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The Deluge, a novel by David Graham Phillips |
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Chapter 28. Blacklock Sees A Light |
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_ CHAPTER XXVIII. BLACKLOCK SEES A LIGHT It was next day, I think, that I met Mowbray Langdon and his brother Tom in the entrance of the Textile Building. Mowbray was back only a week from his summer abroad; but Tom I had seen and nodded to every day, often several times in the same day, as he went to and fro about his "respectable" dirty work for the Roebuck-Langdon clique. He was one of their most frequently used stool-pigeon directors in banks and insurance companies whose funds they staked in their big gambling operations, they taking almost all the profits and the depositors and policy holders taking almost all the risk. It had never once occurred to me to have any feeling of any kind about Tom, or in any way to take him into my calculations as to Anita. He was, to my eyes, too obviously a pale understudy of his powerful and fascinating brother. Whenever I thought of him as the man Anita fancied she loved, I put it aside instantly. "The kind of man a woman _really_ cares for," I would say to myself, "is the measure of her true self. But not the kind of man she _imagines_ she cares for." Tom went on; Mowbray stopped. We shook hands, and exchanged commonplaces in the friendliest way--I was harboring no resentment against him, and I wished him to realize that his assault had bothered me no more than the buzzing and battering of a summer fly. "I've been trying to get in to see you," said he. "I wanted to explain about that unfortunate Textile deal." This, when the assault on me had burst out with fresh energy the day after he landed from Europe! I could scarcely believe that his vanity, his confidence in his own skill at underground work could so delude him. "Don't bother," said I. "All that's ancient history." But he had thought out some lies he regarded as particularly creditable to his ingenuity; he was not to be deprived of the pleasure of telling them. So I was compelled to listen; and, being in an indulgent mood, I did not spoil his pleasure by letting him see or suspect my unbelief. If he could have looked into my mind, as I stood there in an attitude of patient attention, I think even his self-complacence would have been put out of countenance. You may admire the exploits of a "gentleman" cracksman or pickpocket, if you hear or read them with only their ingenuity put before you. But _see_ a "gentleman" liar or thief at his sneaking, cowardly work, and admiration is impossible. As Langdon lied on, as I studied his cheap, vulgar exhibition of himself, he all unconscious, I thought: "Beneath that very thin surface of yours, you're a poor cowardly creature--you, and all your fellow bandits. No; bandit is too grand a word to apply to this game of 'high finance.' It's really on the level with the game of the fellow that waits for a dark night, slips into the barn-yard, poisons the watch-dog, bores an auger-hole in the granary, and takes to his heels at a suspicious sound." With his first full stop, I said: "I understand perfectly, Langdon. But I haven't the slightest interest in crooked enterprises now. I'm clear out of all you fellows' stocks. I've reinvested my property so that not even a panic would trouble me." "That's good," he drawled. I saw he did not believe me--which was natural, as he knew nothing of my arrangement with Galloway and assumed I was laboring in heavy weather, with a bad cargo of Coal stocks and contracts. "Come to lunch with me. I've got some interesting things to tell you about my trip." A few months before, I should have accepted with alacrity. But I had lost interest in him. He had not changed; if anything, he was more dazzling than ever in the ways that had once dazzled me. It was I that had changed--my ideals, my point of view. I had no desire to feed my new-sprung contempt by watching him pump in vain for information to be used in his secret campaign against me. "No, thanks. Another day," I replied, and left him with a curt nod. I noted that he had failed to speak of my marriage, though he had not seen me since. "A sore subject with all the Langdons," thought I. "It must be very sore, indeed, to make a man who is all manners, neglect them." My whole life had been a series of transformations so continuous that I had noted little about my advance, beyond its direction--like a man hurrying up a steep that keeps him bent, eyes down. But, as I turned away from Langdon, I caught myself in the very act of transformation. No doubt, the new view had long been there, its horizon expanding with every step of my ascent; but not until that talk with him did I see it. I looked about me in Wall Street; in my mind's eye I all in an instant saw my world as it really was. I saw the great rascals of "high finance," their respectability stripped from them; saw them gathering in the spoils which their cleverly-trained agents, commercial and political and legal, filched with light fingers from the pockets of the crowd, saw the crowd looking up to these trainers and employers of pickpockets, hailing them "captains of industry"! They reaped only where and what others had sown; they touched industry only to plunder and to blight it; they organized it only that its profits might go to those who did not toil and who despised those who did. "Have I gone mad in the midst of sane men?" I asked myself. "Or have I been mad, and have I suddenly become sane in a lunatic world?" I did not linger on that problem. For me action remained the essential of life, whether I was sane or insane. I resolved then and there to map a new course. By toiling like a sailor at the pump of a sinking ship, I had taken advantage to the uttermost of the respite Galloway's help had given me. My property was no longer in more or less insecure speculative "securities," but was, as I had told Langdon, in forms that would withstand the worst shocks. The attacks of my enemies, directed partly at my fortune, or, rather, at the stocks in which they imagined it was still invested, and partly at my personal character, were doing me good instead of harm. Hatred always forgets that its shafts, falling round its intended victim, spring up as legions of supporters for him. My business was growing rapidly; my daily letter to investors was read by hundreds of thousands where tens of thousands had read it before the Roebuck-Langdon clique began to make me famous by trying to make me infamous. "I am strong and secure," said I to myself as I strode through the wonderful canyon of Broadway, whose walls are those mighty palaces of finance and commerce from which business men have been ousted by cormorant "captains of industry." I must _use_ my strength. How could I better use it than by fluttering these vultures on their roosts, and perhaps bringing down a bird or two? I decided, however, that it was better to wait until they had stopped rattling their beaks and claws on my shell in futile attack. "Meanwhile," I reasoned carefully, "I can be getting good and ready." Their first new move, after my little talk with Langdon, was intended as a mortal blow to my credit Melville requested me to withdraw mine and Blacklock and Company's accounts from the National Industrial Bank; and the fact that this huge and powerful institution had thus branded me was slyly given to the financial reporters of the newspapers. Far and wide it was published; and the public was expected to believe that this was one more and drastic measure in the "campaign of the honorable men of finance to clean the Augean Stables of Wall Street." My daily letter to investors next morning led off with this paragraph--the first notice I had taken publicly of their attacks on me: "In the effort to discredit the only remaining uncontrolled source of financial truth, the big bandits have ordered my accounts out of their chief gambling-house. I have transferred the accounts to the Discount and Deposit National, where Leonidas Thornley stands guard against the new order that seeks to make business a synonym for crime." Thornley was of the type that was dominant in our commercial life before the "financiers" came--just as song birds were common in our trees until the noisy, brawling, thieving sparrows drove them out. His oldest son was about to marry Joe's daughter--Alva. Many a Sunday I have spent at his place near Morristown--a charming combination of city comfort with farm freedom and fresh air. I remember, one Sunday, saying to him, after he had seen his wife and daughters off to church: "Why haven't you got rich? Why haven't you looked out for establishing these boys and girls of yours?" "I don't want my girls to be sought for money," said he, "I don't want my boys to rely on money. Perhaps I've seen too much of wealth, and have come to have a prejudice against it. Then, too, I've never had the chance to get rich." I showed that I thought that he was simply jesting. "I mean it," said he, looking at me with eyes as straight as a well-brought-up girl's. "How could my mind be judicial if I were personally interested in the enterprises people look to me for advice about?" And not only did he keep himself clear and his mind judicial but also he was, like all really good people, exceedingly slow to believe others guilty of the things he would as soon have thought of doing as he would have thought of slipping into the teller's cage during the lunch hour and pocketing a package of bank-notes. He gave me his motto--a curious one: "Believe in everybody; trust in nobody." "Only a thief wishes to be trusted," he explained, "and only a fool trusts. I let no one trust me; I trust no one. But I believe evil of no man. Even when he has been convicted, I see the mitigating circumstances." How Thornley did stand by me! And for no reason except that it was as necessary for him to be fair and just as to breathe. I shall not say he resisted the attempts to compel him to desert me--they simply made no impression on him. I remember, when Roebuck himself, a large stock-holder in the bank, left cover far enough personally to urge him to throw me over, he replied steadfastly: "If Mr. Blacklock is guilty of circulating false stories against commercial enterprises, as his enemies allege, the penal code can be used to stop him. But as long as I stay at the head of this bank, no man shall use it for personal vengeance. It is a chartered public institution, and all have equal rights to its facilities. I would lend money to my worst enemy, if he came for it with the proper security. I would refuse my best friend, if he could not give security. The funds of a bank are a trust fund, and my duty is to see that they are employed to the best advantage. If you wish other principles to prevail here, you must get another president." That settled it. No one appreciated more keenly than did Roebuck that character is as indispensable in its place as is craft where the situation demands craft--and is far harder to get. I shall not relate in detail that campaign against me. It failed not so much because I was strong as because it was weak. Perhaps, if Roebuck and Langdon could have directed it in person, or had had the time to advise with their agents before and after each move, it might have succeeded. They would not have let exaggeration dominate it and venom show upon its surface; they would not have neglected to follow up advantages, would not have persisted in lines of attack that created public sympathy for me. They would not have so crudely exploited my unconventional marriage and my financial relations with old Ellersly. But they dared not go near the battle-field; they had to trust to agents whom their orders and suggestions reached by the most roundabout ways; and they were busier with their enterprises that involved immediate and great gain or loss of money. When Galloway died, they learned that the Coal stocks with which they thought I was loaded down were part of his estate. They satisfied themselves that I was in fact as impregnable as I had warned Langdon. They reversed tactics; Roebuck tried to make it up with me. "If he wants to see me," was my invariable answer to the intimations of his emissaries, "let him come to my office, just as I would go to his, if I wished to see him." "He is a big man--a dangerous big man," cautioned Joe. "Big--yes. But strong only against his own kind," replied I. "One mouse can make a whole herd of elephants squeal for mercy." "It isn't prudent, it isn't prudent," persisted Joe. "It is not," replied I. "Thank God, I'm at last in the position I've been toiling to achieve. I don't have to be prudent. I can say and do what I please, without fear of the consequences. I can freely indulge in the luxury of being a man. That's costly, Joe, but it's worth all it could cost." Joe didn't understand me--he rarely did. "I'm a hen. You're an eagle," said he. _ |
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