Produced by Kirk Pearson <kpearson@nyx.net> and the Online
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The Titan
by
Theodore Dreiser
CONTENTS
I The New City
II A Reconnoiter
III A Chicago Evening
IV Peter Laughlin & Co.
V Concerning A Wife And Family
VI The New Queen of the Home
VII Chicago Gas
VIII Now This is Fighting
IX In Search of Victory
X A Test
XI The Fruits of Daring
XII A New Retainer
XIII The Die is Cast
XIV Undercurrents
XV A New Affection
XVI A Fateful Interlude
XVII An Overture to Conflict
XVIII The Clash
XIX "Hell Hath No Fury--"
XX "Man and Superman"
XXI A Matter of Tunnels
XXII Street-railways at Last
XXIII The Power of the Press
XXIV The Coming of Stephanie Platow
XXV Airs from the Orient
XXVI Love and War
XXVII A Financier Bewitched
XXVIII The Exposure of Stephanie
XXIX A Family Quarrel
XXX Obstacles
XXXI Untoward Disclosures
XXXII A Supper Party
XXXIII Mr. Lynde to the Rescue
XXXIV Enter Hosmer Hand
XXXV A Political Agreement
XXXVI An Election Draws Near
XXXVII Aileen's Revenge
XXXVIII An Hour of Defeat
XXXIX The New Administration
XL A Trip to Louisville
XLI The Daughter of Mrs. Fleming
XLII F. A. Cowperwood, Guardian
XLIII The Planet Mars
XLIV A Franchise Obtained
XLV Changing Horizons
XLVI Depths and Heights
XLVII American Match
XLVIII Panic
XLIX Mount Olympus
L A New York Mansion
LI The Revival of Hattie Starr
LII Behind the Arras
LIII A Declaration of Love
LIV Wanted--Fifty-year Franchises
LV Cowperwood and the Governor
LVI The Ordeal of Berenice
LVII Aileen's Last Card
LVIII A Marauder Upon the Commonwealth
LIX Capital and Public Rights
LX The Net
LXI The Cataclysm
LXII The Recompense
Chapter I
The New City
When Frank Algernon Cowperwood emerged from the Eastern District
Penitentiary in Philadelphia he realized that the old life he had lived
in that city since boyhood was ended. His youth was gone, and with it
had been lost the great business prospects of his earlier manhood. He
must begin again.
It would be useless to repeat how a second panic following upon a
tremendous failure--that of Jay Cooke & Co.--had placed a second
fortune in his hands. This restored wealth softened him in some
degree. Fate seemed to have his personal welfare in charge. He was
sick of the stock-exchange, anyhow, as a means of livelihood, and now
decided that he would leave it once and for all. He would get in
something else--street-railways, land deals, some of the boundless
opportunities of the far West. Philadelphia was no longer pleasing to
him. Though now free and rich, he was still a scandal to the
pretenders, and the financial and social world was not prepared to
accept him. He must go his way alone, unaided, or only secretly so,
while his quondam friends watched his career from afar. So, thinking
of this, he took the train one day, his charming mistress, now only
twenty-six, coming to the station to see him off. He looked at her
quite tenderly, for she was the quintessence of a certain type of
feminine beauty.
"By-by, dearie," he smiled, as the train-bell signaled the approaching
departure. "You and I will get out of this shortly. Don't grieve.
I'll be back in two or three weeks, or I'll send for you. I'd take you
now, only I don't know how that country is out there. We'll fix on some
place, and then you watch me settle this fortune question. We'll not
live under a cloud always. I'll get a divorce, and we'll marry, and
things will come right with a bang. Money will do that."
He looked at her with his large, cool, penetrating eyes, and she
clasped his cheeks between her hands.
"Oh, Frank," she exclaimed, "I'll miss you so! You're all I have."
"In two weeks," he smiled, as the train began to move, "I'll wire or be
back. Be good, sweet."
She followed him with adoring eyes--a fool of love, a spoiled child, a
family pet, amorous, eager, affectionate, the type so strong a man
would naturally like--she tossed her pretty red gold head and waved him
a kiss. Then she walked away with rich, sinuous, healthy strides--the
type that men turn to look after.
"That's her--that's that Butler girl," observed one railroad clerk to
another. "Gee! a man wouldn't want anything better than that, would
he?"
It was the spontaneous tribute that passion and envy invariably pay to
health and beauty. On that pivot swings the world.
Never in all his life until this trip had Cowperwood been farther west
than Pittsburg. His amazing commercial adventures, brilliant as they
were, had been almost exclusively confined to the dull, staid world of
Philadelphia, with its sweet refinement in sections, its pretensions to
American social supremacy, its cool arrogation of traditional
leadership in commercial life, its history, conservative wealth,
unctuous respectability, and all the tastes and avocations which these
imply. He had, as he recalled, almost mastered that pretty world and
made its sacred precincts his own when the crash came. Practically he
had been admitted. Now he was an Ishmael, an ex-convict, albeit a
millionaire. But wait! The race is to the swift, he said to himself
over and over. Yes, and the battle is to the strong. He would test
whether the world would trample him under foot or no.
Chicago, when it finally dawned on him, came with a rush on the second
morning. He had spent two nights in the gaudy Pullman then provided--a
car intended to make up for some of the inconveniences of its
arrangements by an over-elaboration of plush and tortured glass--when
the first lone outposts of the prairie metropolis began to appear. The
side-tracks along the road-bed over which he was speeding became more
and more numerous, the telegraph-poles more and more hung with arms and
strung smoky-thick with wires. In the far distance, cityward, was,
here and there, a lone working-man's cottage, the home of some
adventurous soul who had planted his bare hut thus far out in order to
reap the small but certain advantage which the growth of the city would
bring.
The land was flat--as flat as a table--with a waning growth of brown
grass left over from the previous year, and stirring faintly in the
morning breeze. Underneath were signs of the new green--the New Year's
flag of its disposition. For some reason a crystalline atmosphere
enfolded the distant hazy outlines of the city, holding the latter like
a fly in amber and giving it an artistic subtlety which touched him.
Already a devotee of art, ambitious for connoisseurship, who had had
his joy, training, and sorrow out of the collection he had made and
lost in Philadelphia, he appreciated almost every suggestion of a
delightful picture in nature.
The tracks, side by side, were becoming more and more numerous.
Freight-cars were assembled here by thousands from all parts of the
country--yellow, red, blue, green, white. (Chicago, he recalled,
already had thirty railroads terminating here, as though it were the
end of the world.) The little low one and two story houses, quite new
as to wood, were frequently unpainted and already smoky--in places
grimy. At grade-crossings, where ambling street-cars and wagons and
muddy-wheeled buggies waited, he noted how flat the streets were, how
unpaved, how sidewalks went up and down rhythmically--here a flight of
steps, a veritable platform before a house, there a long stretch of
boards laid flat on the mud of the prairie itself. What a city!
Presently a branch of the filthy, arrogant, self-sufficient little
Chicago River came into view, with its mass of sputtering tugs, its
black, oily water, its tall, red, brown, and green grain-elevators, its
immense black coal-pockets and yellowish-brown lumber-yards.
Here was life; he saw it at a flash. Here was a seething city in the
making. There was something dynamic in the very air which appealed to
his fancy. How different, for some reason, from Philadelphia! That was
a stirring city, too. He had thought it wonderful at one time, quite a
world; but this thing, while obviously infinitely worse, was better.
It was more youthful, more hopeful. In a flare of morning sunlight
pouring between two coal-pockets, and because the train had stopped to
let a bridge swing and half a dozen great grain and lumber boats go
by--a half-dozen in either direction--he saw a group of Irish
stevedores idling on the bank of a lumber-yard whose wall skirted the
water. Healthy men they were, in blue or red shirt-sleeves, stout
straps about their waists, short pipes in their mouths, fine, hardy,
nutty-brown specimens of humanity. Why were they so appealing, he
asked himself. This raw, dirty town seemed naturally to compose itself
into stirring artistic pictures. Why, it fairly sang! The world was
young here. Life was doing something new. Perhaps he had better not go
on to the Northwest at all; he would decide that question later.
In the mean time he had letters of introduction to distinguished
Chicagoans, and these he would present. He wanted to talk to some
bankers and grain and commission men. The stock-exchange of Chicago
interested him, for the intricacies of that business he knew backward
and forward, and some great grain transactions had been made here.
The train finally rolled past the shabby backs of houses into a long,
shabbily covered series of platforms--sheds having only roofs--and
amidst a clatter of trucks hauling trunks, and engines belching steam,
and passengers hurrying to and fro he made his way out into Canal
Street and hailed a waiting cab--one of a long line of vehicles that
bespoke a metropolitan spirit. He had fixed on the Grand Pacific as
the most important hotel--the one with the most social
significance--and thither he asked to be driven. On the way he studied
these streets as in the matter of art he would have studied a picture.
The little yellow, blue, green, white, and brown street-cars which he
saw trundling here and there, the tired, bony horses, jingling bells at
their throats, touched him. They were flimsy affairs, these cars,
merely highly varnished kindling-wood with bits of polished brass and
glass stuck about them, but he realized what fortunes they portended if
the city grew. Street-cars, he knew, were his natural vocation. Even
more than stock-brokerage, even more than banking, even more than
stock-organization he loved the thought of street-cars and the vast
manipulative life it suggested.