Now that Updegraff is dead, I am free to tell of our relations.
My acquaintance with him was more casual than with any other of “The
Seven.” From the outset of my career I made it a rule never to deal with
understrappers, always to get in touch with the man who had the final say.
Thus, as the years went by, I grew into intimacy with the great men of
finance where many with better natural facilities for knowing them remained
in an outer circle. But with Updegraff, interested only in enterprises west
of the Mississippi and keeping Denver as his legal residence and exploiting
himself as a Western man who hated Wall Street, I had a mere bowing
acquaintance. This was unimportant, however, as each knew the other well
by reputation. Our common intimacies made us intimates for all practical
purposes.
Our connection was established soon after the development of my campaign
against the Textile Trust had shown that I was after a big bag of the
biggest game. We happened to have the same secret broker; and I suppose it
was in his crafty brain that the idea of bringing us together was born. Be
that as it may, he by gradual stages intimated to me that Updegraff would
convey me secrets of “The Seven” in exchange for a guarantee that I would
not attack his interests. I do not know what his motive in this treachery
was--probably a desire to curb the power of his associates in industrial
despotism.
Each of “The Seven” hated and feared and suspected the other six with far
more than the ordinary and proverbial rich man's jealous dislike of other
rich men. There was not one of them that did not bear the ever-smarting
scars of vicious wounds, front and back, received from his fellows; there
was not one that did not cherish the hope of overthrowing the rule of Seven
and establishing the rule of One. At any rate, I accepted Updegraff's
proposition; henceforth, though he stopped speaking to me when we happened
to meet, as did all the other big bandits and most of their parasites and
procurers, he kept me informed of every act “The Seven” resolved upon.
Thus I knew all about their “gentlemen's agreement” to support the stock
market, and that they had made Tavistock their agent for resisting any and
all attempts to lower prices, and had given him practically unlimited funds
to draw upon as he needed. I had Tavistock sounded on every side, but found
no weak spot. There was no rascality he would not perpetrate for whoever
employed him; but to his employer he was as loyal as a woman to a bad
man. And for a time it looked as if “The Seven” had checkmated me. Those
outsiders who had invested heavily in the great enterprises through which
“The Seven” ruled were disposing of their holdings--cautiously, through
fear of breaking the market. Money would pile up in the banks--money paid
out by “The Seven” for their bonds and stocks, of which the people had
become deeply suspicious. Then these deposits would be withdrawn--and I
knew they were going into real estate investments, because news of booms
in real estate and in building was coming in from everywhere. But prices
on the Stock Exchange continued to advance.
“They are too strong for you,” said Joe. “They will hold the market up
until the public loses faith in you. Then they will sell out at top-notch
prices as the people rush in to buy.”
I might have wavered had I not been seeing Tavistock every day. He
continued to wear his devil-may-care air; but I observed that he was aging
swiftly--and I knew what that meant. Fighting all day to prevent breaks
in the crucial stocks; planning most of the night how to prevent breaks
the next day; watching the reserve resources of “The Seven” melt away.
Those reserves were vast; also, “The Seven” controlled the United States
Treasury, and were using its resources as their own; they were buying
securities that would be almost worthless if they lost, but if they
won, would be rebought by the public at the old swindling prices, when
“confidence” was restored. But there was I, cannonading incessantly from my
impregnable position; as fast as they repaired breaches in their walls, my
big guns of publicity tore new breaches. No wonder Tavistock had thinner
hair and wrinkles and a drawn look about the eyes, nose and mouth.
With the battle thus raging all along the line, on the one side “The Seven”
and their armies of money and mercenaries and impressed slaves, on the
other side the public, I in command, you will say that my yearning for
distraction must have been gratified. If the road from his cell were long
enough, the condemned man would be fretting less about the gallows than
about the tight shoe that was making him limp and wince at every step.
Besides, in human affairs it is the personal, always the personal. I soon
got used to the crowds, to the big head-lines in the newspapers, to the
routine of cannonade and reply.
But the old thorn, pressing persistently--I could not get used to that. In
the midst of the adulation, of the blares upon the trumpets of fame that
saluted my waking and were wafted to me as I fell asleep at night--in the
midst of all the turmoil, I was often in a great and brooding silence,
longing for her, now with the imperious energy of passion, and now with
the sad ache of love. What was she doing? What was she thinking? Now that
Langdon had again played her false for the old price, with what eyes was
she looking into the future?
Alva, settled in a West Side apartment not far from the ancestral white
elephant, telephoned, asking me to come. I went, because she could and
would give me news of Anita. But as I entered her little drawing-room,
I said: “It was curiosity that brought me. I wished to see how you were
installed.”
“Isn't it nice and small?” cried she. “Billy and I haven't the slightest
difficulty in finding each other--as people so often have in the big
houses.” And it was Billy this and Billy that, and what Billy said and
thought and felt--and before they were married, she had called him William,
and had declared “Billy” to be the most offensive combination of letters
that ever fell from human lips.
“I needn't ask if _you_ are happy,” said I presently, with a dismal
failure at looking cheerful. “I can't stay but a moment,” I added, and if I
had obeyed my feelings, I'd have risen up and taken myself and my pain away
from surroundings as hateful to me as a summer sunrise in a death-chamber.
“Oh!” she exclaimed, in some confusion. “Then excuse me.” And she hastened
from the room.
I thought she had gone to order, or perhaps to bring, the tea. The long
minutes dragged away until ten had passed. Hearing a rustling in the hall,
I rose, intending to take leave the instant she appeared. The rustling
stopped just outside. I waited a few seconds, cried, “Well, I'm off. Next
time I want to be alone, I'll know where to come,” and advanced to the
door. It was not Alva hesitating there; it was Anita.
“I beg your pardon,” said I coldly.
If there had been room to pass I should have gone. What devil possessed
me? Certainly in all our relations I had found her direct and frank, if
anything, too frank. Doubtless it was the influence of my associations down
town, where for so many months I had been dealing with the “short-card”
crowd of high finance, who would hardly play the game straight even when
that was the easy way to win. My long, steady stretch in that stealthy and
sinuous company had put me in the state of mind in which it is impossible
to credit any human being with a motive that is decent or an action that is
not a dead-fall. Thus the obvious transformation in her made no impression
on me. Her haughtiness, her coldness, were gone, and with them had gone
all that had been least like her natural self, most like the repellent
conventional pattern to which her mother and her associates had molded her.
But I was saying to myself: “A trap! Langdon has gone back to his wife. She
turns to me.” And I loved her and hated her. “Never,” thought I, “has she
shown so poor an opinion of me as now.”
“My uncle told me day before yesterday that it was not he but you,” she
said, lifting her eyes to mine. It is inconceivable to me now that I could
have misread their honest story; yet I did.
“I had no idea your uncle's notion of honor was also eccentric,” said I,
with a satirical smile that made the blood rush to her face.
“That is unjust to him,” she replied earnestly.
“He says he made you no promise of secrecy. And he confessed to me only
because he wished to convince me that he had good reason for his high
opinion of you.”
“Really!” said I ironically. “And no doubt he found you open wide to
conviction--_now_.” This a subtlety to let her know that I understood
why she was seeking me.
“No,” she answered, lowering her eyes. “I knew--better than he.”
For an instant this, spoken in a voice I had long given up hope of ever
hearing from her, staggered my cynical conviction. But--“Possibly she
thinks she is sincere,” reasoned my head with my heart; “even the sincerest
women, brought up as was she, always have the calculator underneath; they
deny it, they don't know it often, but there it is; with them, calculation
is as involuntary and automatic as their pulse.” So, I said to her,
mockingly: “Doubtless your opinion of me has been improving steadily ever
since you heard that Mrs. Langdon had recovered her husband.”
She winced, as if I had struck her. “Oh!” she murmured. If she had been
the ordinary woman, who in every crisis with man instinctively resorts to
weakness' strongest weakness, tears, I might have a different story to
tell. But she fought back the tears in which her eyes were swimming and
gathered herself together. “That is brutal,” she said, with not a touch of
haughtiness, but not humbly, either. “But I deserve it.”
“There was a time,” I went on, swept in a swift current of cold rage,
“there was a time when I would have taken you on almost any terms. A man
never makes a complete fool of himself about a woman but once in his life,
they say. I have done my stretch--and it is over.”
She sighed wearily. “Langdon came to see me soon after I left your house,
and went to my uncle,” she said. “I will tell you what happened.”
“I do not wish to hear,” replied I, adding pointedly, “I have been waiting
ever since you left for news of your plans.”
She grew white, and my heart smote me. She came into the room and seated
herself. “Won't you stop, please, for a moment longer?” she said. “I hope
that, at, least, we can part without bitterness. I understand now that
everything is over between us. A woman's vanity makes her belief that a man
cares for her die hard. I am convinced now--I assure you, I am. I shall
trouble you no more about the past. But I have the right to ask you to hear
me when I say that Langdon came, and that I myself sent him away; sent him
back to his wife.”
“Touching self-sacrifice,” said I ironically.
“No,” she replied. “I can not claim any credit. I sent him away only
because you and Alva had taught me how to judge him better. I do not
despise him as do you; I know too well what has made him what he is. But
I had to send him away.”
My comment was an incredulous look and shrug. “I must be going,” I said.
“You do not believe me?” she asked.
“In my place, would you believe?” replied I. “You say I have taught you.
Well, you have taught me, too--for instance, that the years you've spent on
your knees in the musty temple of conventionality before false gods have
made you--fit only for the Langdon sort of thing. You can't learn how to
stand erect, and your eyes can not bear the light.”
“I am sorry,” she said slowly, hesitatingly, “that your faith in me died
just when I might, perhaps, have justified it. Ours has been a pitiful
series of misunderstandings.”
“A trap! A trap!” I was warning myself. “You've been a fool long enough,
Blacklock.” And aloud I said: “Well, Anita, the series is ended now.
There's no longer any occasion for our lying or posing to each other.
Any arrangements your uncle's lawyers suggest will be made.”
I was bowing, to leave without shaking hands with her. But she would not
have it so. “Please!” she said, stretching out her long, slender arm and
offering me her hand.
What a devil possessed me that day! With every atom of me longing for her,
I yet was able to take her hand and say, with a smile, that was, I doubt
not, as mocking as my tone: “By all means let us be friends. And I trust
you will not think me discourteous if I say that I shall feel safer in our
friendship when we are both on neutral ground.”
As I was turning away, her look, my own heart, made me turn again. I caught
her by the shoulders. I gazed into her eyes. “If I could only trust you,
could only believe you!” I cried.
“You cared for me when I wasn't worth it,” she said. “Now that I am more
like what you once imagined me, you do not care.”
Up between us rose Langdon's face--cynical, mocking, contemptuous. “Your
heart is _his_! You told me so! Don't _lie_ to me!” I exclaimed.
And before she could reply, I was gone.
Out from under the spell of her presence, back among the tricksters and
assassins, the traps and ambushes of Wall Street, I believed again;
believed firmly the promptings of the devil that possessed me. “She would
have given you a brief fool's paradise,” said that devil. “Then what
a hideous awakening!” And I cursed the day when New York's insidious
snobbishness had tempted my vanity into starting me on that degrading chase
after “respectability.”
“If she does not move to free herself soon,” said I to myself, “I will put
my own lawyer to work. My right eye offends me. I will pluck it out.”