I was neither seeing nor hearing from the Ellerslys, father or son; but,
as I knew why, I was not disquieted. I had made them temporarily easy in
their finances just before that dinner, and they, being fatuous, incurable
optimists, were probably imagining they would never need me again. I did
not disturb them until Monson and I had got my education so well under
way that even I, always severe in self-criticism and now merciless, was
compelled to admit to myself a distinct change for the better. You know
how it is with a boy at the “growing age”--how he bursts out of clothes
and ideas of life almost as fast as they are supplied him, so swiftly is
he transforming into a man. Well, I think it is much that way with us
Americans all our lives; we continue on and on at the growing age. And
if one of us puts his or her mind hard upon growth in some particular
direction, you see almost overnight a development fledged to the last
tail-feathers and tip of top-knot where there was nothing at all. What
miracles can be wrought by an open mind and a keen sense of the cumulative
power of the unwasted minute! All this apropos of a very trivial matter,
you may be thinking. But, be careful how you judge what is trivial and what
important in a universe built up of atoms.
However--When my education seemed far enough advanced, I sent for Sam.
He, after his footless fashion, didn't bother to acknowledge my note. His
margin account with me was at the moment straight; I turned to his father.
I had my cashier send him a formal, type-written letter signed Blacklock &
Co., informing him that his account was overdrawn and that we “would be
obliged if he would give the matter his immediate attention.” The note must
have reached him the following morning; but he did not come until, after
waiting three days, “we” sent him a sharp demand for a check for the
balance due us.
A pleasing, aristocratic-looking figure he made as he entered my office,
with his air of the man whose hands have never known the stains of toil,
with his manner of having always received deferential treatment. There
was no pretense in my curt greeting, my tone of “despatch your business,
sir, and be gone”; for I was both busy and much irritated against him.
“I guess you want to see our cashier,” said I, after giving him a hasty,
absent-minded hand-shake. “My boy out there will take you to him.”
The old do-nothing's face lost its confident, condescending expression. His
lip quivered, and I think there were tears in his bad, dim, gray-green
eyes. I suppose he thought his a profoundly pathetic case; no doubt he
hadn't the remotest conception what he really was--and no doubt, also,
there are many who would honestly take his view. As if the fact that he
was born with all possible advantages did not make him and his plight
inexcusable. It passes my comprehension why people of his sort, when
suffering from the calamities they have deliberately brought upon
themselves by laziness and self-indulgence and extravagance, should get
a sympathy that is withheld from those of the honest human rank and file
falling into far more real misfortunes not of their own making.
“No, my dear Blacklock,” said he, cringing now as easily as he had
condescended--how to cringe and how to condescend are taught at the same
school, the one he had gone to all his life. “It is you I want to talk
with. And, first, I owe you my apologies. I know you'll make allowances
for one who was never trained to business methods. I've always been like a
child in those matters.”
“You frighten me,” said I. “The last 'gentleman' who came throwing me off
my guard with that plea was shrewd enough to get away with a very large
sum of my hard-earned money. Besides”--and I was laughing, though not too
good-naturedly--“I've noticed that you 'gentlemen' become vague about
business only when the balance is against you. When it's in your favor, you
manage to get your minds on business long enough to collect to the last
fraction of a cent.”
He heartily echoed my laugh. “I only wish I _were_ clever,” said he.
“However, I've come to ask your indulgence. I'd have been here before,
but those who owe me have been putting me off. And they're of the sort of
people whom it's impossible to press.”
“I'd like to accommodate you further,” said I, shedding that last little
hint as a cliff sheds rain, “but your account has been in an unsatisfactory
state for nearly a month now.”
“I'm sure you'll give me a few days longer,” was his easy reply, as if we
were discussing a trifle. “By the way, you haven't been to see us yet. Only
this morning my wife was wondering when you'd come. You quite captivated
her, Blacklock. Can't you dine with us to-morrow night--no, Sunday--at
eight? We're having in a few people I think you'd like to meet.”
If any one imagines that this bald, businesslike way of putting it set
my teeth on edge, let him dismiss the idea; my nerves had been too long
accustomed to the feel of the harsh facts of life. It is evidence of the
shrewdness of the old fellow at character-reading that he wasted none of
his silk and velvet pretenses upon me, and so saved his time and mine.
Probably he wished me to see that I need have no timidity or false shame in
dealing with him, that when the time came to talk business I was free to
talk it in my own straight fashion.
“Glad to come,” said I, wishing to be rid of him, now that my point was
gained. “We'll let the account stand open for the present--I rather think
your stocks are going up. Give my regards to--the ladies, please,
especially to Miss Anita.”
He winced, but thanked me graciously; gave me his soft, fine hand to shake
and departed, as eager to be off as I to be rid of him. “Sunday next--at
eight,” were his last words. “Don't fail us”--that in the tone of a king
addressing some obscure person whom he had commanded to court. It may be
that old Ellersly was wholly unconscious of his superciliousness, fancied
he was treating me as if I were almost an equal; but I suspect he rather
accentuated his natural manner, with the idea of impressing upon me that
in our deal he was giving at least as much as I.
I recall that I thought about him for several minutes after he was
gone--philosophized on the folly of a man's deliberately weaving a net to
entangle himself. As if any man was ever caught in any net not of his own
weaving and setting; as if I myself were not just then working at the last
row of meshes of a net in which I was to ensnare myself.
My petty and inevitable success with that helpless creature added
amazingly, ludicrously, to that dangerous elation which, as I can now see,
had been growing in me ever since the day Roebuck yielded so readily to my
demands as to National Coal. The whole trouble with me was that up to that
time I had won all my victories by the plainest kind of straightaway hard
work. I was imagining myself victor in contests of wit against wit, when,
in fact, no one with any especial equipment of brains had ever opposed me;
all the really strong men had been helping me because they found me useful.
Too easy success--there is the clue to the wild folly of my performances in
those days, a folly that seems utterly inconsistent with the reputation for
shrewdness I had, and seemed to have earned.
I can find a certain small amount of legitimate excuse for my falling under
Langdon's spell. He had, and has, fascinations, through personal magnetism,
which it is hardly in human nature to resist. But for my self-hypnotism in
the case of Roebuck, I find no excuse whatever for myself.
He sent for me and told me what share in National Coal they had decided to
give me for my Manasquale mines. “Langdon and Melville,” said he, “think me
too liberal; far too liberal, my boy. But I insisted--in your case I felt
we could afford to be generous as well as just.” All this with an air that
was a combination of the pastor and the parent.
I can't even offer the excuse of not having seen that he was a hypocrite.
I felt his hypocrisy at once, and my first impulse was to jump for my
breastworks. But instantly my vanity got behind me, held me in the open,
pushed me on toward him. If you will notice, almost all “confidence” games
rely for success chiefly upon enlisting a man's vanity to play the traitor
to his judgment. So, instead of reading his liberality as plain proof of
intended treachery, I read it as plain proof of my own greatness, and of
the fear it had inspired in old Roebuck. Laugh _with_ me if you like;
but, before you laugh _at_ me, think carefully--those of you who have
ever put yourselves to the test on the field of action--think carefully
whether you have never found that your head decoration which you thought a
crown was in reality the peaked and belled cap of the fool.
But my vanity was not done with me. Led on by it, I proceeded to have one
of those ridiculous “generous impulses”--I persuaded myself that there must
be some decency in this liberality, in addition to the prudence which I
flattered myself was the chief cause. “I have been unjust to Roebuck,” I
thought. “I have been misjudging his character.” And incredible though it
seems, I said to him with a good deal of genuine emotion: “I don't know
how to thank you, Mr. Roebuck. And, instead of trying, I want to apologize
to you. I have thought many hard things against you; have spoken some of
them. I had better have been attending to my own conscience, instead of
criticizing yours.”
I had often thought his face about the most repulsive, hypocrisy-glozed
concourse of evil passions that ever fronted a fiend in the flesh. It had
seemed to me the fitting result of a long career which, according to common
report, was stained with murder, with rapacity and heartless cruelty, with
the most brutal secret sensuality, and which had left in its wake the ruins
of lives and hearts and fortunes innumerable. I had looked on the vast
wealth he had heaped mountain high as a monument to devil-daring--other men
had, no doubt, dreamed of doing the ferocious things he had done, but their
weak, human hearts failed when it came to executing such horrible acts, and
they had to be content with smaller fortunes, with the comparatively small
fruits of their comparatively small infamies. He had dared all, had won;
the most powerful bowed with quaking knees before him, and trembled lest
they might, by a blundering look or word, excite his anger and cause him to
snatch their possessions from them.
Thus I had regarded him, accepting the universal judgment, believing the
thousand and one stories. But as his eyes, softened by his hugely generous
act, beamed upon me now, I was amazed that I had so misjudged him. In that
face which I had thought frightful there was, to my hypnotized gaze, the
look of strong, sincere--yes, holy--beauty and power--the look of an
archangel.
“Thank you, Blacklock,” said he, in a voice that made me feel as if I were
a little boy in the crossroads church, believing I could almost see the
angels floating above the heads of the singers in the choir behind the
preacher. “Thank you. I am not surprised that you have misjudged me. God
has given me a great work to do, and those who do His will in this wicked
world must expect martyrdom. I should never have had the courage to do what
I have done, what He has done through me, had He not guided my every step.
You are not a religious man?”
“I try to do what's square,” said I. “But I'd prefer not to talk about it.”
“That's right! That's right!” he approved earnestly. “A man's religion is
a matter between himself and his God. But I hope, Matthew, you will never
forget that, unless you have daily, hourly communion with Almighty God,
you will never be able to bear the great burdens, to do the great work
fearlessly, disregarding the lies of the wicked, and, hardest of all to
endure, the honestly-mistaken judgments of honest men.”
“I'll look into it,” said I. And I don't know to what lengths of foolish
speech I should have gone had I not been saved by an office boy
interrupting with a card for him.
“Ah, here's Walters now,” said he. Then to the boy: “Bring him in when I
ring.”