Part 20

Well as Armstrong knew him, he was for the moment impressed. The only born monsters are the insane criminals; the monstrous among our powerful and eminent and most respectable are by long and deliberate indulgence in self-deception manufactured into monsters, protected from public exposure by their position, wealth, and respectability. We do not realize any more than they do themselves, that they have become insane criminals like the monsters-born. There is a majesty in the trappings of virtue that does not altogether leave them even when a hypocrite wears them; also, Armstrong was more than half disarmed by his new-sprung doubts whether he was wholly justified in meeting treachery with treachery. He surprised Fosdick by breaking the silence with an almost deprecating, "I said more than I intended. What you have done, what I have done, is all part of the game. Let us continue to leave God and morals--honesty and honor--out of it. Let us be practical, businesslike. You wish to save your reputation and your fortune. I can save them for you. I have given you my condition--it is the least I will ask, or can ask. What do you say?"

"I must have time to think it over," replied Fosdick. "I cannot decide so important a matter in haste."

"Quite right," Armstrong readily assented. "It will not be necessary to have your decision before noon to-morrow. The committee has adjourned until Monday. That will give us half of Saturday and Sunday to settle the plans that hang on your decision."

"To-morrow noon," said Fosdick, sunk into a stupor. "To-morrow noon." And he moved vaguely to the door, one trembling hand out before him as if he were blind and feeling his way. And, so all-powerful are appearances with us, Armstrong hung his head and did not dare look at the pitiful spectacle of age and feebleness and misery. "He's a villain," said the young man to himself, "as nearly a through-and-through villain as walks the earth. But he's still a man, with a heart and pride and the power to suffer. And what am I that I should judge him? In his place, with his chances, would I have been any different? Was I not hell-bent by the same route? Am I not, still?"

He walked beside Fosdick to the elevator, waited with him for the car. "Good night," he said in a tone of gentlest courtesy. And it hurt him that the old man did not seem to hear, did not respond. He wished that Fosdick had offered to shake hands with him.

He went to Morris, expecting him at a club across the way, and related the substance of the interview. Morris, who had both imagination and sensibility, guessed the cause of his obvious yet apparently unprovoked depression, guessed why he had been so tender with Fosdick. Nevertheless he twitted him on his soft-heartedness: "The old bunco-steerer hasn't disgorged yet, has he?--and hasn't the remotest intention of disgorging. So, my tears are altogether for the policy holders he has been milking these forty years." Then he added, "Though, why careless damn fools should get any sympathy in their misfortunes does not clearly appear. As between knaves and fools, I incline toward knaves. At least, they are teachers of wisdom in the school of experience, while fools avail nothing, are simply provokers and purveyors to knavery."

*XXII*

*A DUEL AFTER LUNCH*

In the respectable morning newspaper the Fosdicks took in, the facts of Josiah's latest public appearance were presented with those judicious omissions and modifications which the respectable editor feels it his duty to make, that the lower classes may not be led to distrust and deride the upper classes. Thus, Amy, glancing at headlines in search of the only important news--the doings of "our set"--got the impression that her father had had an annoying lapse of memory in testifying about something or other before somebody or other. But the servants took in a newspaper that had no mission to safeguard the name and fame and influence of the upper classes; probably not by chance, this newspaper was left where its vulgar but vivid headlines caught her eye.

She read, punctuating each paragraph with explosions of indignation. But when she had finished, she reread--and began to think. As most of us have learned by experience in great matters or small, truth is rubberlike--it offers small resistance to the blows of prejudice, and, as soon as the blow passes, it straightway springs back to its original form and place. Amy downfaced a thousand little facts of her own knowledge as to where the money came from--facts which tried to tell her that the "low, lying sheet" had revealed only a trifling part of the truth. But, when she saw her father, saw how he had suddenly broken, his very voice emasculate and thin, she gave up the struggle to deceive herself. There is a notion that a man's family is the last to believe the disagreeable truth about his relations with the outside world. This is part of the theory that a man has two characters, that he can be a saint at six o'clock in the morning and a scoundrel at six o'clock in the evening, that he is honest at a certain street and number and a liar and a thief at another street and number. But the fact is that character is the most closely woven and homogeneous of fabrics, and, though a man's family do not admit it publicly when the truth about him is exposed, they know him all the time for what he really is. Amy knew; her father's appearance, indicating not that he was guilty but that he was found out and was in an agony of dread of the consequences, threw her into a hysteria of shame and terror. She avoided the servants; she startled each time the door bell rang; it might mean the bursting of the real disgrace, for, in her ignorance of political conditions, she assumed that arrest and imprisonment would follow the detection of her father and probably Hugo in grave crimes. She dared not face any of the few that called; she would not even see Hugo.

On Sunday morning came a note from Alois--a love letter, begging to see her. She read it with tears flowing and with a heart swelling with gratitude. "He does love me!" she said. "He must know we are about to be disgraced, yet he has only been strengthened in his love." Though the actual state of the family's affairs was vastly different from what she imagined, though she would have been little disturbed had she known that publicity was the only punishment likely to overtake persons so respectable as Fosdick and his son, still the crisis was none the less real to Amy. In such crises the best qualities of human nature rise in all their grandeur and exert all their power. She sent off an immediate answer--"Thank you, Alois--I need you-- Come at three o'clock. Yours, Amy."

When he came, she let him see what she wanted; how, with all she had valued and had thought valuable transforming into trash and slipping away from her, she had turned to him, to the only reality--to the love that welcomes the storm which gives it the opportunity to show how strong it is, how firmly rooted. With his first stammering, ardent protestations, she flung herself into his arms. "I have loved you from the beginning," she sobbed. "But I didn't realize it until I looked round for some one to turn to. You do love me?"

"I am here," he said simply, and there is nothing finer than was the look in his eyes, the feeling in his heart. "And we must be married soon. We must be together, now."

"Yes, yes--soon--at once," she agreed. "And you will take me away, won't you? Ah, I love you--I love you, Alois. I will show you how a woman can love." And never had she been so beautiful, both without and within.

"As soon as you please," said he. He was not inclined to interrogate his happiness; but he was surprised at her sudden and unconditional surrender. He guessed that some quarrel about him with her father or with Hugo had roused her to assert what he was quite ready to believe had been in her heart all the time; or, it might be that she wished to make amends for her father's having planned to send him away when honor commanded him to stay and guard his reputation. Had the cause of her hysteria been real, or had he known why she was so clinging and so eager, he would not have changed--for he loved her and was never half-hearted in any emotion. Though her money and her position were originally her greatest attractions for him, his ideal of his own self-respect was too high and too real for him to rest content until he had forced love to put him under its spell.

When he left her she sent for Hugo and told him. Hugo went off like a charge at the snap of the spark. "You must be mad!" he shouted. "Why, such a marriage is beneath you--is almost as bad as your sister's. It's your duty to bring a gentleman into the family."

She would not argue that; she would at any cost be forbearing with Hugo, who must be in torture, if he was not altogether a fool--and sometimes she thought he was. She restrained herself to saying gently, "You don't seem to appreciate our changed position."

"What 'changed position'? What are you talking about?" demanded Hugo, rearing and beginning to stride the length of the room.

She did not answer; answer seemed unnecessary, when Hugo was so obviously blustering to hide his real state of mind.

"You mean father's testimony?" he said. "What rot! Why, nobody that is anybody pays the slightest attention to that. Everyone understands how things are in finance and how vital it is to guard the secrets from lying demagogues and the mob. There isn't a man of consequence, of high respectability, on Manhattan Island, or in big affairs anywhere in the country, who wouldn't be in as difficult or more difficult a position, if he happened to be cornered. Everyone whose opinion we care anything about is in the game, and this attack on us is simply a move of our enemies."

"Deceive yourself, if you want to," replied Amy. "But I know I can't get married any too soon."

"And marrying a nobody, a mere architect, whose sister works for a living. You haven't even the excuse of caring for him."

"Don't be too sure about that! In the last twenty-four hours I've learned a great deal about life, about people. Everybody talks of love, and of wanting love. But nobody knows what it really means, until he has suffered. Oh, Hugo, don't be so hard! I need Alois!" And there were tears in her eyes.

Hugo tossed his head; but he was not unimpressed. "I'm sorry to see you so weak," said he in a tone that was merely surly and therefore, by contrast, kindly. "Of course, it's none of _my_ business. But I don't approve it, I want you distinctly to understand."

"You won't be disagreeable to Alois?"

"I don't blame _him_," said Hugo. "It's natural he should be crazy to marry you. And, in his way, he isn't a bad sort. He's been about in our set long enough to get something of an air." Hugo was thinking that Amy had now lost young Roebuck, the only eligible in her train; that, after all, since he himself was to be the principal heir to his father's estate, she was not exactly a first-class matrimonial offering and might have to take something even less satisfactory than Alois, if she continued to wait for the husband he could warm to. "Go ahead, if you must," was his final remark. "I'll not interfere."

This was equivalent to approval, and Amy, strengthened, moved upon her father. To her astonishment, he listened without interest. She had to say pointedly, "And I've come to find out whether you approve," before he roused himself to respond.

"Do as you like," he said wearily, not lifting his eyes from the sheet of paper on which he had been making aimless markings, when she interrupted him.

"You wouldn't object if I married--soon?"

"Don't bother me," he flamed out. "Do as you please. Only, don't fret me. And, no splurge! I'm sick. I want quiet."

Thus it came about that on the Thursday following the engagement, a week almost to the hour from Fosdick's tumble into his own carefully and deeply dug pit, Amy married Alois Siersdorf, "with only the two families present, because of Mr. Fosdick's age and illness"; and at noon they sailed away on the almost empty _Deutschland_.

Alois did not let his perplexity before Amy's astounding docility interfere with his happiness. He saw that, whatever the cause, she was in love with him, so deeply in love that she had descended from the pedestal, had lifted him from his knees, had set him upon it, and had fallen down meekly to worship. There were a few of "our people" on the steamer--half a dozen families or parts of families, of "the push," who were on their way to freeze and sneeze in the "warm" Riviera for the sake of fashion. Alois was delighted that Amy was so absorbed in him that she would have nothing to do with them--this for the first three days. He had not believed her capable of the passion and the tenderness she was lavishing upon him. She made him hold her in his arms hours at a time; she developed amazing skill at those coquetries of intimacy so much more difficult than the enticements that serve to make the period of the engagement attractive. And he found her more beautiful, too, than he had thought. She was one of those women who are not at their best when on public or semipublic view, but reserve for intimacy a charm which explains the otherwise inexplicable hold they get upon the man to whom they fully reveal and abandon themselves.

And Alois, in love with the woman herself now rather than with what she represented to his rather material imagination, surprised her in turn. She had thought him somewhat stilted, a distinctly professional man, with too little lightness of mind--interesting, satisfactory beyond the prosy and commonplace and patterned run of men she knew; but still with a tendency to be wearisome if taken in too large doses. She had to confess that she had misjudged him. He was no longer under the nervous strain of trying to win her, was no longer handicapped by a vague but potent notion that he would get more than he gave in a marriage with her. He revealed his real self--light-hearted, varied, most adaptable; thoroughgoing masculine, yet with a femininity, a knowledge of and interest in matters purely feminine, that made companionship as easy as it was delightful.

They were in the full rapture of these agreeable surprises each about the other when the representatives of "our set" began to insist upon associating with them. Amy shrank from the first advances; this only made the bored fashionables the more determined. Even in her morbidness about the lost reputation and the menace of prison, she could not deceive herself as to the meaning of their persistent friendliness. And soon she was delighted by a third surprise. She found that Hugo had been right, and she absurdly wrong, about public opinion. There might be, probably was, a public opinion that misunderstood her father and judged him by provincial, old-fashioned standards. But it was not _her_ public opinion. All the people of her set were more or less involved, directly or through their relations by blood and marriage, in enterprises that necessitated what in the masses--the "lower classes" and the "criminal classes"--would be called lying, swindling, and stealing; they, therefore, had no fault to find with Fosdick. Had he not his fortune still? And was he not impregnable against the mob howling that he be treated as a common malefactor? Where, then, was the occasion for Phariseeism? Was it not the plain duty of respectable people to stand firmly by the Fosdicks and show the mob that respectability was solidly against demagogism, against attempts to judge the upper class by lower class standards? Yes; that was the wise course, and the safe course. Why, even the public prosecutor, a suspiciously demagogical shouter for "equal justice"--respectability appreciated that he had to get the suffrages of the mob, but thought he went a little too far in demagogic speech--why, even he had shown that the gentleman was stronger in him than the politician. Had he not, after a few days of silence, come out boldly rebuking "the attempt to defame and persecute one of the country's most public-spirited and useful citizens, in advance of judicial inquiry"?

Amy was amazed that she had been so preposterously unnerved by what she now saw was literally nothing at all, a mere morbid phantasy. But at the same time, she was devoutly thankful that she had been deluded. "But for that," said she to herself, "I might not have married 'Lois, might have stifled the best, the most beautiful emotion of my life, might have missed happiness entirely." This thought so moved her that she rose--it was in the dead of night--and went into his room and bent over him, asleep, and kissed him softly. And she stood, admiring in the dim light the manliness and the beauty of his head, his waving hair, his small, becoming blond beard.

"I love you," she murmured passionately. "No price would have been too dear to pay for you."

Meanwhile Fosdick was settling to the new conditions with a facility that admirably illustrated the infinite adaptability of the human animal. The inevitable, however cruel, is usually easy to accept. It is always mitigated by such reflections as that it could not have been avoided and that it might have been worse. The more intelligent the victim, the shorter his idle bewailings and the quicker his readjustment--and Fosdick was certainly intelligent. Also, among "practical" men, as youth with its ardent courage and its enthusiasms retreats and old age advances, there is a steady decay of self-respect, a rapid decline of belief that in life, so brief, so unsatisfactory at best, so fundamentally sordid, anything which interferes with comfort, personal comfort, is worth fighting for; where a young man will challenge an almost fanciful infringement of his self-respect, an old man will accept with a resigned and cynical shrug the most degrading conditions, if only they leave him material comfort and peace.

To aid old Fosdick in making the best of it, the sensational but influential part of the press each morning and each afternoon girded at him, at Morris and at the authorities, asking the most impertinent questions, making the most disgusting demands. Thus, the old man was not permitted to lose sight or sound of the foaming-jowled bloodhounds Armstrong was protecting him from. And when he gave full weight to the fact that Armstrong was also saving him from the Atwater-Langdon-Trafford crowd, he ceased to hate him, began to look on him as a friend and ally.

Now that Fosdick and Armstrong were on a basis on which he was compelled to respect the young man, each began to take a more favorable view of the other than he had ever taken before. Rarely indeed is any human being--any living being--altogether or even chiefly bad. If the evil is the predominant force in a man's life, it is usually because of some system of which he is the victim, some system whose appeal to appetite or vanity, or, often, to sheer necessities, is too strong for the natural instincts of the peaceful, patient human animal. And even the man who lives wholly by outrages upon his fellow men lives so that all but a very few of his daily acts are either not bad, or positively good. The mad beasts of creation, high and low, are few--and they are mad. All Fosdick's strongest instincts--except those for power and wealth--were decent, and some of them were fine. It was not surprising that, with so much of the genuinely good in him, he was able to delude himself into believing there was reality behind his reputation as a philanthropic business man.

The hard part of his readjustment was requesting those through whom he had controlled the O.A.D. to transfer their allegiance to Armstrong. It is a tribute to Armstrong's diplomacy--and where was there ever successful diplomat who was not at bottom a good fellow, a sympathetic appreciator of human nature?--it is a tribute to Armstrong's diplomatic skill that Fosdick came to look on this transfer--and to hasten it and to make it complete--as the best, the only means of checking that "infamous Atwater-Trafford gang." He felt he was simply retreating one step further into that shadow behind the throne of power in which he had always been careful to keep himself pretty well concealed. He felt--so considerate and delicate was Armstrong--that he would still be a power in the councils of the O.A.D. He himself suggested that Hugo should retire from the fourth vice-presidency "as soon as this thing blows over."

The public knew nothing of the transfer. Even when one gang bursts open the doors to fling another gang out, the public gets no more than a hasty and shallow glimpse behind the facade of the great institutions that exploit it and administer its affairs. It was not let into the secret that for the first time in the history of the O.A.D. its president did preside, and that he not only presided but ruled as autocratically as Fosdick had ruled, as some one man always does rule sooner or later in any human institution. But the Atwater-Langdon-Trafford "gang" soon heard what was occurring, and, as Armstrong had known that they must hear, he awaited results with not a little anxiety. Of Trafford he was not at all afraid--Trafford's tricks were the familiar common-places by which most men who get on in the world of chicane achieve their success. About Langdon, he was somewhat more unquiet; but Atwater was the one he dreaded. What was Atwater doing, now that he realized--as he must realize--that he had been duped, that Armstrong had used him to conquer Fosdick and was now facing him, armed with Fosdick's weapons and with youth and energy and astuteness; that Morris and the governor were not his tools, as he had been imagining, but Armstrong's allies; that, instead of being about to absorb the O.A.D., he might, should Armstrong force the fighting, lose the great Universal, the greater Gibraltar Mutual, and the Hearth and Home, which gathered in, and kept, the pennies of poverty?

A few days before the committee was to reassemble, Atwater telephoned Armstrong, asking him to come to lunch with him. Armstrong accepted and drew a long breath of relief. He knew that Atwater's agents had been sounding both the governor and Morris, had "persuaded" little Kenworthy to pretend to be ill, and to put off the reassembling of the committee. So, this invitation, this request for a face-to-face talk, must mean that neither the governor nor Morris had yielded.

When Armstrong and Atwater met, each looked the other over genially but thoroughly. "I congratulate you, my young friend," said Atwater heartily. "I can admire a stroke of genius, even though it cuts my own plans."