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.”