The Deluge Part 4

"That puzzled look was a mistake, Langdon," said I, laughing at him. "When you don't know anything about a matter, you look merely blank. You overdid it; you've given yourself away."

He shrugged his shoulders. "As you please," said he. As you please was his favorite expression; a stereotyped irony, for in dealing with him, things were never as _you_ pleased, but always as _he_ pleased.

"Next time you want to dig a mine under anybody," I went on, "don't hire Saxe. Really I feel sorry for you--to have such a clever scheme messed by such an a.s.s."

"If you don't mind, I'd like to know what you're talking about," said he, with his patient, bored look.

"As you and Roebuck own the governor, I know your little law ends my little ca.n.a.l."

"Still I don't know what you're talking about," drawled he. "You are always suspecting everybody of double-dealing. I gather that this is another instance of your infirmity. Really, Blacklock, the world isn't wholly made up of scoundrels."

"I know that," said I. "And I will even admit that its scoundrels are seldom made up wholly of scoundrelism. Even Roebuck would rather do the decent thing, if he can do it without endangering his personal interests.

As for you--I regard you as one of the decentest men I ever knew--outside of business. And even there, I believe you'd keep your word, as long as the other fellow kept his."

"Thank you," said he, bowing ironically. "This flattery makes me suspect you've come to get something."

"On the contrary," said I. "I want to give something. I want to give you my coal mines."

"I thought you'd see that our offer was fair," said he. "And I'm glad you have changed your mind about quarreling with your best friends. We can be useful to you, you to us. A break would be silly."

"That's the way it looks to me," I a.s.sented. And I decided that my sharp talk to Roebuck had set them to estimating my value to them.

"Sam Ellersly," Langdon presently remarked, "tells me he's campaigning hard for you at the Travelers. I hope you'll make it. We're rather a slow crowd; a few men like you might stir things up."

I am always more than willing to give others credit for good sense and good motives. It was not vanity, but this disposition to credit others with sincerity and sense, that led me to believe him, both as to the Coal matter and as to the Travelers Club. "Thanks, Langdon," I said; and that he might look no further for my motive, I added: "I want to get into that club much as the winner of a race wants the medal that belongs to him. I've built myself up into a rich man, into one of the powers in finance, and I feel I'm ent.i.tled to recognition."

"I don't quite follow you," he said. "I can't see that you'll be either better or worse for getting into the Travelers."

"No more I shall," replied I. "No more is the winner of the race the better or the worse for having the medal. But he wants it."

He had a queer expression. I suppose he regarded it as a joke, my attaching apparently so much importance to a thing he cared nothing about. "You've always had that sort of thing," said I, "and so you don't appreciate it.

You're like a respectable woman. She can't imagine what all the fuss over women keeping a good reputation is about. Well, just let her lose it!"

"Perhaps," said he.

"And," I went on, "you can have the rule about the waiting list suspended, and can move me up and get me in at once."

"We don't do things in quite such a hurry at the Travelers," said he, laughing. "However, we'll try to comply with your commands."

His generous, cordial offer made me half ashamed of the plot I had underneath my submission about the coal mines--a plot to get into the coal combine in order to gather the means to destroy it, and perhaps reconstruct it with myself in control. I made up my mind that, if he continued to act squarely, I would alter those plans.

"If you don't mind," Langdon was going on, "I'll make a suggestion--merely a suggestion. It might not be a bad idea for you to arrange to--to eliminate some of the--the popular features from your--brokerage business.

There are several influential members of the Travelers who have a--a prejudice--"

"I understand," I interposed, to spare him the necessity of saying things he thought I might regard as impertinent. "They look on me as a keeper of a high-cla.s.s bucket-shop." "That's about the way they'd put it."

"But the things they object to are, unfortunately, my 'strong hold,'" I explained. "You other big fellows gather in the big investors by simply announcing your projects in a dignified way. I haven't got the ear of that cla.s.s of people. I have to send out my letters, have to advertise in all the cities and towns, have to catch the little fellows. You can afford to send out engraved invitations; I have to gather in my people with bra.s.s bands and megaphones. Don't forget that my people count in the totals bigger than yours. And what's my chief value to you? Why, when you want to unload, I furnish the crowd to unload on, the crowd that gives you and your big customers cash for your water and wind. I don't see my way to letting go of what I've got until I get hold of what I'm reaching for." All this with not a suspicion in my mind that he was at the same game that had caused Roebuck to "hint" that same proposal. What a "con man" high finance got when Mowbray Langdon became active down town!

"That's true," he admitted, with a great air of frankness. "But the cry that you're not a financier, but a bucket-shop man, might be fatal at the Travelers. Of course, the sacrifice would be large for such a small object.

Still, you might have to make it--if you really want to get in."

"I'll think it over," said I. He thought I meant that I'd think over dropping my power--thought I was as big a sn.o.b as he and his friends of the Travelers, willing to make any sacrifice to be "in the push." But, while Matthew Blacklock has the streak of sn.o.b in him that's natural to all human beings and to most animals, he is not quite insane. No, the thing I intended to think over was how to stay in the "bucket-shop" business, but wash myself of its odium. Bucket-shop! What sn.o.bbery! Yet it's human nature, too. The wholesale merchant looks down on the retailer, the big retailer on the little; the burglar despises the pickpocket; the financier, the small promoter; the man who works with his brain, the man who works with his hands. A silly lot we are--silly to look down, sillier to feel badly when we're looked down upon.

VI. OF "GENTLEMEN"

When I got back to my office and was settling in to the proofs of the "Letter to Investors," which I published in sixty newspapers throughout the country and which daily reached upward of five million people, Sam Ellersly came in. His manner was certainly different from what it had ever been before; a difference so subtle that I couldn't describe it more nearly than to say it made me feel as if he had not until then been treating me as of the same cla.s.s with himself. I smiled to myself and made an entry in my mental ledger to the credit of Mowbray Langdon.

"That club business is going nicely," said Sam. "Langdon is enthusiastic, and I find you've got good friends on the committee."

I knew that well enough. Hadn't I been carrying them on my books at a good round loss for two years?

"If it wasn't for--for some features of this business of yours," he went on, "I'd say there wouldn't be the slightest trouble."

"Bucket-shop?" said I with an easy laugh, though this nagging was beginning to get on my nerves.

"Exactly," said he. "And, you know, you advertise yourself like--like--"

"Like everybody else, only more successfully than most," said I. "Everybody advertises, each one adapting his advertising to the needs of his enterprises, as far as he knows how."

"That's true enough," he confessed. "But there are enterprises and enterprises, you know."

"You can tell 'em, Sam," said I, "that I never put out a statement I don't believe to be true, and that when any of my followers lose on one of my tips, I've lost on it, too. For I play my own tips--and that's more than can be said of any 'financier' in this town."

"It'd be no use to tell 'em that," said he. "Character's something of a consideration in social matters, of course. But it isn't the chief consideration by a long shot, and the absence of it isn't necessarily fatal."

"I'm the biggest single operator in the country," I went on. "And it's my methods that give me success--because I know how to advertise--how to keep my name before the country, and how to make men say, whenever they hear it: 'There's a shrewd, honest fellow.' That and the people it brings me, in flocks, are my stock in trade. Honesty's a bluff with most of the big respectables; under cover of their respectability, of their 'old and honored names,' of their social connections, of their church-going and that, they do all sorts of queer work."

"To hear you talk," put in Sam, with a grin, "one would think you didn't shove off millions of dollars of suspicious stuff on the public through those d.a.m.n clever letters of yours."

"There's where you didn't stop to think, Sam," said I. "When I say a stock's going to rise, it rises. When I stop talking about it, it may go on rising or it may fall. But I never advise anybody to buy except when I have every reason to believe it's a good thing. If they hold on too long, that's their own lookout."

"But they invest--"

"You use words too carelessly," I said. "When I say buy, I don't mean _invest_. When I mean invest, I say invest." There I laughed. "It's a word I don't often use."

"And that's what you call honesty!" jeered he.

"That's what I call honesty," I retorted, "and that _is_ honesty." And I thought so then.

"Well--every man has a right to his own notion of what's honest," he said.

"But no man's got a right to complain if a fellow with a different notion criticizes him."

"None in the world," I a.s.sented. "Do _you_ criticize me?"

"No, no, no, indeed!" he answered, nervous, and taking seriously what I had intended as a joke.