“Bother!” said I, my common sense smashing the spell of snobbishness that
had begun to reassert itself as soon as I got into his unnatural, unhealthy
atmosphere. “I'll go as I am, beard and all. I only make myself ridiculous,
trying to be a sheep. I'm a goat, and a goat I'll stay.”
That shut him into himself. When he re-emerged, it was to say: “Something
doing down town to-day, eh?”
A sharpness in his voice and in his eyes, too, made me put my mind on him
more closely, and then I saw what I should have seen before--that he was
moody and slightly distant.
“Seen Tom Langdon this afternoon?” I asked carelessly.
He colored. “Yes--had lunch with him,” was his answer.
I smiled--for his benefit. “Aha!” thought I. “So Tom Langdon has been fool
enough to take this paroquet into his confidence.” Then I said to him: “Is
Tom making the rounds, warning the rats to leave the sinking ship?”
“What do you mean, Matt?” he demanded, as if I had accused him.
I looked steadily at him, and I imagine my unshaven jaw did not make my
aspect alluring.
“That I'm thinking of driving the rats overboard,” replied I. “The ship's
sound, but it would be sounder if there were fewer of them.”
“You don't imagine anything Tom could say would change my feelings toward
you?” he pleaded.
“I don't know, and I don't care a damn,” replied I coolly. “But I do know,
before the Langdons or anybody else can have Blacklock pie, they'll have
first to catch their Blacklock.”
I saw Langdon had made him uneasy, despite his belief in my strength. And
he was groping for confirmation or reassurance. “But,” thought I, “if he
thinks I may be going up the spout, why isn't he more upset? He probably
hates me because I've befriended him, but no matter how much he hated me,
wouldn't his fear of being cut off from supplies drive him almost crazy?” I
studied him in vain for sign of deep anxiety. Either Tom didn't tell him
much, I decided, or he didn't believe Tom knew what he was talking about.
“What did Tom say about me?” I inquired.
“Oh, almost nothing. We were talking chiefly of--of club matters,” he
answered, in a fair imitation of his usual offhand manner.
“When does my name come up there?” said I.
He flushed and shifted. “I was just about to tell you,” he stammered. “But
perhaps you know?”
“Know what?”
“That--Hasn't Tom told you? He has withdrawn--and--you'll have to get
another second--if you think--that is--unless you--I suppose you'd have
told me, if you'd changed your mind?”
Since I had become so deeply interested in Anita, my
ambition--ambition!--to join the Travelers had all but dropped out of my
mind.
“I had forgotten about it,” said I. “But, now that you remind me, I want my
name withdrawn. It was a passing fancy. It was part and parcel of a lot of
damn foolishness I've been indulging in for the last few months. But I've
come to my senses--and it's 'me to the wild,' where I belong, Sammy, from
this time on.”
He looked tremendously relieved, and a little puzzled, too. I thought I was
reading him like an illuminated sign. “He's eager to keep friends with me,”
thought I, “until he's absolutely sure there's nothing more in it for him
and his people.” And that guess was a pretty good one. It is not to the
discredit of my shrewdness that I didn't see it was not hope, but fear,
that made him try to placate me. I could not have possibly known then what
the Langdons had done. But--Sammy was saying, in his friendliest tone:
“What's the matter, old man? You're sour to-night.”
“Never in a better humor,” I assured him, and as I spoke the words
they came true. What I had been saying about the Travelers and all it
represented--all the snobbery, and smirking, and rotten pretense--my final
and absolute renunciation of it all--acted on me as I've seen religion act
on the fellows that used to go up to the mourners' bench at the revivals. I
felt as if I had suddenly emerged from the parlor of a dive and its stench
of sickening perfumes, into the pure air of God's Heaven.
I signed the bill, and we went afoot up the avenue. Sam, as I saw with a
good deal of amusement, was trying to devise some subtle, tactful way of
attaching his poor, clumsy little suction-pump to the well of my secret
thoughts.
“What is it, Sammy?” said I at last. “What do you want to know that you're
afraid to ask me?”
“Nothing,” he said hastily. “I'm only a bit worried about--about you and
Textile. Matt,”--this in the tone of deep emotion we reserve for the
attempt to lure our friends into confiding that about themselves which will
give us the opportunity to pity them, and, if necessary, to sheer off from
them--“Matt, I do hope you haven't been hard hit?”
“Not yet,” said I easily. “Dry your tears and put away your black clothes.
Your friend, Tom Langdon, was a little premature.”
“I'm afraid I've given you a false impression,” Sam continued, with
an overeagerness to convince me that did not attract my attention at
the time. “Tom merely said, 'I hear Blacklock is loaded up with Textile
shorts,'--that was all. A careless remark. I really didn't think of it
again until I saw you looking so black and glum.”
That seemed natural enough, so I changed the subject. As we entered his
house, I said:
“I'll not go up to the drawing-room. Make my excuses to your mother, will
you? I'll turn into the little smoking-room here. Tell your sister--and say
I'm going to stop only a moment.”
Sam had just left me when the butler came.
“Mr. Ball--I think that was the name, sir--wishes to speak to you on the
telephone.”
I had given Ellerslys' as one of the places at which I might be found,
should it be necessary to consult me. I followed the butler to the
telephone closet under the main stairway. As soon as Ball made sure it was
I, he began:
“I'll use the code words. I've just seen Fearless, as you told me to.”
Fearless--that was Mitchell, my spy in the employ of Tavistock, who was
my principal rival in the business of confidential brokerage for the high
financiers. “Yes,” said I. “What does he say?”
“There has been a great deal of heavy buying for a month past.”
Then my dread was well-founded--Textiles were to be deliberately rocketed.
“Who's been doing it?” I asked.
“He found out only this afternoon. It's been kept unusually dark. It--”
“Who? Who?” I demanded.
“Intrepid,” he answered.
Intrepid--that is, Langdon--Mowbray Langdon!
“The whole thing--was planned carefully,” continued Ball, “and is coming
off according to schedule. Fearless overheard a final message Intrepid's
brother brought from him to-day.”
So it was no mischance--it was an assassination. Mowbray Langdon had
stabbed me in the back and fled.
“Did you hear what I said?” asked Ball. “Is that you?”
“Yes,” I replied.
“Oh,” came in a relieved tone from the other end of the wire. “You were so
long in answering that I thought I'd been cut off. Any instructions?”
“No,” said I. “Good-by.”
I heard him ring off, but I sat there for several minutes, the receiver
still to my ear. I was muttering: “Langdon, Langdon--why--why--why?” again
and again. Why had he turned against me? Why had he plotted to destroy
me--one of those plots so frequent in Wall Street--where the assassin
steals up, delivers the mortal blow, and steals away without ever being
detected or even suspected? I saw the whole plot now--I understood Tom
Langdon's activities, I recalled Mowbray Langdon's curious phrases and
looks and tones. But--why--why--why? How was I in his way?
It was all dark to me--pitch-dark. I returned to the smoking-room, lighted
a cigar, sat fumbling at the new situation. I was in no worse plight than
before--what did it matter who was attacking me? In the circumstances,
a novice could now destroy me as easily as a Langdon. Still, Ball's
news seemed to take away my courage. I reminded myself that I was used
to treachery of this sort, that I deserved what I was getting because
I had, like a fool, dropped my guard in the fight that is always an
every-man-for-himself. But I reminded myself in vain. Langdon's smiling
treachery made me heart-sick.
Soon Anita appeared--preceded and heralded by a faint rustling from soft
and clinging skirts, that swept my nerves like a love-tune. I suppose for
all men there is a charm, a spell, beyond expression, in the sight of a
delicate beautiful young woman, especially if she be dressed in those fine
fabrics that look as if only a fairy loom could have woven them; and when a
man loves the woman who bursts upon his vision, that spell must overwhelm
him, especially if he be such a man as was I--a product of life's roughest
factories, hard and harsh, an elbower and a trampler, a hustler and a
bluffer. Then, you must also consider the exact circumstances--I standing
there, with destruction hanging over me, with the sense that within a few
hours I should be a pariah to her, a masquerader stripped of his disguise
and cast out from the ball where he had been making so merry and so free.
Only a few hours more! Perhaps now was the last time I should ever stand
so near to her! The full realization of all this swallowed me up as
in a great, thick, black mist. And my arms strained to escape from my
tightly-locked hands, strained to seize her, to snatch from her, reluctant
though she might be, at least some part of the happiness that was to be
denied me.
I think my torment must have somehow penetrated to her. For she was sweet
and friendly--and she could not have hurt me worse! If I had followed my
impulse I should have fallen at her feet and buried my face, scorching, in
the folds of that pale blue, faintly-shimmering robe of hers.
“Do throw away that huge, hideous cigar,” she said, laughing. And she took
two cigarettes from the box, put both between her lips, lit them, held one
toward me. I looked at her face, and along her smooth, bare, outstretched
arm, and at the pink, slender fingers holding the cigarette. I took it as
if I were afraid the spell would be broken, should my fingers touch hers.
Afraid--that's it! That's why I didn't pour out all that was in my heart. I
deserved to lose her.
“I'm taking you away from the others,” I said. We could hear the murmur
of many voices and of music. In fancy I could see them assembled round
the little card-tables--the well-fed bodies, the well-cared-for skins,
the elaborate toilets, the useless jeweled hands--comfortable, secure,
self-satisfied, idle, always idle, always playing at the imitation
games--like their own pampered children, to be sheltered in the nurseries
of wealth their whole lives through. And not at all in bitterness, but
wholly in sadness, a sense of the injustice, the unfairness of it all--a
sense that had been strong in me in my youth but blunted during the years
of my busy prosperity--returned for a moment. For a moment only; my mind
was soon back to realities--to her and me--to “us.” How soon it would never
be “us” again!
“They're mama's friends,” Anita was answering. “Oldish and tiresome. When
you leave I shall go straight on up to bed.”
“I'd like to--to see your room--where you live,” said I, more to myself
than to her.
“I sleep in a bare little box,” she replied with a laugh. “It's like a
cell. A friend of ours who has the anti-germ fad insisted on it. But my
sitting-room isn't so bad.”
“Langdon has the anti-germ fad,” said I. She answered “Yes” after a pause,
and in such a strained voice that I looked at her. A flush was just dying
out of her face. “He was the friend I spoke of,” she went on.
“You know him very well?” I asked.
“We've known him--always,” said she. “I think he's one of my earliest
recollections. His father's summer place and ours adjoin. And once--I guess
it's the first time I remember seeing him--he was a freshman at Harvard,
and he came along on a horse past the pony cart in which a groom was
driving me. And I--I was very little then--I begged him to take me up, and
he did. I thought he was the greatest, most wonderful man that ever lived.”
She laughed queerly. “When I said my prayers, I used to imagine a god that
looked like him to say them to.”
I echoed her laugh heartily. The idea of Mowbray Langdon as a god struck me
as peculiarly funny, though natural enough, too.
“Absurd, wasn't it?” said she. But her face was grave, and she let her
cigarette die out.
“I guess you know him better than that now?”
“Yes--better,” she answered, slowly and absently. “He's--anything but a
god!”
“And the more fascinating on that account,” said I. “I wonder why women
like best the really bad, dangerous sort of man, who hasn't any respect for
them, or for anything.”
I said this that she might protest, at least for herself. But her answer
was a vague, musing, “I wonder--I wonder.”
“I'm sure _you_ wouldn't,” I protested earnestly, for her.
She looked at me queerly.
“Can I never convince you that I'm just a woman?” said she mockingly. “Just
a woman, and one a man with your ideas of women would fly from.”
“I wish you were!” I exclaimed. “Then--I'd not find it so--so impossible to
give you up.”
She rose and made a slow tour of the room, halting on the rug before the
closed fireplace a few feet from me. I sat looking at her.
“I am going to give you up,” I said at last.
Her eyes, staring into vacancy, grew larger and intenser with each long,
deep breath she took.
“I didn't intend to say what I'm about to say--at least, not this evening,”
I went on, and to me it seemed to be some other than myself who was
speaking. “Certain things happened down town to-day that have set me to
thinking. And--I shall do whatever I can for your brother and your father.
But you--you are free!”
She went to the table, stood there in profile to me, straight and slender
as a sunflower stalk. She traced the silver chasings in the lid of the
cigarette box with her forefinger; then she took a cigarette and began
rolling it slowly and absently.
“Please don't scent and stain your fingers with that filthy tobacco,” said
I rather harshly.
“And only this afternoon you were saying you had become reconciled to my
vice--that you had canonized it along with me--wasn't that your phrase?”
This indifferently, without turning toward me, and as if she were thinking
of something else.
“So I have,” retorted I. “But my mood--please oblige me this once.”
She let the cigarette fall into the box, closed the lid gently, leaned
against the table, folded her arms upon her bosom and looked full at me.
I was as acutely conscious of her every movement, of the very coming and
going of the breath at her nostrils, as a man on the operating-table is
conscious of the slightest gesture of the surgeon.
“You are--suffering!” she said, and her voice was like the flow of oil upon
a burn. “I have never seen you like this. I didn't believe you capable
of--of much feeling.”
I could not trust myself to speak. If Bob Corey could have looked in on
that scene, could have understood it, how amazed he would have been!
“What happened down town to-day?” she went on. “Tell me, if I may know.”
“I'll tell you what I didn't think, ten minutes ago, I'd tell any human
being,” said I. “They've got me strapped down in the press. At ten o'clock
in the morning--precisely at ten--they're going to put on the screws.” I
laughed. “I guess they'll have me squeezed pretty dry before noon.”
She shivered.
“So, you see,” I continued, “I don't deserve any credit for giving you up.
I only anticipate you by about twenty-four hours. Mine's a deathbed
repentance.”
“I'd thought of that,” said she reflectively. Presently she added: “Then,
it is true.” And I knew Sammy had given her some hint that prepared her for
my confession.
“Yes--I can't go blustering through the matrimonial market,” replied I.
“I've been thrown out. I'm a beggar at the gates.”
“A beggar at the gates,” she murmured.