Part 3

Saturday afternoon, each debated writing the other, postponing the engagement. Neva had a savage attack of the blues; at such times she shut herself in, certain she could not get from the outside the cheer she craved and too keen to be content with the cheer that would offer shallow, wordy sympathy, or, worse still, self-complacent pity. As for Letitia, she was quarreling with her husband--about money as usual. She was one of those doll-looking women who so often have serpentine craft and wills of steel. Morris adored her, after the habit of men with such women; she made him feel so big and strong and intellectually superior; and her childish, clinging ways were intoxicating, as she had great physical charm, she so cool and smooth and golden white and delicately perfumed. She always got her own way with everyone; usually her husband, her "master," yielded at the first onset. Once in a while--and this happened to be of those times--he held out for the pleasure of seeing her pout and weep and then, as he yielded, burst into a radiance like sunshine through summer rain. If she had had money of her own he might have got a sudden and even shocking insight into the internal machinery of that doll's head; as it was, his delusion about the relative intelligence and strength of himself and his Letty was intact.

Mrs. Joe did not share his enthusiasm for these "love-tilts"; she did not mind employing the "doll game" in her dealings with the world, but she would have liked to be her real self at home. This, however, was impossible if she was to get the largest results in the quickest and easiest way. So she wearily played on at the farce, and at times grew heartsick with envy of the comparatively few independent--which means financially independent--women of her set, and disliked her Joe when she was forced to think about him distinctly, which was not often. In marriages where the spirit has shriveled and died within the letter, habit soon hardens a wife to an amazing degree toward practical unconsciousness of the existence of her husband, even though he be uxorious. Letty's married life bored her; but she had no more sense of degradation in thus making herself a pander, and for hire, than had her husband, at the same business downtown. She saw so many of the "very best" women doing just as she did, using each the fittest form of cajolery and cozening to wheedle money for extravagances out of their husbands, that it seemed as much the proper and reputable thing as going to bullfights seems to Spaniards, or watching wild beasts devour men, women, and children seemed to the "very best" people of imperial Rome. For the same reason, her husband did not linger upon the real meaning of the phrase "legal adviser" whereunder the business of himself and his brother lawyers was so snugly and smugly masked--the business of helping respectable scoundrels glut bestial appetites for other people's property without fear of jail.

The quarrel had so far advanced that Saturday night was the logical time for the climax in sentimental reconciliation. However, Mrs. Morris decided to endure a twenty-four hours' delay and "get Neva over with." She repented the instant Neva appeared. "I had no idea she could be so good looking," thought she, in a panic at the prospect of rivalry, with desirable available men wofully scarce. She swept Neva with a searching, hostile glance. "She's really almost beautiful."

And, in fact, never before was Neva so good looking. Vanity is an air plant not at all dependent upon roots in realities for nourishment and growth. Thus, she, born with rather less than the normal physical vanity, had been unaffected by the charms she could not but have seen had she looked at herself with vanity's sprightly optimism. Nor was there any encouragement in the atmosphere of old-fashioned Battle Field, where the best people were still steeped in medieval disdain of "foolishness" and regarded the modern passion for the joy of life as sinful. Also, she was without that aggressive instinct to please by physical charm which even circumvents the regulations of a chapter of cloistered nuns.

Until she came to New York, she had given her personal appearance no attention whatever, beyond instinctively trying to be as unobtrusive as possible; and even in New York her concessions to what she regarded as waste of time were really not concessions at all, were merely the result of exercising in the most indifferent fashion her natural good taste, in choosing the best from New York's infinite variety as she had chosen the best from Battle Field's meager and commonplace stocks of goods for women. The dress she was wearing that evening was not especially grand, seemed quakerishly high in the neck in comparison with Letty's; for Letty had a good back and was not one to conceal a charm which it was permissible to display. But Neva, in soft silver-gray; with her hair, bright, yet neither gold nor red, but all the shades between, framing her long oval face in a pompadour that merged gracefully into a simple knot at the back of her small head; with her regular features shown to that advantage which regular features have only when shoulders and neck are bared; and with her complexion cleared of all sallowness and restored to its natural smooth pallor by the healthful air and life of New York--Neva, thus recreated, was more than distinguished looking, was beautiful. "Who'd have thought it?" reflected Letty crossly. "What a difference clothes do make!" But Neva was slender--"thin, painfully thin," thought Mrs. Morris, with swiftly recovering spirits. She herself was plump and therefore thought "scrawniness" hideous, though often, to draw attention to her rounded charms, she wailed piteously that she was getting "disgracefully fat."

Neither of the men--her husband and Boris Raphael, the painter--shared her poor opinion of Neva after the first glance. Morris did not care for thin women, but he thought Neva had a certain beauty--not the kind he admired, but a kind, nevertheless. Boris studied the young woman with an expression that made Mrs. Joe redden with jealousy. "You think my cousin pretty?" said she to him, as they went down to dinner far enough ahead of Neva and Morris to be able to talk freely.

"More than that," replied Boris, "I think her unusual."

"If you ever chance to see her in ordinary dress, you'll change your mind, I'm sorry to say," said Letty softly. "Poor Neva! Hers is a sad case. She's one of the ought-to-bes-but-aren'ts."

"It's my business to see things as they are," was the painter's exasperating reply. "And I'd not in any circumstances be blind to such a marvelous study in long lines as she."

"Marvelous!" Mrs. Morris laughed.

"Long face, long neck, long bust, long waist, long legs, long hands and feet," explained he. "It's the kind of beauty that has to be pointed out to ordinary eyes before they see it. I can imagine her passing for homely in a rude community, just as her expression of calm might pass for coldness."

Mrs. Morris revised her opinion of Boris. She had thought him a most tactful person; she knew the truth now. A man who would praise one woman to another could never be called tactful; to praise enthusiastically was worse than tactless, it was boorish. "How impossible it is," thought she, "for a man of low origin to rise wholly above it." She said, "I'm delighted that my cousin pleases you," as coldly as she could speak to a man after whom everyone was running.

"I must paint her," he said, noting Letty's anger, but indifferent to it. "If I succeed, everyone will see what I see. If that woman were to love and be loved, her face would become--divine! Divinely human, I mean--for she's flesh and blood. The fire's there--laid and ready for the match."

When he and Morris were alone after dinner he began on Neva again, unaffected by her seeming incapacity to respond to his efforts to interest her. "I could scarcely talk for watching her," he said. "She puzzles me. I should not have believed a girl--an unmarried woman--could have such an expression."

"She's not a girl," explained Morris. "She has taken her maiden name again. She was Mrs. Armstrong--was married until last summer to the chap that was made president of the O.A.D. last October."

"Never heard of him," said the artist.

"That shows how little you know about what's going on downtown. When Galloway died--you've heard of Galloway?"

"I painted him--an old eagle--or vulture."

"We'll say eagle, as he's dead. When he died, there was a split in the O.A.D., which he had dominated and used for years--and mighty little he let old Shotwell have, I understand, in return for doing the dirty work. Well, Fosdick finally cooked up that investigation, frightened everybody into fits, won out, beat down the Galloway crowd, threw out Shotwell and put in this young Western fellow."

"What is the O.A.D.?"

"You must have seen the building, the advertisements everywhere--knight in armor beating off specters of want. It's an insurance company."

"I thought insurance companies were to insure people."

"Not at all," replied Morris. "That's what people think they're for--just as they think steel companies are to make steel, and coal companies to mine coal, and railway companies to carry freight and passengers. But all that, my dear fellow, is simply incidental. They're really to mass big sums of money for our great financiers to scramble for."

"How interesting," said Raphael in an uninterested tone. "Some time I must try to learn about those things. Then your cousin has divorced her husband? That's the tragedy I saw in her face."

"Tragedy!" Morris laughed outright. "There you go again, Boris. You're always turning your imagination loose."

"To explore the mysteries my eyes find, my dear Joe," said Boris, unruffled. "You people--the great mass of the human race--go through the world blindfold--blindfolded by ignorance, by prejudice, by letting your stupid brain tell your eyes what they are seeing instead of letting your eyes tell your brain."

"I never heard there was much to Neva Carlin."

"Naturally," replied Boris. "Not all the people who have individuality, personality, mind and heart, beat a drum and march in the middle of the street to inform the world of the fact. As for emotions--real emotions--they don't shriek and weep; they hide and are dumb. I, who let my eyes see for themselves, look at this woman and see beauty barefoot on the hot plowshares. And you--do not look and, therefore, see nothing."

Morris made no reply, but his expression showed he was only silenced, not convinced. He knew his old friend Boris was a great painter--the prices he got for his portraits proved it; and the portraits themselves were certainly interesting, had the air that irradiates from every work of genius, whether one likes or appreciates the work or not. He knew that the basis of Raphael's genius was in his marvelous sight--"simply seeing where others will not" was Boris's own description of his gift. Yet when Boris reported to him what he saw, he was incredulous. "An artist's wild imagination," he said to himself. In the world of the blind, the dim-eyed man is king, not the seeing man; the seeing man--the "seer"--passes for mad, and the blind follow those with not enough sight to rouse the distrust of their flock.

When the painter returned to the drawing-room Neva was gone. As his sight did not fail him when he watched the motions of his bright, blond little friend, Mrs. Joe, he suspected her of having had a hand in Neva's early departure. And she thought she had herself. But, in fact, Neva left because she was too shy to face again the man whose work she had so long reverenced. She knew she ought to treat him as an ordinary human being, but she could not; and she yielded to the impulse to fly.

"You must take me to sec your cousin," said he, his chagrin plain.

"Whenever you like," agreed Letty, with that elaborate graciousness which raises a suspicion of insincerity in the most innocent mind.

"Thank you," said Boris. And to her surprise and relief he halted there, without attempting to pin her down to day and hour. "He asked simply to be polite," decided she, "and perhaps to irritate me a little. He's full of those feminine tricks."

*IV*

*THE FOSDICK FAMILY*

In each of America's great cities, East, West, South, Far West, a cliff of marble glistening down upon the thoroughfare where the most thousands would see it daily; armies of missionaries, so Fosdick liked to call them, moving everywhere among the people; other armies of officers and clerks, housed in the clifflike palaces and garnering the golden harvests reaped by the missionaries--such was the scene upon which Horace Armstrong looked out from his aerie in the vastest of the palaces oL the O.A.D. And it inspired him.

Institutions, like individuals, have a magnetism, a power to attract and to hold, that is quite apart from any analyzable quality or characteristic. Armstrong had grown up in the O.A.D., had preached it as he rose in its service until he had preached belief in it into himself--a belief that was unshaken by the series of damning exposures of its Wall Street owners and users, and had survived his own discoveries, as the increasing importance of his successive positions had forced the "inside ring" to let him deeper and deeper into the secrets. He had not been long in the presidency before he saw that the whole system for gathering in more and more policy holders, however beneficent incidental results might be, had as its sole purpose the drawing of more and more money within reach of greedy, unclean hands. The fact lay upon the surface of the O.A.D. as plain as a great green serpent sprawled upon the ooze of a marsh. Why else would these multimillionaire money hunters interest themselves in insurance? And not a day passed without his having to condemn and deplore--in his own mind--acts of the Fosdick clique. But morals are to a great extent a matter of period and class; Armstrong, busy, unanalytic, "up-to-date" man of affairs, accepted without much question the current moral standards of and for the man of affairs. And when he saw the inside ring "going too far," here and there, now and then, he no more thought of denouncing it and abandoning his career than a preacher would think of resigning a bishopric because he found that his fellow bishops had not been made more than human by the laying on of hands.

Where he could, Armstrong ignored; where he could not ignore--he told himself that the end excused the means.

The busy days fled. He had the feeling of being caught in a revolving door that took him from bedtime to bedtime again without letting him out to accomplish anything; and he was soon so well accommodated to the atmosphere of high finance that he was breathing it with almost no sensation of strangeness. When old Shotwell died--of "heart failure"--Armstrong took out the undelivered speech.

The day after the "testimonial," he had decided that to read that speech would be dangerously near to the line between honor and dishonor; besides, it probably contained many things which, whether true or prejudiced, might affect his peace of mind, might inflict upon his conscience unnecessary discomforts. A wise man is careful not to admit to his valuable brain space matters which do not help him in the accomplishment of his purposes. Should he mail the manuscript to Shotwell? No. That might tempt the old man to a course of folly and disaster. Armstrong hid the "stick of dynamite" among his private papers. But now, Shotwell was dead; and--well, he still believed in the O.A.D.--in the main; but many things had happened in the months since he came on from the West, many and disquieting things. He felt that he owed it to himself, and to the O.A.D., to gather from any and every source information about the Fosdick ring. He unfolded the manuscript, spread it before him on the desk.

Eleven typewritten pages, setting forth in detail how Fosdick had slyly lured Shotwell into committing, apparently alone, certain "indiscretions" for which there happened to be legal penalties of one to ten years in the penitentiary at hard labor; how Shotwell, thus isolated, was trapped--though, as he proceeded to show, he had done nothing morally or legally worse than all the others had done, the Fosdick faction being careful to entangle in each misdeed enough of the Galloway faction to make itself secure. And all the offenses were those "mere technicalities" which high finance permits the law to condemn only because they, when committed in lower circles, cease to be justifiable exceptions to the rule and become those "grave infractions of social order and of property rights" which Chamber of Commerce dinners and bar associations of corporation lawyers so strenuously lecture the people about. And so, Shotwell had fallen.

Armstrong read the document four times--the first time, at a gallop; the second time, line by line; the third time, with a long, thoughtful pause after each paragraph; the fourth time, line by line again, with one hand supporting his brow while the index finger of the other traced under each separate word. Then he leaned back and gazed from peak to peak of the skyscrapers, stretching range on range toward harbor and river. He was not thinking now of the wrongs, the crimes against that mass of policy holders, so remote, so abstract. He was listening to a different, a more terrible sound than the vague wail of that vague mass; he was hearing the ticking of a death-watch. For he had discovered that Fosdick had him trapped in just the same way.

As a precaution? Or with the time of his downfall definitely fixed?

Armstrong began to pace the limits of his big private room. For a turn or so it surprised him to find that he could move freely about; for, with the thought that he was in another man's power, had come a physical sensation of actual chains and bolts and bars, of dungeon walls and dungeon air. In another man's power! In Fosdick's power! He, Horace Armstrong, proud, intensely alive and passionately fond of freedom, with inflexible ambition set upon being the master of men--he, a slave, dependent for his place, for his authority, for his very reputation. Dependent on the nod of a fellow man. He straightened himself, shook himself; he clenched his fists and his teeth until the powerful muscles of his arms and shoulders and jaws swelled to aching, until the blood beat in his skin like flame against furnace wall.

The door opened; he saw as he was turning that it was Josiah Fosdick; he wheeled back toward the window because he knew that if he should find himself full face to this master of his before he got self-control, he would spring at him and sink his fingers in his throat and wring the life out of him. The will to kill! To feel that creature under him, under his knees and fingers; to see eyes and tongue burst out; to know that the brain that dared conceive the thought of making a slave of him was dead for its insolence!

"Good morning, my boy!" Josiah was saying in that sonorous, cheery voice of his. He always wore his square-crowned hard hat or his top hat well back from his brow when he was under roof downtown; and he was always nervously chewing at a cigar, which sometimes was lighted and sometimes not. Just now it was not lighted and the odor of it was to Armstrong the sickening stench of the personality of his master.

"My master!" he muttered, and wiped the sweat from his forehead; with eyes down and the look of the lion cringing before the hot iron in its tamer's hand he muttered a response.

"I want you to put my son Hugo in as one of the fourth vice-presidents," continued the old man, seating himself and cocking his trim feet on a corner of the table. "He must be broken to the business, and I've told him he's got to start at the bottom of the ladder."

Armstrong contrived to force a smile at this ironic pleasantry of his master's. He instantly saw Josiah's scheme--to have the young man inducted into the business; presently to give him the dignity and honor of the presidency, ejecting Armstrong, perhaps in discredit to justify the change and to make it impossible for him to build up in another company.

"You'll do what you can to teach him the ropes?"

"Certainly," said Armstrong, at the window.

Fosdick came up close to him, put his hand affectionately on his shoulder. "You've grown into my heart, Horace. I feel as if you were another son of mine, as if Hugo were your younger brother. I want you to regard him as such. I'm old; I'll soon be off the boards. I like to think of you two young fellows working together in harmony. It may be that----"

Armstrong had himself well within the harness now. He looked calmly at Fosdick and saw a twinkle in those good-natured, wicked eyes of his, a warning that he had guessed Armstrong's suspicion and was about to counter with something he flattered himself was particularly shrewd.

"It may be I'll want your present place for the boy, after a few years. Perhaps it will be better not to put him there; again it may be a good thing. If I decide to do it, you'll have a better place--something where there'll be an even bigger swing for your talents. I'll see to that. I charge myself with your future."

Armstrong turned away, bringing his jaws together with a snap.

"You trust me, don't you?" said Fosdick, not quite certain that Armstrong had turned to hide an overmastering emotion of gratitude.

"I'd advise against making Hugo a vice-president just at present," said Armstrong.

"Why?" demanded Fosdick with a frown.

"I think such a step wouldn't be wise until after this new policy holders' committee has quieted down."

Fosdick laughed and waved his arm. "Those smelling committees! My boy, I'm used to them. Every big corporation has one or more of 'em on hand all the time. The little fellows are always getting jealous of the men who control, are always trying to scare them into paying larger interest--for that's what it amounts to. We men who run things practically borrow the public's money for use in our enterprises. You can call it stocks or bonds or mortgages or what not, but they're really lenders, though they think they're shareholders and expect bigger interest than mere money is worth. But we don't and won't give much above the market rate. We keep the rest of the profits--we're entitled to 'em. We'd play hob, wouldn't we, lying awake of nights thinking out schemes to enable John Jones and Tom Smith to earn thirty, forty, fifty per cent on their money?"

"But this committee--" There Armstrong halted, hesitating.

"Don't fret about it, young man. The chances are it'll quiet down of itself. If it doesn't, if it should have in it some sturdy beggar who persists, why, we'll hear from him sooner or later. When we get his figure, we can quiet him--put him on the pay roll or give him a whack at our appropriation for legal expenses."

"But this committee--" Armstrong stopped short--why should he warn Fosdick? Why go out of his way to be square with the man who had enslaved him? Had he not done his whole duty when he had refused to listen to the overtures of the new combination against Fosdick? Indeed, was it more than a mere suspicion that such a combination existed?

"This committee--what?"

"You feel perfectly safe about it?"

"It couldn't find out anything, if there was anything to find out. And if it did find out anything, what'd it do with it? No newspaper would publish it--our advertising department takes care of that. The State Government wouldn't notice it--our legal department takes care of them."

"Sometimes there's a slip-up. A few years ago----"