Part 16

With the exception of Fontaine and Marx, in this varied group of master-adventurers, all had begun life with little better than the coats on their backs, and the colossal fortunes which roughly totaled two billions had been amassed in virtually twenty years. This is a point which future economists may ponder over with profit.

At Slade's entrance the conversation abruptly ceased and each in his own manner studied the new arrival; some with languid, confident curiosity; Forscheim, who had old scores to settle, with a glance of unrestrained satisfaction; Steele, leaning a little forward, eager in his inquisitorial mind to divine the attack, already convinced that such a personality as Slade would not come without an aggressive defense.

The second glance reassured Slade, for he distinguished in the group the conflicting rivalries and perceived by what slender checks the irrepressible jealousies and antagonisms had been stilled.

"If they've got together," he said to himself with a sudden delight in a favorable hazard, "it's because they're scared to the ground and they want to shut off the panic first and trim me second. Good! That's what I wanted to be sure of."

He advanced to the head of the table, swinging into place a heavy chair which he swept through the air as though it had been paper, and, resolved to acquire the advantage of initiative, said:

"Well, gentlemen, let's get right down to business. I've come to get five millions."

In their astonishment several pushed back their chairs with a harsh, grating sound. Forscheim laughed aloud insolently, but Steele, sensitive to small things, instantly determined to employ caution, to be the last to crush him if he failed, and the first to support him if he had indeed the power to survive.

"Mr. Slade," said Stone in his blasting manner, "your remark is in bad taste. The situation you are facing is an exceedingly serious one and only a prompt compliance on your part with the measures we have determined upon to avert a national calamity, will save you from bankruptcy"--he stopped, but not from hesitation, adding with a sudden flush of anger--"and worse."

"We are here," said McBane, in tones of conviction which produced a nodding of assenting heads, "in the performance of a public duty. In carrying that out we do not intend to allow the fate of one man or a dozen to interfere with the steps we intend to take to restore public confidence."

"And I repeat," said Slade, with a disdainful smile, "that I am here to get five millions; and you are going to give it to me."

An outburst of exclamations followed this assertion, half angry, half contemptuous, above which was heard Forscheim's shrill nasal voice saying:

"Dere is a shtate examiner, Mr. Shlade, don't forget dat."

"My books are kept as carefully as yours, Forscheim," said Slade, with a sudden angry concentration of his glance. He had once in a committee meeting taken Forscheim by the throat and flung him out of doors--a fear which the other could never forget. Then he struck the table a resounding blow with his fist, stilling the clamor.

"Wait!" he exclaimed, rising until his bulky figure towered over the table. "Don't let's waste time. Come to the point. You think I've come here to receive your terms. You are mistaken. I've come here to deliver an ultimatum--my ultimatum."

"Do you realize, sir," said Judge Barton sternly, "what the object of this meeting is? We are here to preserve the prosperity of this country for the next ten years, the homes and savings of millions of persons."

"No, that is not why you are here," said Slade contemptuously. "I'll tell you why you are here. You are here to protect your own interests--first, last, and always! Because a panic to you means hundreds of millions, the end of development, the closing of markets; because at the end of a stock market panic is an industrial panic, and the end of any protracted individual depression means the colossal flattening out of your billion dollar trusts. That's why there'll never be another '93--that's the one good thing in the present situation the public doesn't know. There isn't going to be a '93 now, and you know it and I know it."

"Suppose, Mr. Slade, you listen to our stipulations first," said McBane, but in a more conciliatory tone.

Beyond his exposition which had struck all with its piercing verity, Slade had effected over them an almost physical mastery, which men grudgingly are forced to yield to masculine strength.

"I know your demands," said Slade instantly. "Oh, there is no informer present. Nothing difficult. I know you and the way your minds work. You have three conditions: first, I am to resign the presidency of the Associated Trust; second, sell my stock control to a syndicate you have organized, which will stand as a guarantee to the public; third, the taking over of all my holdings in the Osaba territory by the United Mining Company. Am I right?"

He did not need to wait for a reply; the answer was plain upon their countenances.

"Now, gentlemen, I'm going to finish up," he said, pursuing his advantage. "Remember one thing: I'm not a Majendie. I fight to the last breath and when I'm downed I carry everything I get my hands on down with me.

"Now, let's be perfectly plain. I know where I stand. If Majendie and the Atlantic Trust hadn't gone to smash, there wouldn't be a ghost of a show for me; you'd squeeze every last cent I had. I know it. I knew it then when I knew it was Majendie or me. But you see Majendie's dead and the Atlantic Trust--three hundred and eighty millions--has closed its doors. That makes all the difference in the world. You don't want to trim me--not primarily. Forscheim and the United Mining do--that's their private affair. What you men who count want, I repeat, is to stop this panic--to get me out of the way and stop the panic if you can; if you can't get me out of the way, to stop the panic at once--now--within twenty-four hours! Now, gentlemen, I defy you to let the Associated Trust close its doors tomorrow and prevent, with all your money, the wreck of every industry in the country."

"You overestimate the importance of such a failure," said Fontaine slowly, but without aggressiveness.

Slade's attack had made a profound impression.

"I have taken particular care that if the Associated fails, it'll be the biggest smash on record," said Slade, ready now to play his trump card.

"What do you mean?" demanded Haggerty, startled, while the others waited expectantly.

"Just that," said Slade, not unwilling that they should know the depth of his game. "If the Associated fails, sixty-seven institutions fail from here to San Francisco. I have taken care of that in the last two months."

"You haf ingreased your oplications at sooch a time!" fairly shrieked Forscheim, who saw his victory eluding him.

"You bet I did," said Slade. "I made sure that I couldn't be _allowed_ to fail."

He took from his pocket a folded sheet and handed it to Steele, who had a moment before finally determined to come to his support.

"That's what failure means. Pass it around," he said.

The lawyer elevated his eyebrows in astonishment. The disclosure of how Slade by negotiating loans with a number of subsidiary institutions throughout the country had made them united in his general fate, completed the dawning recognition of a master which had been forming in his mind.

"He will beat them," he thought, passing on the paper. "He will go far. I must be his friend." Aloud he said carefully: "Of course, Mr. Slade, at the bottom the affairs of the Associated Trust are absolutely solvent."

"Solvent under any system of banking in the world which does not withhold ready money on proper guarantees," said Slade, looking at him with a glance that showed the lawyer he had received his alliance; "solvent as the Atlantic Trust was, is, and will be proved to be. You gentlemen know that as well as I do."

"Of course, Mr. Slade," said Steele, with an appearance of aggressiveness which the other understood perfectly, "one thing must be understood--the present speculative operations of the Trust Companies can not go on."

"Now, gentlemen, to finish up," said Slade, who seized the hint. "Here's my answer: I will agree to any legislation, in fact will urge it, that will place the Trust Companies on the basis of the National Banks; that is, on the same conservative basis of loans and transactions. That is right. I am now convinced that it is for the best." He allowed a slight smile to show and continued: "I will resign as President of the Associated Trust three months from to-day. That I had already determined on. For what I wish to do, that would only be an embarrassment. You will lend me the five millions I wish and, better still, tomorrow morning make a simple announcement to the effect that, having consulted on the affairs of the Associated Trust, you have found no reasons for apprehension, and announce that you will come to its support. Sign it Fontaine, Gunther, McBane, Marx and Stone, and the run on the banks will end in twenty-four hours. Tomorrow morning I will personally assure Mr. Steele, by an examination of my books, that affairs are as I have described. After this examination you can place five millions to my disposal--if necessary. Believe me, this is a much better way to end the panic. You reassure public confidence by your guarantee. The other way, by forcing my resignation, you create an impression that everything is rotten. Besides, the first way has this advantage--it is the only way. That's my word, gentlemen; if you intend to stop the panic you've got to float me!"

An hour later, having yielded not a jot of his position, turning a deaf ear to threats, expostulations and arguments, he rose victorious.

In the anteroom he went up to Gunther, who was still bowed over his solitaire, waiting grimly until his word had been carried out.

"Mr. Gunther," said Slade, stopping at the table, "we have come to an understanding. The gentlemen in the other room were agreeably surprised at my exposition of the affairs of the Associated Trust. They are going to lend me five millions."

"Indeed!" said Gunther in a sort of grunt but with a countenance so impassive that Slade was moved to admiration.

"Gunther," he said, suddenly carried away by a feeling of prophetic elation, "up to now you've known me only as a speculator. Now I'm going to become a conservative force. In a month I'm coming to you with a proposition. You're the only man I would ever trust. Good-night."

His automobile was waiting. He threw himself riotously into it, giving the address of Mrs. Kildair's apartment; and as he felt the pleasant, exhilarating sensation which the speed of his machine conveyed to him, he repeated, feeling suddenly how at last he had emerged from the perils of the first phase which he had once so frankly defined:

"Now, I'll be conservative!"

Unlike Gunther, who had behind him the traditions of generations of authority, Slade had that typical quality so perplexing in the American millionaire of sudden fortune--the childlike eagerness for admiration. When he arrived at Mrs. Kildair's and found that she was still absent, he was consumed with a nervous impatience. He seated himself at the piano, playing over clumsily refrains of the crude ranch songs which came to him as an echo of his earlier struggling days. But these echoes of a past conflict seemed only to whet his impatience. He ended with a crashing discord and rose, lighting another cigar, pacing the broad space of the studio with rapid, restless strides, surprised at the annoyance which her absence brought him.

When Mrs. Kildair entered, let in by Henriette, her maid, Slade flung aside his cigar and strode impatiently forward.

One glance at his triumphant face told her what she wanted to know. She made a quick sign to him with her hand and turned her back, disengaging her opera cloak with exaggerated slowness, drawing a deep breath. Then she sent Henriette upstairs to her room to wait until she called.

"Congratulations," she said calmly, entering the studio and extending her hand. "You have won!"

"How do you know?" he said, taken back by her composure.

"It is there--in your eyes," she said, passing her fingers so close to them that he seemed to feel their soft contact. "Tell me all about it."

"Yes, I've beaten them--Fontaine, Barton, Forscheim, Haggerty, the whole lot of them," he cried with a gleeful laugh. "More, I've forced myself into their hidebound circle. You'll see--in a month I'll be one of them."

At times roguishly delighted as a boy, at others with flashes of primitive power, he related to the eager woman all the details of the night and the desperate stake he had played to make a failure so colossal that they themselves would recoil before it.

"And if Majendie had not killed himself?" she said breathlessly, womanlike perceiving the hazards of fate.

"But he did!" he cried impatiently, unwilling to admit the element of chance in the destiny he had hewn for himself. But the thought sobered him. He looked down from the height to which his ambition had flung him. "It's true. It was either Majendie or me," he said quietly. "Shall I tell you something? That night we were here I knew he was lost--that he would do it. Don't ask me how I knew!" Then, shaking off the memory as an evil dream, he continued, extending his arm in crude magnetic gestures: "Well, that's over. I am where I want to be; the rest is easy. In a month--two months--they will see, Forscheim and Haggerty, how the trap they laid for me has sprung against them. Tonight will be worth twenty millions to me."

"How do you mean?" she said eagerly, but she did not look at him. Slade, triumphant in his brute power, inspired her with an emotion she did not dare to show him yet.

"Forscheim and Haggerty, the United Mining," he said, forgetting his habitual caution in the now present desire to dazzle and overcome this woman who had so resisted him, who had become so suddenly necessary to him, "have laid their trap to get hold of the Osaba territory. They've stripped Gilbert and old General Paxton of their holdings, and they were sure they'd strip me. The Osaba gold fields will be one day worth hundreds of millions--another Eldorado. Well, they'll get a third interest tonight. I've got a third, and Striker and Benz. Mexican United, who've fought them tooth and nail, have another third. Each now has got to have what I've got or get out. I've got the control and when I sell--" He ended with a laugh. "I've licked Forscheim before but it will be nothing to this. They thought they had me down and they played into my hands!"

Suddenly he changed his tone as the memory came to him of Gunther impassively waiting in his anteroom.

"Now they'll see what I can do," he said savagely. "Gunther's the only real man among them. I must have Gunther. With him I can do what I want--construct, construct!"

She rose, stopping him as he most wanted to continue.

"You must go now," she said quietly; "I've already done what I shouldn't."

He stopped, infuriated at this check to his inclinations, for, beyond his victory over the men he had fought, she still eluded him.

"Did you care what happened to me--much?" he asked savagely.

"Yes; I was surprised how much I cared," she said slowly, keeping her eyes on his.

There are certain strong, direct characters who are most vulnerable in the moment of their greatest exaltation as the generality of men are weakest in their defeats. She saw in his eyes how much she lacked to his complete triumph and suddenly seized the opportunity by the forelock.

"Why are you afraid to marry?" she said vigorously. "You are a child; you don't understand life. You don't know how to draw from it the incitements it can give you. You wish to be a great figure and you think you can remain an outcast."

"What do you mean?" he said roughly, and advancing he took her by the shoulders without her recoiling.

"You want to be another Gunther," she said, meeting his glance with an intensity of ambition greater than his, "and you wish to fight like a guerrilla. You think you need no one, and you need admiration, confidence, to be spurred on, flattered, cajoled, made to feel your greatness, to have it dinned into your ears day and night, to be surrounded by it. You have the vanity of a god and you don't know how to feed it."

"Well, what would you do?" he said, still holding her from him.

"I would make you what you should be: a personage--not a wanderer," she said with extraordinary energy. "I'd make your home a court; I'd show you what it meant to step into your box at the opera and have the feeling that every eye in the house turned to you. You want to do great things--but you want to feel that you have done great things, that others are impressed by them, envy and look up to you. You want that stimulus and there is only one way to get it. Take your place in society, where you belong among the great figures."

"I find my own stimulus," he said, looking at her.

"Listen, John Slade," she said furiously. "You think because you have always done what you want with women that that will continue. It won't. You are at a dangerous age. You have depended upon women; you cannot shake it off. The day will come when you'll be caught as every man is who plays beyond his youth and strength. Women will either hinder you or push you on. Make up your mind now. Which do you want?"

"I want you!" he said, suddenly caught by her words that came as an answer to his new view of himself; and violently, characteristically, he added, enfolding her: "And when I want a thing, I want it now! Get your wraps on. We're going over to Jersey now and get married."

"No, no," she said firmly though her heart was beating so that she thought he must hear it.

"You've got me. I never expected it, but I've got to have you," he said and brutally, without thinking whether he hurt her or not, he forced her head up to his. She did not resist, intoxicated, carried away by her absolute helplessness in his arms. Then, confident, he renewed his demand that they should be married that night, at once.

"No, no," she said, disengaging herself, and though all her natural being responded to his demand, her intellectual self conquered, knowing full well that beyond winning him, she must always maintain over him a certain moral superiority. "No. To do what I want to do, we must not give any one the slightest occasion to talk. Such an act as this would be suicidal."

"When then?" he said furiously.

"Announce our engagement tomorrow," she said, "and in a week we can be married very quietly."

"A week!" he cried indignantly.

"Or less," she said, smiling; "and now you must go."

"You haven't said, 'I love you,'" he said with a last flash of antagonistic suspicion.

"When I say it you will be satisfied," she said, with a look that revealed to him a new, undiscovered world.

"Rita," he persisted doggedly, seizing her wrist, "I know what you can do, what you'll make of us, but that's not all. I don't want any cold-blooded reason-and-logic marriage. Look here. You've got to love me--like hell--do you understand?"

She turned on him swiftly, opening her lips until her white teeth showed in their tense grip. Then, suddenly veiling her emotion in a relaxing smile, she said, as she rang for Henriette:

"No woman could find it hard to love you, John Slade."

When he had left she remained standing a long while very thoughtfully. Then she went quietly upstairs and fell almost immediately into a quiet, profound sleep. Her own self-possession surprised her; but unusual natures have this over common-place ones that they are continually surprising themselves.

*CHAPTER XIX*

When the next day Beecher reached his club he found all discussions centered upon John G. Slade and the astonishing and incomprehensible outcome of the conference at Gunther's of which naturally only the usual misinformation was known. The morning papers had contained a reassuring statement, backed by powerful names, of the condition of the Associated Trust, with promises of support. Gunther had publicly announced that he would bring twenty millions of ready money to relieve the financial stringency and, if that were not sufficient, twenty millions more. When the man in the Street comprehended that the great fortunes of the country had authorized this step, the effect was instantaneous. The stock market opened with loss of two to three points and immediately recovered this decline and, for the first time during the week, registered distinct advances. The runs on the banks still continued, but the lines of depositors were apparently less. At eleven o'clock Rupert V. Steele visibly entered the offices of the Associated Trust and, advancing to the deserted window of the cashier, made the first deposit. In a minute it was publicly announced that five millions of dollars had just been deposited to the credit of the great Columbus National. Half of the waiting line, wavered, turned and went home.

"Well, Slade's turned the trick," said Gunther, joining his friend. "But how he managed to wriggle through is a mystery."

"Haven't seen the papers," said Beecher. "What do they say about Emma Fornez?"

"Couldn't be better. The third act bowled 'em over," said Gunther, laughing. Beecher had told him of the diva's prophecy. "By the way, Ted, my long shot may not prove such a wild one. Mapleson is a close friend of the Cheevers--rather attentive to the lady, who from all accounts is a rather frisky one. I telephoned McKenna about it and he seemed distinctly interested."

"McKenna?" said Beecher, opening his eyes.

"Well, yes," said Gunther, laughing; "but forget I told you. Besides, I have a feeling that things will open up now."

"Is McKenna on the trail of any one?"

"Well, yes," said Gunther slowly; "and I don't think it'll be long now before we hear of him. How about lunch?"

At this moment a boy arrived with summons for Beecher to the telephone. He did not recognize the voice immediately.

"You don't know who it is?" said a woman.

He thought he recognized the tones of Miss Rivers, whom he had shamefully neglected in the excitement of the last days; but, warily, he did not commit himself.

"You're disguising your voice," he said cautiously.

"Not at all. You are not very flattering--but when one listens so much to the voice of Emma Fornez--"

"Miss Charters," he said instantly.

"At last."

He was suddenly troubled at the discovery, for he had sincerely persuaded himself that he did not intend to see her again.

"She is going to reproach me," he thought uneasily, "for not returning to see her last night. The devil! Well, I shall tell her the truth--I didn't like her companion."

But instead of reproaches she said in very good humor:

"Look out, I can be very jealous. What are you doing tonight?"

"I am dining out," he said, fibbing promptly, determined to remain firm.

"Oh--I'm sorry," she said, with a quick dropping of her tone. "I wanted you to take me to a dress rehearsal that will be very amusing."

"I'm sorry too."

"What are you doing this afternoon, around tea time?"

"I have an engagement," he said truthfully.

"With Emma Fornez?"

"Yes."

"I am not very lucky, am I?" she said.

The wounded tone in her voice made him feel a bit ashamed. He saw that she would not ask him again and relented a little.

"Will you be in at four? I can drop in for a little chat then," he said, amazed at his own yielding even as he spoke the words.

"Come then. I want very much to see you," she answered but without lightness.

"Now I'm in it again!" he said ruefully as he left the telephone. "What the deuce made me say I'd go. Just because I didn't want to hurt her--O Lord! Steady, old boy, steady!"