The Deluge Part 39

"Touching self-sacrifice," said I ironically.

"No," she replied. "I can not claim any credit. I sent him away only because you and Alva had taught me how to judge him better. I do not despise him as do you; I know too well what has made him what he is. But I had to send him away."

My comment was an incredulous look and shrug. "I must be going," I said.

"You do not believe me?" she asked.

"In my place, would you believe?" replied I. "You say I have taught you.

Well, you have taught me, too--for instance, that the years you've spent on your knees in the musty temple of conventionality before false G.o.ds have made you--fit only for the Langdon sort of thing. You can't learn how to stand erect, and your eyes can not bear the light."

"I am sorry," she said slowly, hesitatingly, "that your faith in me died just when I might, perhaps, have justified it. Ours has been a pitiful series of misunderstandings."

"A trap! A trap!" I was warning myself. "You've been a fool long enough, Blacklock." And aloud I said: "Well, Anita, the series is ended now.

There's no longer any occasion for our lying or posing to each other.

Any arrangements your uncle's lawyers suggest will be made."

I was bowing, to leave without shaking hands with her. But she would not have it so. "Please!" she said, stretching out her long, slender arm and offering me her hand.

What a devil possessed me that day! With every atom of me longing for her, I yet was able to take her hand and say, with a smile, that was, I doubt not, as mocking as my tone: "By all means let us be friends. And I trust you will not think me discourteous if I say that I shall feel safer in our friends.h.i.+p when we are both on neutral ground."

As I was turning away, her look, my own heart, made me turn again. I caught her by the shoulders. I gazed into her eyes. "If I could only trust you, could only believe you!" I cried.

"You cared for me when I wasn't worth it," she said. "Now that I am more like what you once imagined me, you do not care."

Up between us rose Langdon's face--cynical, mocking, contemptuous. "Your heart is _his_! You told me so! Don't _lie_ to me!" I exclaimed.

And before she could reply, I was gone.

Out from under the spell of her presence, back among the tricksters and a.s.sa.s.sins, the traps and ambushes of Wall Street, I believed again; believed firmly the promptings of the devil that possessed me. "She would have given you a brief fool's paradise," said that devil. "Then what a hideous awakening!" And I cursed the day when New York's insidious sn.o.bbishness had tempted my vanity into starting me on that degrading chase after "respectability."

"If she does not move to free herself soon," said I to myself, "I will put my own lawyer to work. My right eye offends me. I will pluck it out."

x.x.xV. "WILD WEEK"

"The Seven" made their fatal move on treacherous Updegraff's treacherous advice, I suspect. But they would not have adopted his suggestion had it not been so exactly congenial to their own temper of arrogance and tyranny and contempt for the people who meekly, year after year, presented themselves for the shearing with fatuous bleats of enthusiasm.

"The Seven," of course, controlled directly, or indirectly, all but a few of the newspapers with which I had advertising contracts. They also controlled the main sources through which the press was supplied with news--and often and well they had used this control, and surprisingly cautious had they been not so to abuse it that the editors and the public would become suspicious. When my war was at its height, when I was beginning to congratulate myself that the huge magazines of "The Seven"

were empty almost to the point at which they must sue for peace on my own terms, all in four days forty-three of my sixty-seven newspapers--and they the most important--notified me that they would no longer carry out their contracts to publish my daily letter. They gave as their reason, not the real one, fear of "The Seven," but fear that I would involve them in ruinous libel suits. I who had _legal_ proof for every statement I made; I who was always careful to understate! Next, one press a.s.sociation after another ceased to send out my letter as news, though they had been doing so regularly for months. The public had grown tired of the "sensation," they said.

I countered with a telegram to one or more newspapers in every city and large town in the United States:

"'The Seven' are trying to cut the wires between the truth and the public.

If you wish my daily letter, telegraph me direct and I will send it at my expense."

The response should have warned "The Seven." But it did not. Under their orders the telegraph companies refused to transmit the letter. I got an injunction. It was obeyed in typical, corrupt corporation fas.h.i.+on--they sent my matter, but so garbled that it was unintelligible. I appealed to the courts. In vain.

To me, it was clear as sun in cloudless noonday sky that there could be but one result of this insolent and despotic denial of my rights and the rights of the people, this public confession of the truth of my charges. I turned everything salable or mortgageable into cash, locked the cash up in my private vaults, and waited for the cataclysm.

Thursday--Friday--Sat.u.r.day. Apparently all was tranquil; apparently the people accepted the Wall Street theory that I was an "exploded sensation."

"The Seven" began to preen themselves; the strain upon them to maintain prices, if no less than for three months past, was not notably greater; the crisis would pa.s.s, I and my exposures would be forgotten, the routine of reaping the harvests and leaving only the gleanings for the sowers would soon be placidly resumed.

Sunday. Roebuck, taken ill as he was pa.s.sing the basket in the church of which he was the s.h.i.+ning light, died at midnight--a beautiful, peaceful death, they say, with his daughter reading the Bible aloud, and his lips moving in prayer. Some hold that, had he lived, the tranquillity would have continued; but this is the view of those who can not realize that the tide of affairs is no more controlled by the "great men" than is the river led down to the sea by its surface flotsam, by which we measure the speed and direction of its current. Under that terrific tension, which to the shallow seemed a calm, something had to give way. If the dam had not yielded where Roebuck stood guard, it must have yielded somewhere else, or might have gone all in one grand crash.

Monday. You know the story of the artist and his Statue of Grief--how he molded the features a hundred times, always failing, always getting an anti-climax, until at last in despair he gave up the impossible and finished the statue with a veil over the face. I have tried again and again to a.s.semble words that would give some not too inadequate impression of that tremendous week in which, with a succession of explosions, each like the crack of doom, the financial structure that housed eighty millions of people burst, collapsed, was engulfed. I can not. I must leave it to your memory or your imagination.

For years the financial leaders, crazed by the excess of power which the people had in ignorance and over-confidence and slovenly good-nature permitted them to acquire, had been tearing out the honest foundations on which alone so vast a structure can hope to rest solid and secure. They had been subst.i.tuting rotten beams painted to look like stone and iron.

The crash had to come; the sooner, the better--when a thing is wrong, each day's delay compounds the cost of righting it. So, with all the horrors of "Wild Week" in mind, all its physical and mental suffering, all its ruin and rioting and bloodshed, I still can insist that I am justly proud of my share in bringing it about. The blame and the shame are wholly upon those who made "Wild Week" necessary and inevitable.

In catastrophes, the cry is "Each for himself!" But in a cataclysm, the obvious wise selfishness is generosity, and the cry is, "Stand together, for, singly, we perish." This was a cataclysm. No one could save himself, except the few who, taking my often-urged advice and following my example, had entered the ark of ready money. Farmer and artisan and professional man and laborer owed merchant; merchant owed banker; banker owed depositor. No one could pay because no one could get what was due him or could realize upon his property. The endless chain of credit that binds together the whole of modern society had snapped in a thousand places. It must be repaired, instantly and securely. But how--and by whom?

I issued a clear statement of the situation; I showed in minute detail how the people standing together under the leaders.h.i.+p of the honest men of property could easily force the big bandits to consent to an honest, just, rock-founded, iron-built reconstruction. My statement appeared in all the morning papers throughout the land. Turn back to it; read it. You will say that I was right. Well--

Toward two o'clock Inspector Crawford came into my private office, escorted by Joe. I saw in Joe's seamed, green-gray face that some new danger had arisen. "You've got to get out of this," said he. "The mob in front of our place fills the three streets. It's made up of crowds turned away from the suspended banks."

I remembered the sullen faces and the hisses as I entered the office that morning earlier than usual. My windows were closed to keep out the street noises; but now that my mind was up from the work in which I had been absorbed, I could hear the sounds of many voices, even through the thick plate gla.s.s.

"We've got two hundred policemen here," said the inspector. "Five hundred more are on the way. But--really, Mr. Blacklock, unless we can get you away, there'll be serious trouble. Those d.a.m.n newspapers! Every one of them denounced you this morning, and the people are in a fury against you."

I went toward the door.

"Hold on, Matt!" cried Joe, springing at me and seizing me, "Where are you going?"

"To tell them what I think of them," replied I, sweeping him aside. For my blood was up, and I was enraged against the poor cowardly fools.

"For G.o.d's sake don't show yourself!" he begged. "If you don't care for your own life, think of the rest of us. We've fixed a route through buildings and under streets up to Broadway. Your electric is waiting for you there."

"It won't do," I said. "I'll face 'em--it's the only way."

I went to the window, and was about to throw up one of the sunblinds for a look at them; Crawford stopped me. "They'll stone the building and then storm it," said he. "You must go at once, by the route we've arranged."

"Even if you tell them I'm gone, they won't believe it," replied I.

"We can look out for that," said Joe, eager to save me, and caring nothing about consequences to himself. But I had unsettled the inspector.

"Send for my electric to come down here," said I. "I'll go out alone and get in it and drive away."

"That'll never do!" cried Joe.

But the inspector said: "You're right, Mr. Blacklock. It's a bare chance.

You may take 'em by surprise. Again, some fellow may yell and throw a stone and--" He did not need to finish.

Joe looked wildly at me. "You mustn't do it, Matt!" he exclaimed. "You'll precipitate a riot, Crawford, if you permit this."

But the inspector was telephoning for my electric. Then he went into the adjoining room, where he commanded a view of the entrance. Silence between Joe and me until he returned.

"The electric is coming down the street," said he.