Part 27

"We failed before, and we were younger and more adaptable."

"But now we understand each other."

"Do we?" she said, her eyes gravely upon him.

"How can you ask that!"

"Because so much depends on our seeing the truth exactly. The rest of our lives is at stake."

"Yes. I can't go on without you. Can _you_ go on without me?"

"Each of us," she replied, "can go on without the other. I can paint pictures; you can make money. The question is, what will we mean to each other if we go on together? We aren't children any more, Horace. We are a man and a woman full grown, experienced, unable to blind ourselves even in our follies. And we aren't simply rushing into an episode of passion that will rage and die out. If it were merely that, I shouldn't be asking you and myself questions. When the end came, we could resume our separate lives; and, even if our experience had cost us dear instead of helping us, still we could recover, would in time be stronger and better for having had it. But you offer me your whole self, your whole life, and you ask me to give you mine. You ask me to marry you."

He did not understand this; woman meant to him only sex, and the difference between love and passion was a marriage ceremony. He felt that in what she said there lurked traces of the immorality of the woman who tries to think for herself instead of properly selecting a proper man and letting him do the thinking for both. "I love you," said he, "and there's the whole story. Love doesn't reason; it feels."

"Then it ought never to get married," she said. "We tried marriage once on the basis of husband and wife being absolute strangers to each other, and at cross purposes." She paused; he did not suspect it was to steady her constantly endangered self-control. "And," she added, "I shall never try that kind of marriage again. Passion is a better kindler than worldliness, but it is just as poor fuel."

"Neva!" he exclaimed.

"I couldn't be merely your mistress, Horace. I'd want _you_, and I'd want you to take me, all of me. I'd want it to be our life, and not merely an episode in our life. Can't you see what would come afterwards--when you had grown calm about me--and I about you? Can't you see that you'd turn back to your business and prostitute yourself for money, while I'd turn perhaps to luxury and show and prostitute myself to you for the means to exhibit myself? Don't you see it on every side, there in New York--the traffic in the souls of men and women viler than any on the sidewalks at night--the brazen faces of the men, flaunting their shame, the brazen faces of the women, the so-called wives, flaunting _their_ shame?"

"But you could never be like them," he protested. "Never!"

"As strong women as I, stronger, have been dragged down. No human being can resist the slow, steady, insidious seduction of his daily surroundings."

"I don't understand this at all, Neva," he said, though his ill-concealed anger showed that he did. Indeed, so angry was he that he was almost forgetting his own warnings to himself of the injustice of holding her responsible for anything she said in her obviously unstrung condition. He asked, "What have you to do with that sort of woman?" He hesitated, forced himself to go boldly on. "Why do you compare me to those men? _I_ do not degrade myself."

She did not answer immediately, but looked away across the beds of blooming flowers. When she began again, she seemed calmer, under better control. "All the time I was in New York," she said, "the life there--the real life of money getting and money spending--never touched me personally until toward the last. Then--I saw what it really meant, saw it so plainly that I can't ever again hide the truth from myself. And since I came away--out here--where it's calm, and one thinks of things as they are--where father and the other way of living and acting toward one's fellow beings, took strong hold of me----"

"But, Neva--you----"

"_Please_, let me finish," she begged, all excitement once more. "It's so hard to say--so much harder than you think. But I must--must--_must_ let you see what kind of woman I am, who it is you've asked to be your wife. As I remember my acquaintances in New York, _our_ friends, do you know what I always feel? I remember their palaces, their swarms of servants, their jewels, their luxuries, the food they eat, the wine they drink, all of it; and I wonder just whose dollar was stolen to help pay for this or that luxury, just who is in want, how many are in want, that that carriage might roll or the other automobile go darting about. You _know_ the men steal it; they don't know from whom, and so they can brazen it out to themselves."

"That is harsh--too harsh, Neva!"

She did not heed his interruption. "They can brazen it out," she went on, "because no one can or will come forward and say, 'Take off that new string of pearls. Your husband stole the money from me to-day to buy it.' He did steal it, but not that day, not directly from one person, but indirectly from many who hardly, if at all, knew they were being robbed. That is what New York has come to mean to me these last few weeks--my New York and yours--the people we know best."

"But we need not know _them_. Have what friends you please." He took an air of gentleness, of forbearance with her. He reminded himself that she was overwrought by her father's illness and death, that she was not in condition to see things normally and practically; such hysterical ideas as these of hers naturally bred and flourished in the miasmatic soil and atmosphere of the fresh grave.

"Don't you see it?" she cried desperately. "I mean you--Horace--_you_, that ask me to be your wife."

"Me!" His amazement was wholly genuine.

"Yes--you!" And she lost all control of herself, was seized and swept away by the emotions that had grown stronger and stronger during her father's illness, and since his death had dominated her day and night in her loneliness. The scarlet of fever was in her cheeks, its flame in her eyes.

"Yes, you, Horace," she repeated. "Can't you see I'd be worse than uneasy about everything we bought, about every dollar we spent? When you left me to go downtown in the morning, I'd be thinking, 'Who is the man I love going to rob to-day?' And when you came back at night, when your hands touched mine, I'd be shuddering--for there might be blood on them!" She covered her face. "There _would_ be blood on them. Happiness! Why, I should be in hell! And soon you'd hate me for what I would be thinking of you, would despise me for living a life I thought degrading."

If he had been self-analytic, he would have suspected the origin of the furious anger that surged up in him. "I see!" said he, his voice hard. "If these notions," he sneered, "were to prevail among the women, about all the strongest men in the country would lose their wives."

"That is not the question," she answered, maddened by his manner. "I'm only trying to make _you_ acquainted with _me_. I don't understand, as I look at it, now that my eyes have opened, how a woman can live with a man who kills hundreds, thousands with his railway, to make dividends, or who lets thousands live in hovels and toil all the daylight hours and half starve part of the year that he may have a bigger income. Oh, I don't know the morals of it or the practical business side of it. And I don't want to know. My instinct tells me it's wrong, _wrong_. And I dare not have anything to do with it, Horace, or I'd become like those women, those so-called respectable women, one sees driving every afternoon in Fifth Avenue, with their hard, selfish faces. Ah, I see blood on their carriage wheels, the blood of their brothers and sisters who paid for carriage and furs and liveries and jewels. It would be dreadful enough for the intelligent and strong--for men like you, Horace--to take from the ignorant and weak to buy the necessities of life. But to snatch bread and shelter and warmth and education from their fellow beings to buy vanities-- It isn't American--it isn't decent--it isn't brave!"

He saw that it would be idle to argue with her. Indeed, he began to feel, rather than to see, that beneath her hysteria there was something he would have to explore, something she was terribly in earnest about. There was a long silence, she slowly calming, he hidden behind the mask of that handsome, rugged face in which strength yielded so little for grace. "Well, what are you going to do about it?" he said unemotionally.

"All I can," she replied. "I can refuse to live that sort of life, to live on human flesh and blood. I know good people do it, people who are better than I. And if it seems right to them, why, I don't judge them. Only, it doesn't seem right to me. I wish it did. I wish I could shut my eyes again. But--I can't. My father won't let me!"

He made a movement that suggested shrinking. But he said presently, "I still don't see where I come in. In our business we don't get money that way."

"How do you get it?" she asked.

He stared, stolid and silent, at the floor.

"You told me once that----"

"In some moods I say things I don't altogether mean.... I don't moon about the miseries I can't possibly cure," he went on. "I don't quibble; I act. I don't criticise life; I live. I don't create the world or make the law of the survival of the fittest; I simply accept conditions I could not change. As for this so-called stealing, even the worst of the big men take only what's everybody's property and therefore anybody's."

"It seems to me," said she, "the question always is, 'Does this property belong to me?' and if the answer is 'No,' then to take it is--" She paused before the word.

"To steal," he said bluntly.

She made no comment. Finally he went on: "Let us understand each other. You refuse to marry me unless I abandon my career, and sink down to a position of no influence--become a nobody. For, of course, I can't play the game unless I play it under the rules. At least, I can think of no way."

"I see I didn't express myself well," she replied. "I've not tried to make conditions. I've simply shown you what kind of woman you were asking to marry you--and that you don't want her--that you want only the part of me that for the moment appeals to your senses. If I had married you without telling you what was in my mind and heart would it have been fair to you?"

He did not answer.

"Would it have been fair, Horace?"

"No," he said--a simple negative.

"You see that you do not want me--that you would find me more, far more, of a drag on your career than I was before--a force pulling back instead of merely a dead weight."

He was looking at her--was looking from behind his impenetrable mask. He looked for a long time, she now meeting his gaze and now glancing away. At last he said, with slow deliberateness: "I see that I came seeking a mistress. Whether I want her as a wife, I don't know. Whether she wants me as a husband--I don't know." He relapsed into thought which she did not interrupt.

When he rose to go, he did not see how she flushed and trembled, and fought down the longing to say the things that would have meant retreat.

"I feel," said he with a faint smile, "like a man who goes down to the pier thinking he is about to take an outing for the day, and finds that if he goes aboard he will be embarked for a life journey into new lands and will never come back. I never before really grasped what marriage means."

She had always been fascinated by his eyes, which seemed to her to contain the essence of all that attracted and thrilled and compelled her in the idea, man. As she stood touching the hand he extended, she had never felt his eyes so deeply; never before had there been in them this manly gentleness of respect and consideration. And her faltering courage took heart.

"I am going back to New York," he said. "I want to look about me."

She looked straight and calm; but, through her hand, he felt that she was vibrating like a struck, tense violin string. "Some men want a mistress when they marry," she went on, smiling-serious, "and some want a housekeeper, and some a parlor ornament, and some a mother for their children. But very few want a wife. And I"--she sighed. "I couldn't do anything at any of the other parts, unless I were also the wife."

"I understand--at last," he said. "Or rather, I begin to understand. You have thought it out. I haven't--and I must."

She hoped he would kiss her; but he did not. He reluctantly released her hand, gave her a lingering look which she had not the vanity or the buoyance rightly to interpret, then gazed slowly round the gardens, brilliant, alluring, warm. She stood motionless and tense, watching his big form, his strong shoulders and forcefully set head as he crossed the gardens, went down the walk and through the gate, to be hidden by the hedge between the lawns and the street. When the last echo of his firm step had ceased in her ears, she collapsed into the chair in which he had sat, and was all passion and tenderness and tears and longings and fears.

"He thinks me cold! He thinks me cold!" she cried. "Oh, Father, why won't You let me be weak? Why can't I take less than all? Why can't I trust him, when I love him so!"

*XXX*

*BY A TRICK*

By itself, Armstrong's insult to Fosdick in refusing to "take care of" his son-in-law would have been of small consequence, unpleasant reminder of his shorn power and rude check to his benevolent instincts though it was. Fosdick was not likely, at least soon, to forget his lesson in the wisdom of letting the big Westerner alone. Also, Armstrong was useful to him--not so useful as a tool in the same position would have been; still, far more useful than a representative of some hostile interest. But this insult was the latest and the rashest of a series of similar insults which Armstrong had been distributing right and left with an ever freer, ever bolder hand. While he was "thinking over" Neva's plain talk with him, he, by more than mere coincidence, was experimenting with a new policy which was in the general direction of the one he had adopted as soon as he got control of the O.A.D. It was a policy of "anti-graft"; and once he had inaugurated it, once he had begun to look about him in the O.A.D. for opportunities to stop the plundering, and the pilfering as well, he had pushed on far beyond where he originally intended to halt--as a strong man always does, whatever the course he chooses.

Everyone belongs to some section or class. He may quarrel with individuals in that class, he may quarrel with individuals in another class, or with the whole of it; but he may not break with the whole of his own class. Be he cracksman or financier or preacher or carpenter or lawyer or what not, he must be careful not to get his own class, as a class, against him. If he does, he will find himself alone, defenseless, doomed. Armstrong belonged to the class financier; he had been in finance all his grown-up life. He stood for the idea financier in the minds of financiers, in his own mind, in the public mind. His battles with his fellow-financiers, being within the class lines, had strengthened him, had given him clear title to recognition as a power in finance; he had been like the politician who fights his way through and over his fellow politicians to a nomination or a boss-ship, like the preacher who bears off the bishopric from his rivals, the doctor who absorbs the patronage of the rich, the lawyer who succeeds in the competition among lawyers for the position of chief pander to the plutocratic appetite for making and breaking laws.

But this new policy of Armstrong's was a policy of war on his own class. Cutting down commissions, cutting out "good things," lopping off sinecures, bisecting salaries--why, he was hacking away at the very foundations of the dominance of his class! No privileges, no parasitism, no consideration for gentlemen, no "soft snaps," no ornaments on the pay rolls--where were the profits to come from, the profits that enabled the big fellows to fatten, that filled the crib for their business and social hangers-on? Reform, economy, stoppage of waste, all these were excellent to talk about; and, within limits that recognized the rights of the dominant classes, even might be practiced without offense, especially by a fellow trying to make a reputation and judiciously doing it at the expense of financiers who had lost their grip and so could expect no quarter. But to raise the banner of "anti-graft" for a serious campaign-- Anarchy, socialism, chaos!

Armstrong had inaugurated and was pressing a war on his own class. And for whose benefit? Not for his own; he wasn't enriching himself--and therein was a Phariseeism, an effort to pose as a censor of his class, that alone would have made him a suspicious character. He was fighting his own class, was making traitorous, familicidal war for the benefit of the common enemy--the vast throng of the people who hated the upper classes, as everybody knew, and were impudently restless in their God-appointed position of hewers of wood and drawers of water for the financial aristocracy. Were not the people weakening dangerously in reverence for and gratitude to their superiors, the great and good men who provided them with work, took care of their savings for them, supported the church that guarded their souls and the medical profession that healed their bodies, paid all the taxes, undertook all the large responsibilities--and did this truly godlike work, supported this Atlantean burden, in exchange for a trivial commission that brought no benefit but the sorrows of luxury? These were the ignoramuses Armstrong was inflating, these the ingrates he was encouraging. Already he had doubled the dividends of the O.A.D., had made them a seeming rebuke to the other insurance companies. Competition--yes! But not the cutthroat, wicked, ruinous competition that would destroy his own class, its profits and its power. If he were permitted to persist, the clamor for so-called "honesty" might spread from policy holders to stockholders, to wage earners, to the whole mass of the wards of high finance. And they might compel the upper class to grant them more money to waste in drink and in wicked imitation of the luxury of their betters!

Armstrong was expelling himself from his own class--into what? Except in finance, high finance, what career was there for him? He would be like a politician without a party, like a general without an army, like a preacher without a parish, like a disbarred lawyer. His reputation would be gone--for morality is a relative word, and by his conduct he was convincing the only class important to him as a man of action that he had not the morality of his class, that he could not be trusted with its interests. Every era, every race, every class has its own morality, its own practical application of the general moral code to its peculiar needs. The class financier, in the peculiar circumstances surrounding life in the new era, had its code of what was honest and what dishonest, what respectable and what disreputable, what loyal and what disloyal. Under that code his new course was disloyal, disreputable, was positively dishonest. It would avail him nothing, should other classes vaguely approve; if his own class condemned, he was damned.

"A hell of a mess I'm getting into," reflected he, "with trying to play one game by the rules of another." He saw his situation clearly, but he had no disposition to turn back. "All in a lifetime!" he concluded with a shrug. "I'll just see what comes of it. Anything but monotony." To him monotony, the monotony of simply taking in and putting away for his own use money confided to him, was the dullest of lives--and it was beginning to seem the most contemptible--"like going through the pockets of sleepers," said he to himself.

He saw the storm coming. Not that there were any clouds or gusty winds; the great storms, the cyclones, don't come that way. No, his sky was serene all round; everything looked bright, brilliant. But there was an ominous stillness in the air--that dead, dead calm which fills an experienced weather expert with misgivings. Before the great storms that explode out of those utter calms, the domestic animals always act queerly; and, in this case, that sign was not lacking. The big fellows beamed on him, were most polite, most eager for his friendship. Not so the little fellows--the underlings, both in the O.A.D. and in its allied banks and in the institutions of high finance into which Armstrong happened to go. At sight of him they became agitated, nervous, stood aloof, watched him furtively.

But he went his new way steadily, as if he did not know what was impending. It secretly amused him greatly to observe his directors. The new board he had selected was composed of men of substantial fortune, who were just outside high finance--business men, trained in business methods. But they had been agitated by what they had seen and heard and read of the financiers--of the vast fortunes quickly made, of the huge mysterious profits, of the great enterprises where the financier risked only other people's money, and stood to lose nothing if the venture failed, kept all the profits if it succeeded. They longed for these fairylike lands where money grew on bushes and the rivers ran gold. And when they were invited into the directory of the O.A.D., they thought they were at last sweeping through the gates from the real world of business to the Hesperian Gardens of finance. As they sat at the meetings, hearing Armstrong and his lieutenants give accounts of economies and safe investments and profits for the policy holders, each felt like a child who had been led to believe it was going to a Christmas festival and finds that it has been lured into a regular session of the Sunday school. Why, the honor and the director's fees were all there was in it!

Then there were the agents, the officials, the staff of the company, high and low, far and near. To the easy-going, golden days of finance had succeeded these sober days of business. Instead of generosity, free flinging about of the money that came in so easily, there was now the most rigid economy--"regular, damn, pinch-penny honesty," complained Duncan, the magnificent agent at Chicago. "I tell you frankly, Armstrong, I'm going to get out. It isn't worth the while of a man of my ability to work for what the company now allows."

"Sorry to lose you, old man," said Armstrong, "but we can't allow any secret rake-offs."

It was Duncan who precipitated the cyclone. A cyclone at its start is a little eddy of air which happens to be set whirling by a chance twist of a sunbeam glancing from a cloud. Millions of these eddies occur every hour everywhere. Only when conditions are just right does a cyclone result, does the eddy continue to whirl, draw more and more air in commotion, get a forward impulse that increases, until in an incredibly short space of time destruction is raging over the land. The conditions in the O.A.D. were just right. Armstrong was hated by the whole personnel, at home and abroad, and hated as only the man is hated who cuts his fellows off from "easy money." And he had not a friend. Throughout high finance, he was hated and feared; at any moment, as the result of his doings, some other big institution, all other big institutions might have to adopt his policy. Directors, presidents, officials great and small, all the recipients of the profits from the system of using other people's money as if it were your own, regarded him as a personal enemy. When Duncan said to one of his fellow agents, "We must get that chap out," the right eddy had been started.