Robbie's father was president and chief stockholder of a certain vast
manufacturing establishment; he was also a capitalist of national
reputation, and a man whose hand was often felt by the stock markets of
the world. Robbie knew about these things vaguely, and was not uncurious
to know more; and so he took to rising at ten o'clock in the morning,
and to turning his automobile down-townward; and his clubs saw him less
and less often, and heard his merry laugh almost never.
For a strange change came over Robbie. I do not know how I can better
explain the phenomenon than by his father's words already quoted--that
he was learning that the life of man is a battle. Formerly all that he
had known had been the play side of it. When one goes in for a game of
golf, he lays out all his cleverness and skill, and gets nothing but a
silver cup and some newspaper clippings for the trouble; but when he
plays at stocks, he gets real prizes of hard cash and negotiable
securities.
Mr. Robert van Rensselaer had set to work to learn the rules of this new
game; and as he was a clever fellow, and had, besides, all the capital
any one could need, it came about quickly that his name was one men
reckoned with. He carried out some strokes that perplexed his adoring
father, and it was not very long before the latter ceased to have to
sign checks to the credit of his son's bank account. Before five years
were past "young van Rensselaer" had taken his seat at the
council-boards of several great corporations, and the things that he
said there were always attended to; or if they were not he was apt to
turn elsewhere, and in such cases it was generally not long before some
one was sorry.
And of course this could not take place without producing a change in
him. To be sure, he was still "Robbie" to his old friends, and still as
good-hearted a fellow as ever lived; to be sure, likewise, he still
kept the yacht, and the automobile, and the flat. But before this he had
never had an enemy, and now he had thousands; and every day his time was
given up to a desperate hand-to-hand combat, as grim as any jungle ever
saw. And so his mouth became set and his brow knit; and since he no
longer had his way with absolute regularity, his temper was not so sweet
as before.
It is of importance to explain this, because our friend was much in the
papers in those days, and secured a great deal of notoriety through an
unfortunate exhibition of ill temper. It happened at a time when he had
been for over ten years the new man we have pictured, and had supplanted
his father as the president of a large and important manufacturing
concern. The reader will perhaps divine that I refer to the historic
Hungerville Steel Mills, and to the occasion of the great Hungerville
strike that once shook the country.