the main points--how I proved that the common stock was actually worth less than two dollars a share, that the bonds were worth less than twenty-five dollars in the hundred, that both stock and bonds were illegal; my detailed recital of the crimes of Roebuck, Melville and Langdon in wrecking mining properties, in wrecking coal railways, in ejecting American labor and subst.i.tuting helots from eastern Europe; how they had swindled and lied and bribed; how they had twisted the books of the companies, how they were planning to unload the ma.s.s of almost worthless securities at high prices, then to get from under the market and let the bonds and stocks drop down to where they could buy them in on terms that would yield them more than two hundred and fifty per cent, on the actual capital invested. Less and dearer coal; lower wages and more ignorant laborers; enormous profits absorbed without mercy into a few pockets.

On the day the seventh chapter of this history appeared, the telegraph companies notified me that they would transmit no more of my matter. They feared the consequences in libel suits, explained Moseby, general manager of one of the companies.

"But I guarantee to protect you," said I. "I will give bond in any amount you ask."

"We can't take the risk, Mr. Blacklock," replied he. The twinkle in his eye told me why, and also that he, like every one else in the country except the clique, was in sympathy with me.

My lawyers found an honest judge, and I got an injunction that compelled the companies to transmit under my contracts. I suspended the "History" for one day, and sent out in place of it an account of this attempt to shut me off from the public. "Hereafter," said I, in the last paragraph in my letter, "I shall end each day's chapter with a forecast of what the next day's chapter is to be. If for any reason it fails to appear, the public will know that somebody has been coerced by Roebuck, Melville & Co."

x.x.xI. ANITA'S SECRET

That afternoon--or, was it the next?--I happened to go home early. I have never been able to keep alive anger against any one. My anger against Anita had long ago died away, had been succeeded by regret and remorse that I had let my nerves, or whatever the accursed cause was, whirl me into such an outburst. Not that I regretted having rejected what I still felt was insulting to me and degrading to her; simply that my manner should have been different. There was no necessity or excuse for violence in showing her that I would not, could not, accept from grat.i.tude what only love has the right to give. And I had long been casting about for some way to apologize--not easy to do, when her distant manner toward me made it difficult for me to find even the necessary commonplaces to "keep up appearances" before the servants on the few occasions on which we accidentally met.

But, as I was saying, I came up from the office and stretched myself on--the lounge in my private room adjoining the library. I had read myself into a doze, when a servant brought me a card. I glanced at it as it lay upon his extended tray. "Gerald Monson," I read aloud. "What does the d.a.m.ned rascal want?" I asked.

The servant smiled. He knew as well as I how Monson, after I dismissed him with a present of six months' pay, had given the newspapers the story--or, rather, his version of the story--of my efforts to educate myself in the "arts and graces of a gentleman."

"Mr. Monson says he wishes to see you particular, sir," said he.

"Well--I'll see him," said I. I despised him too much to dislike him, and I thought he might possibly be in want. But that notion vanished the instant I set eyes upon him. He was obviously at the very top of the wave. "h.e.l.lo, Monson," was my greeting, in it no reminder of his treachery.

"Howdy, Blacklock," said he. "I've come on a little errand for Mrs.

Langdon." Then, with that nasty grin of his: "You know, I'm looking after things for her since the bust-up."

"No, I didn't--know," said I curtly, suppressing my instant curiosity.

"What does Mrs. Langdon want?"

"To see you--for just a few minutes--whenever it is convenient."

"If Mrs. Langdon has business with me, I'll see her at my office," said I.

She was one of the fas.h.i.+onables that had got herself into my black books by her treatment of Anita since the break with the Ellerslys.

"She wishes to come to you here--this afternoon, if you are to be at home.

She asked me to say that her business is important--and very private."

I hesitated, but I could think of no good excuse for refusing. "I'll be here an hour," said I. "Good day."

He gave me no time to change my mind.

Something--perhaps it was his curious expression as he took himself off--made me begin to regret. The more I thought of the matter, the less I thought of my having made any civil concession to a woman who had acted so badly toward Anita and myself. He had not been gone a quarter of an hour before I went to Anita in her sitting-room. Always, the instant I entered the outer door of her part of our house, that powerful, intoxicating fascination that she had for me began to take possession of my senses. It was in every garment she wore. It seemed to linger in any place where she had been, for a long time after she left it. She was at a small desk by the window, was writing letters.

"May I interrupt?" said I. "Monson was here a few minutes ago--from Mrs.

Langdon. She wants to see me. I told him I would see her here. Then it occurred to me that perhaps I had been too good-natured. What do you think?"

I could not see her face, but only the back of her head, and the loose coils of magnetic hair and the white nape of her graceful neck. As I began to speak, she stopped writing, her pen suspended over the sheet of paper.

After I ended there was a long silence.

"I'll not see her," said I. "I don't quite understand why I yielded." And I turned to go.

"Wait--please," came from her abruptly.

Another long silence. Then I: "If she comes here, I think the only person who can properly receive her is you."

"No--you must see her," said Anita at last. And she turned round in her chair until she was facing me. Her expression--I can not describe it. I can only say that it gave me a sense of impending calamity.

"I'd rather not--much rather not," said I.

"I particularly wish you to see her," she replied, and she turned back to her writing. I saw her pen poised as if she were about to begin; but she did not begin--and I felt that she would not. With my mind shadowed with vague dread, I left that mysterious stillness, and went back to the library.