No sane creature, not even a sane bulldog, will fight simply from love of
fighting. When a man is attacked, he may be sure he has excited either fear
or cupidity, or both. As far as I could see, it was absurd that cupidity
was inciting Langdon and Roebuck against me. I hadn't enough to tempt them.
Thus, I was forced to conclude that I must possess a strength of which I
was unaware, and which stirred even Roebuck's fears. But what could it be?
Besides Langdon and Roebuck and me there were six principals in the
proposed Coal combine, three of them richer and more influential in finance
than even Langdon, all of them except possibly Dykeman, the lawyer or
navigating officer of the combine, more formidable figures than I. Yet none
of these men was being assailed. “Why am I singled out?” I asked myself,
and I felt that if I could answer, I should find I had the means wholly
or partly to defeat them. But I could not explain to my satisfaction even
Langdon's activities against me. I felt that Anita was somehow, in part at
least, the cause; but, even so, how had he succeeded in convincing Roebuck
that I must be clipped and plucked into a groundling?
“It must have something to do with the Manasquale mines,” I decided. “I
thought I had given over my control of them, but somehow I must still have
a control that makes me too powerful for Roebuck to be at ease so long as I
am afoot and armed.” And I resolved to take my lawyers and search the whole
Manasquale transaction--to explore it from attic to underneath the cellar
flooring. “We'll go through it,” said I, “like ferrets through a ship's
hold.”
As I was finishing breakfast, Anita came in. She had evidently slept well,
and I regarded that as ominous. At her age, a crisis means little sleep
until a decision has been reached. I rose, but her manner warned me not to
advance and try to shake hands with her.
“I have asked Alva to stop with me here for a few days,” she said formally.
“Alva!” said I, much surprised. She had not asked one of her own friends;
she had asked a girl she had met less than two days before, and that girl
my partner's daughter.
“She was here yesterday morning,” Anita explained. And I now wondered how
much Alva there was in Anita's firm stand against her parents.
“Why don't you take her down to our place on Long Island?” said I, most
carefully concealing my delight--for Alva near her meant a friend of mine
and an advocate and example of real womanhood near her. “Everything's ready
for you there, and I'm going to be busy the next few days--busy day and
night.”
She reflected. “Very well,” she assented presently. And she gave me a
puzzled glance she thought I did not see--as if she were wondering whether
the enemy was not hiding new and deeper guile under an apparently harmless
suggestion.
“Then I'll not see you again for several days,” said I, most businesslike.
“If you want anything, there will be Monson out at the stables where he
can't annoy you. Or you can get me on the 'long distance.' Good-by. Good
luck.”
And I nodded carelessly and friendlily to her, and went away, enjoying
the pleasure of having startled her into visible astonishment. “There's
a better game than icy hostility, you very young, young lady,” said I to
myself, “and that game is friendly indifference.”
Alva would be with her. So she was secure for the present and my mind was
free for “finance.”
At that time the two most powerful men in finance were Galloway and
Roebuck. In Spain I once saw a fight between a bull and a tiger--or, rather
the beginning of a fight. They were released into a huge iron cage. After
circling it several times in the same direction, searching for a way out,
they came face to face. The bull tossed the tiger; the tiger clawed the
bull. The bull roared; the tiger screamed. Each retreated to his own side
of the cage. The bull pawed and snorted as if he could hardly wait to get
at the tiger; the tiger crouched and quivered and glared murderously, as if
he were going instantly to spring upon the bull. But the bull did not rush,
neither did the tiger spring. That was the Roebuck-Galloway situation.
How to bait Tiger Galloway to attack Bull Roebuck--that was the problem I
must solve, and solve straightway. If I could bring about war between the
giants, spreading confusion over the whole field of finance and filling all
men with dread and fear, there was a chance, a bare chance, that in the
confusion I might bear off part of my fortune. Certainly, conditions would
result in which I could more easily get myself intrenched again; then, too,
there would be a by no means small satisfaction in seeing Roebuck clawed
and bitten in punishment for having plotted against me.
Mutual fear had kept these two at peace for five years, and most
considerate and polite about each other's “rights.” But while our country's
industrial territory is vast, the interests of the few great controllers
who determine wages and prices for all are equally vast, and each plutocrat
is tormented incessantly by jealousy and suspicion; not a day passes
without conflicts of interest that adroit diplomacy could turn into
ferocious warfare. And in this matter of monopolizing the coal, despite
Roebuck's earnest assurances to Galloway that the combine was purely
defensive, and was really concerned only with the labor question, Galloway,
a great manufacturer, or, rather, a huge levier of the taxes of dividends
and interest upon manufacturing enterprises, could not but be uneasy.
Before I rose that morning I had a tentative plan for stirring him to
action. I was elaborating it on the way down town in my electric. It shows
how badly Anita was crippling my brain, that not until I was almost at my
office did it occur to me: “That was a tremendous luxury Roebuck indulged
his conscience in last night. It isn't like him to forewarn a man, even
when he's sure he can't escape. Though his prayers were hot in his mouth,
still, it's strange he didn't try to fool me. In fact, it's suspicious. In
fact--”
Suspicious? The instant the idea was fairly before my mind, I knew I had
let his canting fool me once more. I entered my offices, feeling that the
blow had already fallen; and I was surprised, but not relieved, when I
found everything calm. “But fall it will within an hour or so--before I can
move to avert it,” said I to myself.
And fall it did. At eleven o'clock, just as I was setting out to make my
first move toward heating old Galloway's heels for the war-path, Joe came
in with the news: “A general lockout's declared in the coal regions. The
operators have stolen a march on the men who, so they allege, were secretly
getting ready to strike. By night every coal road will be tied up and every
mine shut down.”
Joe knew our coal interests were heavy, but he did not dream his news meant
that before the day was over we would be bankrupt and not able to pay
fifteen cents on the dollar. However, he knew enough to throw him into
a fever of fright. He watched my calmness with terror. “Coal stocks are
dropping like a thermometer in a cold wave,” he said, like a fireman at a
sleeper in a burning house.
“Naturally,” said I, unruffled, apparently. “What can we do about it?”
“We must do something!” he exclaimed.
“Yes, we must,” I admitted. “For instance, we must keep cool, especially
when two or three dozen people are watching us. Also, you must attend to
your usual routine.”
“What are you going to do?” he cried. “For God's sake, Matt, don't keep me
in suspense!”
“Go to your desk,” I commanded. And he quieted down and went. I hadn't been
schooling him in the fire-drill for fifteen years in vain.
I went up the street and into the great banking and brokerage house of
Galloway and Company. I made my way through the small army of guards,
behind which the old beast of prey was intrenched, and into his private
den. There he sat, at a small, plain table, in the middle of the room
without any article of furniture in it but his table and his chair. On the
table was a small inkstand, perfectly clean, a steel pen equally clean, on
the rest attached to it. And that was all--not a letter, not a scrap of
paper, not a sign of work or of intention to work. It might have been the
desk of a man who did nothing; in fact, it was the desk of a man who had
so much to do that his only hope of escape from being overwhelmed was to
despatch and clear away each matter the instant it was presented to him.
Many things could be read from the powerful form, bolt upright in that
stiff chair, and from the cynical, masterful old face. But to me the
chief quality there revealed was that quality of qualities, decision--the
greatest power a man can have, except only courage. And old James Galloway
had both.
He respected Roebuck; Roebuck feared him. Roebuck did have some sort
of conscience, distorted though it was, and the dictator of savageries
Galloway would have scorned to commit. Galloway had no professions of
conscience--beyond such small glozing of hypocrisy as any man must put on
if he wishes to be intrusted with the money of a public that associates
professions of religion and appearances of respectability with honesty.
Roebuck's passion was wealth--to see the millions heap up and up. Galloway
had that passion, too--I have yet to meet a multi-millionaire who isn't
avaricious and even stingy. But Galloway's chief passion was power--to
handle men as a junk merchant handles rags, to plan and lead campaigns of
conquest with his golden legions, and to distribute the spoils like an
autocrat who is careless how they are divided, since all belongs to him,
whenever he wishes to claim it.
He pierced me with his blue eyes, keen as a youth's, though his face was
seamed with scars of seventy tumultuous years. He extended toward me
over the table his broad, stubby white hand--the hand of a builder, of a
constructive genius. “How are you, Blacklock?” said he. “What can I do
for you?” He just touched my hand before dropping it, and resumed that
idol-like pose. But although there was only repose and deliberation in his
manner, and not a suggestion of haste, I, like every one who came into that
room and that presence, had a sense of an interminable procession behind
me, a procession of men who must be seen by this master-mover, that they
might submit important and pressing affairs to him for decision. It was
unnecessary for him to tell any one to be brief and pointed.
“I shall have to go to the wall to-day,” said I, taking a paper from
my pocket, “unless you save me. Here is a statement of my assets and
liabilities. I call to your attention my Coal holdings. I was one of the
eight men whom Roebuck got round him for the new combine--it is a secret,
but I assume you know all about it.”
He laid the paper before him, put on his nose-glasses and looked at it.
“If you will save me,” I continued, “I will transfer to you, in a block,
all my Coal holdings. They will be worth double my total liabilities within
three months--as soon as the reorganization is announced. I leave it
entirely to your sense of justice whether I shall have any part of them
back when this storm blows over.”
“Why didn't you go to Roebuck?” he asked without looking up.
“Because it is he that has stuck the knife into me.”
“Why?”
“I don't know. I suspect the Manasquale properties, which I brought into
the combine, have some value, which no one but Roebuck, and perhaps
Langdon, knows about--and that I in some way was dangerous to them through
that fact. They haven't given me time to look into it.”
A grim smile flitted over his face. “You've been too busy getting married,
eh?”
“Exactly,” said I. “It's another case of unbuckling for the wedding-feast
and getting assassinated as a penalty. Do you wish me to explain anything
on that list--do you want any details of the combine--of the Coal stocks
there?”
“Not necessary,” he replied. As I had thought, with that enormous machine
of his for drawing in information, and with that enormous memory of his for
details, he probably knew more about the combine and its properties than I
did.
“You have heard of the lockout?” I inquired--for I wished him to know I
had no intention of deceiving him as to the present market value of those
stocks.
“Roebuck has been commanded by his God,” he said, “to eject the free
American labor from the coal regions and to substitute importations of
coolie Huns and Bohemians. Thus, the wicked American laborers will be
chastened for trying to get higher wages and cut down a pious man's
dividends; and the downtrodden coolies will be brought where they can enjoy
the blessings of liberty and of the preaching of Roebuck's missionaries.”
I laughed, though he had not smiled, but had spoken as if stating colorless
facts. “And righteousness and Roebuck will prevail,” said I.
He frowned slightly, a sardonic grin breaking the straight, thin, cruel
line of his lips. He opened his table's one shallow drawer, and took out a
pad and a pencil. He wrote a few words on the lowest part of the top sheet,
folded it, tore off the part he had scribbled on, returned the pad and
pencil to the drawer, handed the scrap of paper to me. “I will do it,” he
said. “Give this to Mr. Farquhar, second door to the left. Good morning.”
And in that atmosphere of vast affairs speedily despatched his consent
without argument seemed, and was, the matter-of-course.
I bowed. Though he had not saved me as a favor to me, but because it fitted
in with his plans, whatever they were, my eyes dimmed. “I shan't forget
this,” said I, my voice not quite steady.
“I know it,” said he curtly. “I know you.” I saw that his mind had already
turned me out. I said no more, and withdrew. When I left the room it was
precisely as it had been when I entered it--except the bit of paper torn
from the pad. But what a difference to me, to the thousands, the hundreds
of thousands directly and indirectly interested in the Coal combine and its
strike and its products, was represented by those few, almost illegible
scrawlings on that scrap of paper.
Not until I had gone over the situation with Farquhar, and we had signed
and exchanged the necessary papers, did I begin to relax from the
strain--how great that strain was I realized a few weeks later, when
the gray appeared thick at my temples and there was in my crown what
was, for such a shock as mine, a thin spot. “I am saved!” said I to
myself, venturing a long breath, as I stood on the steps of Galloway's
establishment, where hourly was transacted business vitally affecting
the welfare of scores of millions of human beings, with James Galloway's
personal interest as the sole guiding principle. “Saved!” I repeated, and
not until then did it flash before me, “I must have paid a frightful price.
He would never have consented to interfere with Roebuck as soon as I asked
him to do it, unless there had been some powerful motive. If I had had my
wits about me, I could have made far better terms.” Why hadn't I my wits
about me? “Anita” was my instant answer to my own question. “Anita again.
I had a bad attack of family man's panic.” And thus it came about that I
went back to my own office, feeling as if I had suffered a severe defeat,
instead of jubilant over my narrow escape.
Joe followed me into my den. “What luck?” asked he, in the tone of a mother
waylaying the doctor as he issues from the sick-room.
“Luck?” said I, gazing blankly at him.
“You've seen the latest quotation, haven't you?” In his nervousness his
temper was on a fine edge.
“No,” replied I indifferently. I sat down at my desk and began to busy
myself. Then I added: “We're out of the Coal combine. I've transferred our
holdings. Look after these things, please.” And I gave him the checks,
notes and memoranda of agreement.
“Galloway!” he exclaimed. And then his eye fell on the totals of the stock
I had been carrying. “Good God, Matt!” he gasped. “Ruined!”
And he sat down, and buried his face and cried like a child--it was then
that I measured the full depth of the chasm I had escaped. I made no such
exhibition of myself, but when I tried to relight my cigar my hand trembled
so that the flame scorched my lips.
“Ruined?” I said to Joe, easily enough. “Not at all. We're back in the
road, going smoothly ahead--only, at a bit less stiff a pace. Think, Joe,
of all those poor devils down in the mining districts. They're out--clear
out--and thousands of 'em don't know where their families will get bread.
And though they haven't found it out yet, they've got to leave the place
where they've lived all their lives, and their fathers before them--have
got to go wandering about in a world that's as strange to them as the
surface of the moon, and as bare for them as the Sahara desert.”
“That's so,” said Joe. “It's hard luck.” But I saw he was thinking only of
himself and his narrow escape from having to give up his big house and all
the rest of it; that, soft-hearted and generous though he was, to those
poor chaps and their wives and children he wasn't giving a thought.
Wall Street never does--they're too remote, too vague. It deals with
columns of figures and slips of paper. It never thinks of those
abstractions as standing for so many hearts and so many mouths, just as the
bank clerk never thinks of the bits of metal he counts so swiftly as money
with which things and men could be bought. I read somewhere once that
Voltaire--I think it was Voltaire--asked a man what he would do if, by
pressing a button on his table, he would be enormously rich and at the
same time would cause the death of a person away off at the other side of
the earth, unknown to him, and probably no more worthy to live, and with
no greater expectation of life or of happiness than the average sinful,
short-lived human being. I've often thought of that as I've watched our
great “captains of industry.” Voltaire's dilemma is theirs. And they don't
hesitate; they press the button. I leave the morality of the performance to
moralists; to me, its chief feature is its cowardice, its sneaking, slimy
cowardice.
“You've done a grand two hours' work,” said Joe.
“Grander than you think,” replied I. “I've set the tiger on to fight the
bull.”
“Galloway and Roebuck?”
“Just that,” said I. And I laughed, started up, sat down again. “No, I'll
put off the pleasure,” said I. “I'll let Roebuck find out, when the claws
catch in that tough old hide of his.”