Part 15

The newspapers were shrieking for a "real cleaning of the Augean stables of finance"; the political figureheads of "the interests" were solemnly and sonorously declaiming that there must be no repetition of former fiascos and fizzles, when nobody had been punished, though everybody had been caught black-handed. The prosecuting officers were protesting that the plea of the guilty that they were "gentlemen" and "respectable" would not again avail. So, Wall Street's wise knew that the struggle between Fosdick and Atwater was near its crisis. Throughout the "wallow" banks and trust companies, bond houses and bucket shops, all the eminent respectabilities, were "hustling" to get weathertight. Everyone appreciated that Fosdick and Atwater, prudent men, patron saints of "stability," would be careful to confine the zone of war strictly. But--what would they regard as the prudent and proper limits of this release and use of public anger? Neither faction was afraid of law, of serious criminal prosecution; however the authorities might be compelled to side, they would not yield to popular clamor--beyond making the usual bluff necessary to fool the public until it forgot. But these exposures which had now become a regular part of the raids of the great men on each other's preserves always tended to make the public shy for a while; and the royalty, nobility, and gentry of the fashionable hierarchy, had to meet the enormous expenses of their families, their establishments, and their retinues of dependents, never less, ever more. They could ill afford any cessation or marked slackening of the inflow of wealth from the industrious and confiding, or covetous, masses--covetous rather than confiding, since the passion of the average man for gambling, for getting something for nothing, is an even larger factor in the successful swindling operations of enthroned respectability than is his desire for a safe, honest investment of his surplus. Finally, the uneasy upper classes remembered that usually these exposures resulted in the sacrifice of some of them; an unlucky financier or group of financiers was loaded down with the blame for the corruption and, amid the execration of the crowd and the noisy denunciation of fellow financiers, was sent away into the wilderness, disgraced so far as a man can be disgraced in the eyes of money-worshipers when he still has his wealth. Rarely did the sacrifice extend further than disgrace; still, that was no light matter, as it meant lessened opportunities to share in the looting which was soon resumed with increased energy and success. The disgraced financier had to live on what he had acquired before his disgrace, instead of keeping that intact, and paying his expenses, and adding to his fortune, too, out of fresh loot.

Altogether, it was wise to get good and ready--to "dress" the shelves and the back of the shop as well as the windows and front cases; to destroy or hide suspicious books and memoranda; to shift confidential clerks; to distribute vacations to Europe among employees, open and secret, with dangerous information and a tendency toward hysterical and loose talking under cross-examination; to retain all the able lawyers, and all those related by blood, marriage, or business to legislators, prosecuting officers, and powerful politicians; to confer discreetly as to the exact facts of certain transactions, "so that we may not make any blunders and apparent contradictions on the witness stand." And the lawyers--how busy they were! The aristocrats of the legal profession were as brisk as are their humbler fellows on the eve of a "tipped-off" raid on a den of "swell crooks." In fact, the whole business had the air of a very cheap and vulgar kind of crookedness; and the doings of the great men were strange indeed, in view of their pose as leaders by virtue of superiority in honest skill. An impartial observer might have been led to wonder whether honest men had not been driven from leadership because they would not stoop to the vilenesses by which "success" was gained, and not because they were less in brain. As for such conduct in men lauded as "bold," "brave," "courageous beyond the power to quail"--it was simply inexplicable. The "dare-devil leaders" were acting like a pack of shifty cowards engaged in robbing a safe and just hearing the heavy, regular tread of a police patrol under the windows.

Armstrong was too absorbed in the game for much analysis or theorizing; still, his lip did curl at the spectacle--and in part his sneer was self-contempt. "It's disgusting," said he to himself, "that to keep alive among these scoundrels and guard the interests one is intrusted with, one must do or tolerate so many despicable things." As that view of the matter was the one which every man in the district was taking, each to excuse himself to himself, there was not an uncomfortable conscience or a shame-reddened cheek or a slinking eye. Once a man becomes convinced that his highest duty is not to himself, but to his fellow man, the rest is easy; the greater his "self-sacrifice" of honesty, decency, and self-respect for the sake of the public good--for country or religion or "stability" or "to keep the workingman's family from starving"--the more sympathetic and enthusiastic is his conscience.

When the financial district was at the height of its activity in getting weathertight for the approaching investigation, Fosdick shook off his savage enemy, the gout, and got downtown again. He went direct from his carriage to Armstrong's offices. He greeted his "man" as cordially as if he had not just been completing the arrangements by which he expected to make Armstrong himself the first conspicuous victim of the investigation. And Armstrong received and returned the greeting with no change in his usual phlegmatic manner to hint his feelings or his plans.

"About Hugo--" began Josiah.

Armstrong made a gesture of dismissal. "That's a closed incident. Any news of the committee?"

Josiah accepted the finality of Armstrong's manner. "You show yourself a man in ignoring the flappings and squawkings of that young cockatoo," said he cheerfully. "As for the committee-- What do you think of Morris for counsel?"

"You've decided on him?" said Armstrong. His eyes wandered.

But Fosdick was not subtle, and thought nothing of that slight but, in one so close, most significant sign of a concealing mind. "It's settled," replied he. "Joe's an honorable man. Also, he's tied fast to us, and at the same time the public can't charge that he's one of our lawyers. I know, you and he--" There Fosdick stopped. He prided himself on a most gentlemanly delicacy in family matters.

"He'll take orders?" said Armstrong, with no suggestion that he either saw cause for "delicacy" or appreciated it.

"I suppose he would, if it were necessary. But, thank God, Horace, it isn't. As I told him at my house last night, after the governor and I had decided on him--I said to him: 'Joe, go ahead and make a reputation for yourself. We fear nothing--we've got nothing to hide that the public has a right to know. Tear the mask off those damned scoundrels who are trying to seize the O.A.D. and change it from a great bulwark of public safety into a feeder for their reckless gambling.'"

"And what did he say?" inquired Armstrong--a simple inquiry, with no hint of the cynical amusement it veiled.

"He was moved to tears, almost," replied Fosdick, damp of eye himself at the recollection. "And he said: 'Thank you, Mr. Fosdick, and you, Governor Hartwell. I'll regard this commission as a sacred trust. I'll be careful not to give encouragement to calumny or to make the public uneasy and suspicious where there is no just reason for uneasiness and suspicion; and at the same time I'll expose these men who have been prostituting the name of financier.' You really ought to have heard him."

An inarticulate sound came from behind the Westerner's armor of stolid apathy.

"Horace, he's a noble fellow," continued Fosdick, assuming that his "man" was sympathetic. "And he knows the law from cover to cover. He has drawn some of our best statutes, and whenever I've got into a place where it looked as if the howling of the mob was going to stop business, I've always called on him to get up a statute that would make the mob happy and not interfere with us, and he has never failed me. By the time he's fifty, he'll be one of the strongest men in the country--the kind of man the business interests 'd like to see in the White House. If it weren't for that fool wife of his! Do you know her?"

"No," replied Armstrong.

Fosdick decided that "delicacy" was unnecessary, as Armstrong was out of the Carlin family. "It's all very well," said he, "for a young fellow to go crazy about a girl when he's courting. But to keep on being crazy about her after they've got used to each other and settled down--it's past me. It defeats the whole object of marriage, which is to steady a man, to take woman off his mind, and give him peace for his work. In my opinion, there's too much talk about love nowadays. It ain't decent--it ain't _decent_! And it's setting the women crazy, with so much idle time on their hands. Morris is stark mad about that wife of his, and all he gets out of it is what a man usually gets when he makes a fool of himself for a woman. She thinks of nothing but spending money, and she keeps him poor. The faster he earns, the wilder she spends. I suppose he thinks she cares for him--when working him is simply a business with her."

If Fosdick had known what Mrs. Morris was about at that very hour, there would have been even more energy in his denunciation of her. As soon as her husband had got home the previous night, he had confided to her the whole of his new and dazzling opportunity--not only all that his secret employer expected him to make of it but all that he purposed to make of it. She was not a discreet woman; so, it was fortunate for him that her listening when he talked "shop," as she called his career, was a pretense. She gathered only what was important to her--that he felt sure of making a great deal out of the new venture.

He meant reputation; she assumed that he meant money. She began to spend it the very next day. Even as Josiah Fosdick was denouncing her, she was in an art store negotiating for a set of medieval tapestries for her salon. As antiques, the tapestries were wonderful--wonderful, like so large a part of the antiques that multimillionaires have brought over for their houses and for the museums--wonderful as specimens of the ingenuity of European handicraftsmen at forgery. As works of art, the tapestries were atrocious; as household articles, they were dangerous--filthy, dust- and germ-laden rags. But "everybody" was getting antique tapestries; Mrs. Morris must have them. She was an interesting and much-admired representative of the American woman who goes in _seriously_ for art. To go in _seriously_ for art does not mean to cultivate one's sense of the beautiful, to learn to discriminate with candor among good, not so good, not so bad, and bad. It means to keep in touch with the European dealers in things artistic, real and reputed; to be the first to follow them when, a particular fad having been mined to its last dollar, they and their subsidized critics and connoisseurs come out excitedly for some new period or style or school. Mrs. Morris was regarded as one of the first authorities in fashionable New York on matters of art. Her house was enormously admired; she was known to every dealer from Moscow to the tip of the Iberian peninsula; and incredible were the masses of trash they had worked off upon her and, through her recommendations, upon her friends.

Her "amazing artistic discernment"--so Sunnywall, the most fashionable of the fashionable architects, described it--was the bulwark of her social position. Whenever a voice lifted against the idle lives of fashionable people, how conclusive to reply, "Look at Mrs. Joe Morris--she's typical. She devotes her life to art. It's incalculable what she has done toward interesting the American people in art." She even had fame in a certain limited way. Her name was spoken with respect from Maine to California in those small but conspicuous circles where possession of more or less wealth and a great deal of empty time has impelled the women to occupy themselves with books, pictures, statuary, furniture they think they ought to like. To what fantastic climaxes prosperity has brought the old American passion for self-development! The men, to shrewd and shameless prostitution in the market-places; the women, to the stupefying ignorance of the culture that consists in the mindless repetitions of the slang and cant and nonsense of intellectual fakirs.

Mrs. Morris told her husband about the new tapestries at dinner. That was her regular time for imparting to him anything she knew he would be "troublesome" about; and it was rapidly ruining his digestion. She chose dinner because the presence of the servants made it impossible for him to burst out until the fact that the thing was done and could not be undone had time to batter down his wrath. Usually she spoke between soup and fish--she spoke thus early that she might gain as much time as possible. So often did she have these upsetting communications to make that he got in the habit of dreading those two courses as a transatlantic captain dreads the Devil's Hole; and on evenings when the fish had come and gone with nothing upsetting from her, he had a sudden, often exuberant rush of high spirits.

"I dropped in at Violette's to-day for another look at those tapestries," she began.

At "Violette's" he paused in lifting the spoon to his lips; at "tapestries" he pricked his ears--one of the greatest trials of his wife's married life was that independent motion of his ears, "just like one of the lower animals or something in a side show," she often complained.

"And I simply couldn't resist," she ended, looking like a happy, spoiled child. He dropped the spoon with a splash.

"Do be careful, Joe," she remonstrated sweetly. "We can't change the dinner-cloth every night, and such frequent washing is _ruinous_. I had them sent home, and you'll be entranced when you see them."

"Did you give Violette his original price?" he demanded, as his color, having reached an apoplectic blue-red, began to pale toward the normal.

"He wouldn't come down a cent. And I don't blame him."

Morris glowered at the butler and the footman. They went about their business as if quite unconscious of the work of peace they were doing--and were expected by their mistress to do. Mrs. Morris talked on and on, pretending to assume that he was as delighted with her purchase as was she. She discoursed of these particular tapestries, of tapestries in general, of the atmosphere they brought into a house--"the suggestion, the very spirit of the old, beautiful life of the upper classes in the Middle Ages." By the time dinner was over she had talked herself so far away from the sordid things of life that the coarsest nature would have shrunk from intruding them. But on that evening Morris was angry through and through. When they left the dining room, she said, "Now, come and look at them, dear."

"No," he said savagely. He threw open the door of his study. "Come in here. I want to talk to you."

She hesitated. A glance at his fury-blanched face convinced her that, if she made it necessary, he would seize her and thrust her in. As the door closed on them with a bang, the butler said to the footman, "Letty's done it once too often."

The footman tiptoed toward the door. The butler stopped him with, "You couldn't hear bloody murder through that study door, and the keyhole's no good."

"Why didn't he take her to her boudoir?" grumbled the footman.

She had indeed "done it once too often." As soon as Morris had the door locked he blazed down at her--she fresh and innocent, with her fluffy golden hair and sweet blue eyes and dimples on either side of her pretty mouth. "Damn you!" he exclaimed through his set teeth. "You want to ruin me, body and soul--you vampire!"

Two big slow tears drenched her eyes. "Oh, Joe!" she implored. "What have I done! Don't be angry with me. It kills me!" And she caught her breath like a child trying bravely not to cry and put out her rosy arms toward him, her round, rosy shoulders and bosom rising and falling in a rhythmic swell.

"Don't touch me!" he all but shouted. "That's part of your infernal game. Oh, you think I'm a fool--and so I am--so I am! But not the kind you imagine. It hasn't been your cleverness that has made me play the idiot, but my own weakness." He caught her by the shoulders. "What is it?" he cried furiously, shaking her. "What's the infernal spell I get under whenever you touch me?"

"You love me," she pleaded, "as I love you."

"Love!" he jeered. "Well, call it that--no matter. Those tapestries have got to go back--do you hear?"

"Yes--you needn't shout, dear. Certainly they'll go back."

"You say 'certainly,' but you've no intention of sending them back. You think this'll blow over, that you'll wheedle me round as you have a hundred times. But I tell you, _this_ time, what I say _goes_!"

"What's the trouble, Joe? You were never like this before."

He was gnawing at his thin gray mustache and was breathing heavily. "When I married you I was a decent sort of fellow. I had a sense of honor and a disposition to be honest. You--you've made me into a bawd. I tell you, not the lowest creature that parades the streets of the slums is viler than I. That's what you and love--love!--have done for me. My wife and love! God, woman, what you have made me do to get money for those greedy hands of yours! Now, listen to me. You evidently didn't listen last night when I told you my plans. No matter. Here's the point. I'm going to sell out once more--going to play the traitor for as big stakes as ever tempted a man. Then, I'll make the career I once dreamed of making, and you will be second to no woman in the land. But, no more extravagance."

"I always knew you'd be rich and famous," she cried, clasping her hands and looking the radiant child.

"Famous, but not rich. I'm not playing for money this time. And we're not going to have much money hereafter. I've thought it all out. We're going to move into a smaller house; all your junk is to be sold, and what little money it'll bring we'll put by."

She seemed to be freezing. The baby look died out of her face. Her eyes became hard, her mouth cruel. "I don't understand," she said.

"Yes, you do, madam," he retorted. "You need not waste time in scheming or in working your schemes. I've thought it all out. You were driving me straight to ruin; and, when you got me there, if I hadn't conveniently died or blown my brains out, you'd have divorced me and fastened on some one else. I think that, like me, you used to be decent. You've been led on and on until you've come pretty near to losing all human feeling. Well, it's to be a right about, this instant. I'm going back--and you've got to go back with me."

There was a note in his voice, an expression in his eyes that disquieted her; but she had ruled him so long, had softened him from the appearance of strength into plastic weakness so often, that she saw before her simply a harder task than usual, perhaps the hardest task she had yet had.

"I'll be very busy the next few months," he went on. "You must go away--to your mother--or abroad--anywhere, so that I shan't be tempted."

"I don't want to leave you!" she cried. "I want to stay and help you."

His smile was sardonic. "No! You shall go. I've an offer for this house, as it stands. In fact, I've sold it."

She stared wildly. "Joe!" she screamed.

"I've sold it," he repeated.

"To whom?"

His eyes shifted, and he flushed. "To Trafford," he replied, with a sullenness, a shamefacedness that would not have escaped her had she not been internally in such a commotion that nothing from the outside could impress her.

"But you couldn't get a tenth what the things are worth, selling that way."

"I got a good price," said he, his eyes averted. "Never mind what it was."

"Why, the Traffords would have no use for this house. They've got a palace."

"He bought it," said Morris doggedly.

"I don't believe it."

"He bought it; and I want you to tell everybody we sold at a loss--a big loss. You can say we're thinking of living in the country. Not a word to anyone that'd indicate there's any mystery about the sale." This without looking up.

She studied his face--the careworn but still handsome features, the bad lines about the eyes and mouth, the splendid intellectuality of the brow, a confused but on the whole disagreeable report upon the life and character within. "I think I do understand," she said slowly. Then, like a vicious jab, "At least, as much as I want to understand."

She strolled toward the door, sliding one soft, jeweled hand reflectively over her bare shoulders. She paused before a statuette and inspected it carefully, her hands behind her back, her fingers slowly locking and unlocking. Presently she gave a queer little laugh and said, "It wasn't the house, it was _you_ Trafford bought."

A pause, then he: "He _thinks_ so."

Again a pause, she smiling softly up at the statuette. Without facing him she said, "I must have my share, Joe."

He did not answer.

She waited a few minutes, repeated, "_I_ must have my share."

"Yes," he replied.

A pause; then, "Are you coming up to bed?"

"I shall sleep here."

She had passively despised him, whenever she had thought about him at all in those years of his subservience to her. For the first time she was looking at him with a feeling akin to respect.

"Good night," she murmured sweetly.

"Good night," curtly from him.

The watching servants were astonished at her expression of buoyant good humor, were astounded when she said with careless cheerfulness to the butler, "Thomas, telephone Violette the first thing in the morning to come for those tapestries he brought to-day. Tell him I'll call and explain."

*XVIII*

*ARMSTRONG PROPOSES*

Armstrong lingered in the entrance to the apartment house where Neva lived, dejection and irritation plain upon his features. At no time since he met her at Trafford's had he so longed to see her; and the elevator boy had just told him she was out. The boy's manner was convincing, but Armstrong was supersensitive about Neva.

She had received him often, and was always friendly; but always with a reserve, the more disquieting for its elusiveness. And whenever he tried to see her and failed, he suspected her of being unwilling to admit him. Sometimes the suspicion took the form of a belief it was a _tete-a-tete_ with the painter which she would not let him interrupt. Again, he feared she had decided not to admit him any more. It would be difficult to say which made him the gloomier--the feeling that he was, at best, a distant second, or the feeling that he was not placed at all. Never before in his relation with any human being, man or woman, had he been so exasperatingly at a disadvantage as with her. The fact that they had been married, which apparently ought to have made it impossible for her to maintain any barrier of reserve against him, once she had accepted him as a friend, was somehow just the circumstance that prevented him from making any progress whatever with her. And this was highly exasperating to a man of his instinct and passion and ability for conquest and dominion over all about him, men as well as women.