It was the next day, I think, that I met Mowbray Langdon and his
brother Tom in the entrance to 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 barnyard,
poisons the watch dog, bores an auger hole in the granary, and takes
to his heels at the first 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 thought 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 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
study out 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 venomous 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 the mighty palaces of
finance and commerce from which business men have been ousted by the
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, "I can be getting good and ready."