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The Deluge, a novel by David Graham Phillips |
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Chapter 19. A Windfall From "Gentleman Joe" |
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_ CHAPTER XIX. A WINDFALL FROM "GENTLEMAN JOE" I went to my rooms, purposing to go straight to bed, and get a good sleep. I did make a start toward undressing; then I realized that I should only lie awake with my brain wearing me out, spinning crazy thoughts and schemes hour after hour--for my imagination rarely lets it do any effective thinking after the lights are out and the limitations of material things are wiped away by the darkness. I put on a dressing-gown and seated myself to smoke and to read. When I was very young, new to New York, in with the Tenderloin crowd and up to all sorts of pranks, I once tried opium smoking. I don't think I ever heard of anything in those days without giving it a try. Usually, I believe, opium makes the smoker ill the first time or two; but it had no such effect on me, nor did it fill my mind with fantastic visions. On the contrary, it made everything around me intensely real--that is, it enormously stimulated my dominant characteristic of accurate observation. I noticed the slightest details--such things as the slight difference in the length of the arms of the Chinaman who kept the "joint," the number of buttons down the front of the waist of the girl in the bunk opposite mine, across the dingy, little, sweet-scented room. Nothing escaped me, and also I was conscious of each passing second, or, rather, fraction of a second. As a rule, time and events, even when one is quietest, go with such a rush that one notes almost nothing of what is passing. The opium seemed to compel the kaleidoscope of life to turn more slowly; in fact, it sharpened my senses so that they unconsciously took impressions many times more quickly and easily and accurately. As I sat there that night after leaving Anita, forcing my mind to follow the printed lines, I found I was in exactly the state in which I had been during my one experiment with opium. It seemed to me that as many days as there had been hours must have elapsed since I got the news of the raised Textile dividend. Days--yes, weeks, even months, of thought and action seemed to have been compressed into those six hours--for, as I sat there, it was not yet eleven o'clock. And then I realized that this notion was not of the moment, but that I had been as if under the influence of some powerful nerve stimulant since my brain began to recover from the shock of that thunderbolt. Only, where nerve stimulants often make the mind passive and disinclined to take part in the drama so vividly enacting before it, this opening of my reservoirs of reserve nervous energy had multiplied my power to act as well as my power to observe. "I wonder how long it will last," thought I. And it made me uneasy, this unnatural alertness, unaccompanied by any feverishness or sense of strain. "Is this the way madness begins?" I dressed myself again and went out--went up to Joe Healey's gambling place in Forty-fourth Street. Most of the well-known gamblers up town, as well as their "respectable" down town fellow members of the fraternity, were old acquaintances of mine; Joe Healey was as close a friend as I had. He had great fame far squareness--and, in a sense, deserved it. With his fellow gamblers he was straight as a string at all times--to be otherwise would have meant that when he went broke he would stay broke, because none of the fraternity would "stake" him. But with his patrons--being regarded by them as a pariah, he acted toward them like a pariah--a prudent pariah. He fooled them with a frank show of gentlemanliness, of honesty to his own hurt; under that cover he fleeced them well, but always judiciously. That night, I recall, Joe's guests were several young fellows of the fashionable set, rich men's sons and their parasites, a few of the big down town operators who hadn't yet got hipped on "respectability"--they playing poker in a private room--and a couple of flush-faced, flush-pursed chaps from out of town, for whom one of Joe's men was dealing faro from what looked to my experienced and accurate eye like a "brace" box. Joe, very elegant, too elegant in fact, in evening dress, was showing a new piece of statuary to the oldest son of Melville, of the National Industrial Bank. Joe knew a little something about art--he was much like the art dealers who, as a matter of business, learn the difference between good things and bad, but in their hearts wonder and laugh at people willing to part with large sums of money for a little paint or marble or the like. As soon as Joe thought he had sufficiently impressed young Melville, he drifted him to a roulette table, left him there and joined me. "Come to my office," said he. "I want to see you." He led the way down the richly-carpeted marble stairway as far as the landing at the turn. There, on a sort of mezzanine, he had a gorgeous little suite. The principal object in the sitting-room or office was a huge safe. He closed and locked the outside door behind us. "Take a seat," said he. "You'll like the cigars in the second box on my desk--the long one." And he began turning the combination lock. "You haven't dropped in on us for the past three or four months," he went on. "No," said I, getting a great deal of pleasure out of seeing again, and thus intimately, his round, ruddy face--like a yachtman's, not like a drinker's--and his shifty, laughing brown eyes. "The game down town has given me enough excitement. I haven't had to continue it up town to keep my hand in." In fact, I had, as I have already said, been breaking off with my former friends because, while many of the most reputable and reliable financiers down town go in for high play occasionally at the gambling houses, it isn't wise for the man trying to establish himself as a strictly legitimate financier. I had been playing as much as ever, but only in games in my own rooms and at the rooms of other bankers, brokers and commercial leaders. The passion for high play is a craving that gnaws at a man all the time, and he must always be feeding it one way or another. "I've noticed that you are getting too swell to patronize us fellows," said he, his shrewd smile showing that my polite excuse had not fooled him. "Well, Matt, you're right--you always did have good sound sense and a steady eye for the main chance. I used to think the women'd ruin you, they were so crazy about that handsome mug and figure of yours. But when I saw you knew exactly when to let go, I knew nothing could stop you." By this time he had the safe open, disclosing several compartments and a small, inside safe. He worked away at the second combination lock, and presently exposed the interior of the little safe. It was filled with a great roll of bills. He pried this out, brought it over to the desk and began wrapping it up. "I want you to take this with you when you go," said he. "I've made several big killings lately, and I'm going to get you to invest the proceeds." "I can't take that big bundle along with me, Joe," said I. "Besides, it ain't safe. Put it in the bank and send me a check." "Not on your life," replied Healey with a laugh. "The suckers we trimmed gave checks, and I turned 'em into cash as soon as the banks opened. I wasn't any too spry, either. Two of the damned sneaks consulted lawyers as soon as they sobered off, and tried to stop payment on their checks. They're threatening proceedings. You must take the dough away with you, and I don't want a receipt." "Trimming suckers, eh?" said I, not able to decide what to do. "Their fathers stole it from the public," he explained. "They're drunken little snobs, not fit to have money. I'm doing a public service by relieving them of it. If I'd 'a' got more, I'd feel that much more"--he vented his light, cool, sarcastic laugh--"more patriotic." "I can't take it," said I, feeling that, in my present condition, to take it would be very near to betraying the confidence of my old friend. "They lost it in a straight game," he hastened to assure me. "I haven't had a 'brace' box or crooked wheel for four years." This with a sober face and a twinkle in his eye. "But even if I had helped chance to do the good work of teaching them to take care of their money, you'd not refuse me. Up town and down town, and all over the place, what's business, when you come to look at it sensibly, but trading in stolen goods? Do you know a man who could honestly earn more than ten or twenty thousand a year--good clean money by good clean work?" "Oh, for that matter, your money's as clean as anybody's," said I. "But, you know, I'm a speculator, Joe. I have my downs--and this happens to be a stormy time for me. If I take your money, I mayn't be able to account for it or even to pay dividends on it for--maybe a year or so." "It's all right, old man. I'll never give it a thought till you remind me of it. Use it as you'd use your own. I've got to put it behind somebody's luck--why not yours?" He finished doing up the package, then he seated himself, and we both looked at it through the smoke of our cigars. "It's just as easy to deal in big sums as in little, in large matters as in small, isn't it, Joe," said I, "once one gets in the way of it?" "Do you remember--away back there--the morning," he asked musingly--"the last morning--you and I got up from the straw in the stables over at Jerome Park--the stables they let us sleep in?" "And went out in the dawn to roost on the rails and spy on the speed trials of old Revell's horses?" "Exactly," said Joe, and we looked at each other and laughed. "We in rags--gosh, how chilly it was that morning! Do you remember what we talked about?" "No," said I, though I did. "I was proposing to turn a crooked trick--and you wouldn't have it. You persuaded me to keep straight, Matt. I've never forgotten it. You kept me straight--showed me what a damn fool a man was to load himself down with a petty larceny record. You made a man of me, Matt. And then those good looks of yours caught the eye of that bookmaker's girl, and he gave you a job at writing sheet--and you worked me in with you." So long ago it seemed, yet near and real, too, as I sat there, conscious of every sound and motion, even of the fantastic shapes taken by our upcurling smoke. How far I was from the "rail bird" of those happy-go-lucky years, when a meal meant quite as much to me as does a million now--how far from all that, yet how near, too. For was I not still facing life with the same careless courage, forgetting each yesterday in the eager excitement of each new day with its new deal? We went on in our reminiscences for a while; then, as Joe had a little work to do, I drifted out into the house, took a bite of supper with young Melville, had a little go at the tiger, and toward five in the clear June morning emerged into the broad day of the streets, with the precious bundle under my arms and a five hundred-dollar bill in my waistcoat pocket. "Give my win to me in a single bill," I said to the banker, "and blow yourself off with the change." Joe walked down the street with me--for companionship and a little air before turning in, he said, but I imagine a desire to keep his eye on his treasure a while longer had something to do with his taking that early morning stroll. We passed several of those forlorn figures that hurry through the slowly-awakening streets to bed or to work. Finally, there came by an old, old woman--a scrubwoman, I guess, on her way home from cleaning some office building. Beside her was a thin little boy, hopping along on a crutch. I stopped them. "Hold out your hand," said I to the boy, and he did. I laid the five hundred-dollar bill in it. "Now, shut your fingers tight over that," said I, "and don't open them till you get home. Then tell your mother to do what she likes with it." And we left them gaping after us, speechless before this fairy story come true. "You must be looking hard for luck to-day," said Joe, who understood this transaction where another might have thought it a showy and not very wise charity. "They'll stop in at the church and pray for you, and burn a candle." "I hope so," said I, "for God knows I need it." _ |
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