There are two kinds of dangerous temptations--those that tempt us, and
those that don't. Those that don't, give us a false notion of our resisting
power, and so make us easy victims to the others. I thought I knew myself
pretty thoroughly, and I believed there was nothing that could tempt me
to neglect my business. With this delusion of my strength firmly in mind,
when Anita became a temptation to neglect business, I said to myself: “To
go up-town during business hours for long lunches, to spend the mornings
selecting flowers and presents for her--these things _look_ like
neglect of business, and would be so in some men. But _I_ couldn't
neglect business. I do them because my affairs are so well ordered that a
few hours of absence now and then make no difference--probably send me back
fresher and clearer.”
When I left the office at half-past twelve on that fateful Wednesday in
June, my business was never in better shape. Textile Common had dropped a
point and a quarter in two days--evidently it was at last on its way slowly
down toward where I could free myself and take profits. As for the Coal
enterprise nothing could possibly happen to disturb it; I was all ready for
the first of July announcement and boom. Never did I have a lighter heart
than when I joined Anita and her friends at Sherry's. It seemed to me her
friendliness was less perfunctory, less a matter of appearances. And the
sun was bright, the air delicious, my health perfect. It took all the
strength of all the straps Monson had put on my natural spirits to keep me
from being exuberant.
I had fully intended to be back at my office half an hour before the
Exchange closed--this in addition to the obvious precaution of leaving
orders that they were to telephone me if anything should occur about which
they had the least doubt. But so comfortable did my vanity make me that
I forgot to look at my watch until a quarter to three. I had a momentary
qualm; then, reassured, I asked Anita to take a walk with me. Before we set
out I telephoned my right-hand man and partner, Ball. As I had thought,
everything was quiet; the Exchange was closing with Textile sluggish and
down a quarter. Anita and I took a car to the park.
As we strolled about there, it seemed to me I was making more headway with
her than in all the times I had seen her since we became engaged. At each
meeting I had had to begin at the beginning once more, almost as if we
had never met; for I found that she had in the meanwhile taken on all, or
almost all, her original reserve. It was as if she forgot me the instant I
left her--not very flattering, that!
“You accuse me of refusing to get acquainted with you,” said I, “of
refusing to see that you're a different person from what I imagine. But how
about you? Why do you still stick to your first notion of me? Whatever I am
or am not, I'm not the person you condemned on sight.”
“You _have_ changed,” she conceded. “The way you dress--and sometimes
the way you act. Or, is it because I'm getting used to you?”
“No--it's--” I began, but stopped there. Some day I would confess about
Monson, but not yet. Also, I hoped the change wasn't altogether due to
Monson and the dancing-master and my imitation of the tricks of speech and
manner of the people in her set.
She did not notice my abrupt halt. Indeed, I often caught her at not
listening to me. I saw that she wasn't listening now.
“You didn't hear what I said,” I accused somewhat sharply, for I was
irritated--as who would not have been?
She started, gave me that hurried, apologetic look that was bitterer to me
than the most savage insult would have been.
“I beg your pardon,” she said. “We were talking of--of changes, weren't
we?”
“We were talking of _me_” I answered. “Of the subject that interests
you not at all.”
She looked at me in a forlorn sort of way that softened my irritation with
sympathy. “I've told you how it is with me,” she said. “I do my best to
please you. I--”
“Damn your best!” I cried. “Don't try to please _me_. Be yourself. I'm
no slave-driver. I don't have to be conciliated. Can't you ever see that
I'm not your tyrant? Do I treat you as any other man would feel he had the
right to treat the girl who had engaged herself to him? Do I ever thrust my
feelings or wishes--or--longings on you? And do you think repression easy
for a man of my temperament?”
“You have been very good,” she said humbly.
“Don't you ever say that to me again,” I half commanded, half pleaded. “I
won't have you always putting me in the position of a kind and indulgent
master.”
She halted and faced me.
“Why do you want me, anyhow?” she cried. Then she noticed several loungers
on a bench staring at us and grinning; she flushed and walked on.
“I don't know,” said I. “Because I'm a fool, probably. My common sense
tells me I can't hope to break through that shell of self-complacence
you've been cased in by your family and your associates. Sometimes I think
I'm mistaken in you, think there isn't any real, human blood left in your
veins, that you're like the rest of them--a human body whose heart and mind
have been taken out and a machine substituted--a machine that can say and
do only a narrow little range of conventional things--like one of those
French dolls.”
“You mustn't blame me for that,” she said gently. “I realize it, too--and
I'm ashamed of it. But--if you could know how I've been educated. They've
treated me as the Flathead Indian women treat their babies--keep their
skulls in a press--isn't that it?--until their heads and brains grow of
the Flathead pattern. Only, somehow, in my case--the process wasn't quite
complete. And so, instead of being contented like the other Flathead girls,
I'm--almost a rebel, at times. I'm neither the one thing nor the other--not
natural and not Flathead, not enough natural to grow away from Flathead,
not enough Flathead to get rid of the natural.”
“I take back what I said about not knowing why I--I want you, Anita,” I
said. “I do know why--and--well, as I told you before, you'll never regret
marrying me.”
“If you won't misunderstand me,” she answered, “I'll confess to you my
instinct has been telling me that, too. I'm not so bad as you must think.
I did bargain to sell myself, but I'd have thrown up the bargain if you
had been as--as you seemed at first.” For some reason--perhaps it was her
dress, or hat--she was looking particularly girlish that day, and her
skin was even more transparent than usual. “You're different from the men
I've been used to all my life,” she went on, and--smiling in a friendly
way--“you often give me a terrifying sense of your being a--a wild man on
his good behavior. But I've come to feel that you're generous and unselfish
and that you'll be kind to me--won't you? And I must make a life for
myself--I must--I must! Oh, I can't explain to you, but--” She turned her
little head toward me, and I was looking into those eyes that the flowers
were like.
I thought she meant her home life. “You needn't tell me,” I said, and I'll
have to confess my voice was anything but steady. “And, I repeat, you'll
never regret.”
She evidently feared that she had said too much, for she lapsed into
silence, and when I tried to resume the subject of ourselves, she answered
me with painful constraint. I respected her nervousness and soon began to
talk of things not so personal to us. Again, my mistake of treating her as
if she were marked “Fragile. Handle with care.” I know now that she, like
all women, had the plain, tough, durable human fibre under that exterior
of delicacy and fragility, and that my overconsideration caused her to
exaggerate to herself her own preposterous notions of her superior
fineness. We walked for an hour, talking--with less constraint and more
friendliness than ever before, and when I left her I, for the first time,
felt that I had left a good impression.
When I entered my offices, I, from force of habit, mechanically went direct
to the ticker--and dropped all in an instant from the pinnacle of Heaven
into a boiling inferno. For the ticker was just spelling out these words:
“Mowbray Langdon, president of the Textile Association, sailed unexpectedly
on the _Kaiser Wilhelm_ at noon. A two per cent. raise of the dividend
rate of Textile Common, from the present four per cent, to six, has been
determined upon.”
And I had staked up to, perhaps beyond, my limit of safety that Textile
would fall!
Ball was watching narrowly for some sign that the news was as bad as he
feared. But it cost me no effort to keep my face expressionless; I was like
a man who has been killed by lightning and lies dead with the look on his
face that he had just before the bolt struck him.
“Why didn't you tell me this,” said I to Ball, “when I had you on the
'phone?” My tone was quiet enough, but the very question ought to have
shown him that my brain was like a schooner in a cyclone.
“We heard it just after you rang off,” was his reply. “We've been trying
to get you ever since. I've gone everywhere after Textile stock. Very few
will sell, or even lend, and they ask--the best price was ten points above
to-day's closing. A strong tip's out that Textiles are to be rocketed.”
Ten points up already--on the mere rumor! Already ten dollars to pay on
every share I was “short”--and I short more than two hundred thousand! I
felt the claws of the fiend Ruin sink into the flesh of my shoulders. “Ball
doesn't know how I'm fixed,” I remember I thought, “and he mustn't know.”