GAIL FIRST!
Allison, springing forward with a jerk as he left Jim Sargent’s house,
headed his long, low runabout up the Avenue. He raced into the Park, and
glanced up at the lookout house as he sped on past; but it was only a
fleeting look. He needed no reminder of Gail, and he scarcely noticed
that he was following the same road which they had so often taken
together. His only impulse had been to drive somewhere at top speed, and
he had automatically chosen this path. The night was damp and chill, but
his evening top coat was open, revealing the white glint of his shirt
front. He did not seem to mind. As he passed Roseleaf Inn, he slowed
down. The roadhouse may have given him, and probably did, another
reminder of Gail, in such a manner as to concrete him into logical
thought; for he slowed down the terrific speed which had been the
accompaniment of his unreasoning emotion. The driving required too much
concentration for specific thought.
With this turning of his mental attitude, even the slow running of the
car seemed to disturb him, and, about half a mile past Roseleaf Inn, he
came slowly to a stop, sitting at the wheel, with his head bent slightly
forward, and staring at the spot where the roadway had ceased to roll
beneath his machine. Presently he became aware of the cold, and running
his car to the side of the road, he stepped out, and, buttoning his coat
around him, crossed a fence and walked through the narrow strip of trees
to the river bank, where he stood for a moment looking out upon the
misty Hudson, sparkling under the moonlight. He began to walk up and
down the bank presently, the turf sinking spongily under his feet, and
it was noticeable that his pace grew more and more rapid, until he was
striding at a furious rate of speed.
The man was in a torment of passion. He had spent a lifetime in the
deliberate acquisition of everything upon which he had set his will; and
it was one of the things upon which he had built his success, that, once
he had fixed his desire deliberately upon anything, he had held
unwaveringly to that object, employing all the forces of which strong
men are capable; patient waiting, dogged persistence, or vicious
grappling, whichever was best adapted to gain his ends.
Gail! If there had been tender thoughts of her, they were gone now. He
saw her in a thousand enchantments; sitting beside him, clad in the
white furs which added such piquancy to her rosy cheeks and sparkling
eyes; lounging in the library, in some filmy, clinging robe which
defined her grace, half concealing and half suggesting the long,
delicately curving lines which had so appealed to his ruthlessness;
sitting at the piano, her beautiful small head slightly bent forward,
displaying the requisite line at the nape of her neck, her brown hair
waving backward to a simple knot, her rounded white arms free from the
elbows, and her slender fingers flashing over the keys; coming down the
stairway, in the filmy cream lace gown which had made her seem so
girlishly fragile, her daintily blue slippered feet and her beautifully
turned ankles giving a hint of the grace and suppleness of her whole
self; in her black beaded ball costume, its sparkling deadness
displaying the exquisite ivory tints and beautiful colouring of her neck
and shoulders and bosom with startling effectiveness. In these and a
thousand other glowing pictures he saw her, and with every added picture
there came a new pain in his thought of her.
He felt the warmth of her hand upon his arm, the brush of her shoulder
against his own, the mere elbow touch as she sat beside him in the car,
the many little careless contacts of daily life, unconscious to her, but
to him fraught always with flame; and, finally, that maddening moment
when he had crushed her in his arms, and so had made, for all time to
come, the possession of her a necessity almost maniacal in the violence
of its determination! He heard the sound of her voice, in all its
enchanting cadences, from the sweetness of her murmured asides to the
ring of her laugh; and the delicate fragrance which was a part of her
overwhelmed him now, in remembrance, like an unnerving faintness!
It was so that he had centred his mind upon her, and himself and his
will, until, in all creation, there was nothing else but that was
trivial; ambition, power, wealth, fame, the command of empires and of
men, were nothing, except as they might lead to her!
As a boy Allison had been endowed with extraordinary strength. From a
mother who had married beneath her socially he had inherited a certain
redeeming refinement of taste, a richness of imagination, a turn of
extravagance, a certain daring and confidence. Had his heredity been
left to the father alone, he would have developed into a mere brute,
fighting for the love of inflicting pain, his ambitions confined to
physical supremacy alone. As it was, the combination had made of him a
brute more dangerous by the addition of intelligence. In spite of gentle
surroundings, he had persistently ran away to play in a rough and tumble
neighbourhood, where he had been the terror of boys a head taller than
himself, and had established an unquestioned tyranny among them. He had
a passion at that time for killing cats, and a devilish ingenuity in
devising new modes of torture for them, saturating them with gasolene
and burning them alive, and other such ghastly amusements. The cruelty
of this he had from the father, the ingenuity from the mother. In a
fleeting introspection, a review which could have occupied but a few
seconds of time, he saw back through the years of his passion, for every
year had been a passion of supremacy, as if the cinematograph of his
life had flashed swiftly before him, pausing for illumination at certain
points which had marked the attainment of hard-won goals.
The days of his schooling, when the mother in him had made him crave
knowledge in spite of the physical instincts which drove him out doors.
He accomplished both. He went at his lessons viciously, perhaps because
they were something which had a tendency to baffle him, and he had made
no braver fights in life than on those lonely nights when, angry and
determined, he had grappled with his books and conquered them. He had
won football honours at the same time. It was said that half the
victories of his team came through the fear of Allison on the opposing
elevens. He had the reputation of being a demon on the gridiron. His
eyes became slightly bloodshot in every contest, and he went into every
battle with a smile on his lips which was more like a snarl. His rise to
football supremacy was well remembered all through life by a dozen
cripples. He had been extremely fond of football, even after one of his
strongest opponents had been carried from the field with a broken neck.
Then business. A different sort of cruelty entered there. He had a
method of advancement which was far more effective than adroitness. With
the same vicious fever of achievement which had marked the conquering of
his books, he had made himself flawlessly efficient, and had contrasted
himself deliberately with whatever weakness he could find in his
superiors. On the day when the superintendent drank, Allison took
especial pains to create an emergency, a break-down in the power plant,
and showed himself side by side with the temporarily stupid
superintendent, clear-eyed, firm-jawed, glowing cheeked, ready to
grapple with his own emergency. He became superintendent. Trickery, now.
A block of stock here, a block of stock there, a combination of small
holdings by which an unsuspected group of outsiders swept in with
control of that first little street car company. Allison’s was the
smallest block of shares in that combination, infinitesimal as compared
with the total capitalisation of the company, the investment of his
small savings combined with all the borrowing he could manage. Yet,
since he had organised the rebellion, he was left in its control by the
same personal dominance with which he had brought together the warring
elements. Less than two years after his accession to management, he had
frozen out the associates who had put him in power. They none of them
knew how it was done, but they did know that he had taken advantage of
every tricky opportunity his position gave him, and they were bitter
about it. He laughed at them, and he thrashed the man who complained
loudest, a man who had lost every cent of his money through Allison’s
manipulations. Well, that was the way of business. The old rule of
conquest that might makes right had only gone out of favour as applied
to physical oppression. In everything else, it still prevailed; and
Allison was its chief exponent.
The years of manhood. The panorama was a swiftly moving one now.
Combinations and consolidations had followed closely one upon the other;
brilliant and bewildering shiftings of the pieces on the chess board of
his particular business. Other players had become confused in all these
kaleidoscopic changes, some of which had seemed meaningless; but not
Allison. Every shift left him in a position of more ruthless advantage,
even in those moves which were intended only to create confusion; and he
pushed steadily forward towards the one mark he had set; that there
should eventually be none other in the field than himself! It was
because he never flagged that he could do this. At no summit had he ever
paused for gratification over the extent of his climb, for a backward
glance over his fiercely contended pathway, for refreshment, for breath;
but, with that exhaustless physical vitality inherited from his father
and mental vitality inherited from his mother, he had kept his pace
forward, plunging onward, from summit to still higher summit, and never
asking that there might be one highest peak to which he could attain,
and rest! True, sometimes he had thought, on the upward way, that at the
summit he might pause, but had that summit been the highest, with none
other luring him in the distant sky, he would have been disappointed.
So it was that he had come this far, and the roadway to his present
height was marked by the cripples he had left behind him, without
compunction, without mercy, without compassion. Bankrupts strewed his
way, broken men of purpose higher than his own, useful factors in the
progress of human life, builders and creators who had advanced the
interest of the commonwealth, but who had been more brilliant in
construction than they had been in reaping the rewards of their
building. It was for Allison to do this. It had been his specialty; the
reaping of rewards. It had been his faculty to permit others to build,
to encourage them in it, and then, when the building was done, to wrest
it away from the builders. That marked him as the greatest commercial
genius of his time; and he had much applause for it.
Women. Yes, there had been women, creatures of a common mould with whom
he had amused himself, had taken them in their freshness, and broken
them, and thrown them away; this in his earlier years. But in his
maturity, he had bent all his strength to a greater passion; the
acquirement of all those other things which men had wanted and held most
dear, among them acquisition, and power, and success. Perhaps it had
been bad for him, this concentration, for now it left him, at the height
of his maturity, with mistaken fancies, with long pent fires, with
disproportionate desires. Bringing to these, he had the tremendously
abnormal moral effect of never having been thwarted in a thing upon
which he had set his mind, and of believing, by past accomplishment,
that anything upon which he had set his wish must be his, or else every
victory he had ever gained would be swept aside and made of no value. He
must accomplish, or die!
He was without God, this man; he had nothing within him which conceded,
for a moment, a greater power than his own. In all his mental imagery,
which was rich enough in material things, there was no conception of a
Deity, or of a need for one. To what should he pray, and for what, when
he had himself to rely upon? Worship was an idealistic diversion, a
poetic illusion, the refuge of the weak, who excused their lack of
strength by ascribing it to a mysterious something beyond the control of
any man. He tolerated the popular notion that there must be a God, as he
tolerated codes of social ethics; the conventions which laid down, for
instance, what a gentleman might or might not do, externally, and still
remain a gentleman. In the meantime, if a man-made law came between him
and the accomplishment of his ends, he broke it, without a trace of
thought that he might be wrong. Laws were the mutual safeguard of the
weak, to protect themselves against the encroachment of the strong; and
it was in the equally natural province of the strong to break down those
safeguards. In the same way he disregarded moral laws. They, too, were
for the upholding of the weak, and the mere fact that they existed was
proof enough that they were an acknowledgment of the right of the strong
to break them.
There is a mistake here. It lies in the statement that Allison
recognised no God. He did. Allison. Not Allison, the man, but the
unconquerable will of Allison, a will which was a divinity in itself. He
believed in it, centred on it all his faith, poured out to it all the
fervidness of his heart, of his mind, of his spirit, of his body. He
worshipped it!
So it was that he came to the consideration of the one thing which had
attempted to deny itself to him. Gail! It seemed monstrous to him that
she had set herself against him. It was incredible that she should have
a will, which, if she persisted, should prove superior to his own. Why,
he had set his mind upon her from the first! The time had suddenly
arrived when he was ripe for her, and she had come. He had not even
given a thought to the many suitors who had dangled about her. She was
for none of them. She was for him, and he had waited in patience until
she was tired of amusing herself, and until he had wrought the big
ambition towards which her coming, and her impulse, and the new fire she
had kindled in him, had directed him. She had been seriously in earnest
in withholding herself from him. She was determined upon it. She
believed now, in her soul, that she could keep to that determination. At
first he had been amused by it, as a man holds off the angry onslaught
of a child; but, in this last interview with her, there had come a
moment when he had felt his vast compulsion valueless; and it had
angered him.
A flame raged through his veins which fairly shook him with its
violence. It was not only the reflex of his determination to have her,
but it was the terrific need of her which had grown up in him. Have her?
Of course he would have her! If she would not come to him willingly, he
would take her! If she could not share in the ecstasy of possession
which he had so long anticipated, she need not. She was not to be
considered in it any more than he had considered any other adverse
factor in the attainment of anything he had desired. He was possessed of
a rage now, which centred itself upon one object, and one alone. Gail!
She was his new summit, his new peak, the final one where he had planned
to rest; but now his angry thought was to attain it, and spurn it,
broken and crumbled, as had been all the other barriers to his will, and
press ruthlessly onward into higher skies, he knew not where. It was no
time now, to think on that. Gail first!