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The Deluge, a novel by David Graham Phillips |
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Chapter 24. Blacklock Attends Family Prayers |
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_ CHAPTER XXIV. BLACKLOCK ATTENDS FAMILY PRAYERS During dinner I bore the whole burden of conversation--though burden I did not find it. Like most close-mouthed men, I am extremely talkative. Silence sets people to wondering and prying; he hides his secrets best who hides them at the bottom of a river of words. If my spirits are high, I often talk aloud to myself when there is no one convenient. And how could my spirits be anything but high, with her sitting there opposite me, mine, mine for better or for worse, through good and evil report--my wife! She was only formally responsive, reluctant and brief in answers, volunteering nothing. The servants waiting on us no doubt laid her manner to shyness; I understood it, or thought I did--but I was not troubled. It is as natural for me to hope as to breathe; and with my knowledge of character, how could I take seriously the moods and impulses of one whom I regarded as a childlike girl, trained to false pride and false ideals? "She has chosen to stay with me," said I to myself. "Actions count, not words or manner. A few days or weeks, and she will be herself, and mine." And I went gaily on with my efforts to interest her, to make her smile and forget the role she had commanded herself to play. Nor was I wholly unsuccessful. Again and again I thought I saw a gleam of interest in her eyes or the beginnings of a smile about that sweet mouth of hers. I was careful not to overdo my part. As soon as we finished dessert I said: "You loathe cigar smoke, so I'll hide myself in my den. Sanders will bring you the cigarettes." I had myself telephoned for a supply of her kind early in the day. She made a polite protest for the benefit of the servants; but I was firm, and left her free to think things over alone in the drawing-room--"your sitting-room," I called it, I had not finished a small cigar when there came a timid knock at my door. I threw away the cigar and opened. "I thought it was you," said I. "I'm familiar with the knocks of all the others. And this was new--like a summer wind tapping with a flower for admission at a closed window." And I laughed with a little raillery, and she smiled, colored, tried to seem cold and hostile again. "Shall I go with you to your sitting-room?" I went on. "Perhaps the cigar smoke here--" "No, no," she interrupted; "I don't really mind cigars--and the windows are wide open. Besides, I came for only a moment--just to say--" As she cast about for words to carry her on, I drew up a chair for her. She looked at it uncertainly, seated herself. "When mama was here--this afternoon," she went on, "she was urging me to--to do what she wished. And after she had used several arguments, she said something I--I've been thinking it over, and it seemed I ought in fairness to tell you." I waited. "She said: 'In a few days more he'--that meant you--'he will be ruined. He imagines the worst is over for him, when in fact they've only begun.'" "They!" I repeated. "Who are 'they'? The Langdons?" "I think so," she replied with an effort. "She did not say--I've told you her exact words--as far as I can." "Well," said I, "and why didn't you go?" She pressed her lips firmly together. Finally, with a straight look into my eyes, she replied: "I shall not discuss that. You probably misunderstand, but that is your own affair." "You believed what she said about me, of course," said I. "I neither believed nor disbelieved," she answered indifferently, as she rose to go. "It does not interest me." "Come here," said I. I waited until she reluctantly joined me at the window. I pointed to the steeple of the church across the way. "You could as easily throw down that steeple by pushing against it with your bare hands," I said to her, "as 'they,' whoever they are, could put me down. They might take away my money. But if they did, they would only be giving me a lesson that would teach me how more easily to get it back. I am not a bundle of stock certificates or a bag of money. I am--here," and I tapped my forehead. She forced a faint, scornful smile. She did not wish me to see her belief of what I said. "You may think that is vanity," I went on. "But you will learn, sooner or later, the difference between boasting and simple statement of fact. You will learn that I do not boast. What I said is no more a boast than for a man with legs to say, 'I can walk.' Because you have known only legless men, you exaggerate the difficulty of walking. It's as easy for me to make money as it is for some people to spend it." It is hardly necessary for me to say I was not insinuating anything against her people. But she was just then supersensitive on the subject, though I did not suspect it. She flushed hotly. "You will not have any cause to sneer at my people on that account hereafter," she said. "I settled _that_ to-day." "I was not sneering at them," I protested. "I wasn't even thinking of them. And--you must know that it's a favor to me for anybody to ask me to do anything that will please you--Anita!" She made a gesture of impatience. "I see I'd better tell you why I did not go with them to-day. I insisted that they give back all they have taken from you. And when they refused, I refused to go." "I don't care why you refused, or imagined you refused," said I. "I am content with the fact that you are here." "But you misunderstand it," she answered coldly. "I don't understand it, I don't misunderstand it," was my reply. "I accept it." She turned away from the window, drifted out of the room--you, who love or at least have loved, can imagine how it made me feel to see _Her_ moving about in those rooms of mine. While the surface of my mind was taken up with her, I must have been thinking, underneath, of the warning she had brought; for, perhaps half or three-quarters of an hour after she left, I was suddenly whirled out of my reverie at the window by a thought like a pistol thrust into my face. "What if 'they' should include Roebuck!" And just as a man begins to defend himself from a sudden danger before he clearly sees what the danger is, so I began to act before I even questioned whether my suspicion was plausible or absurd. I went into the hall, rang the bell, slipped a light-weight coat over my evening dress and put on a hat. When Sanders appeared, I said: "I'm going out for a few minutes--perhaps an hour--if any one should ask." A moment later I was in a hansom and on the way to Roebuck's. * * * * * When Roebuck lived near Chicago, he had a huge house, a sort of crude palace such as so many of our millionaires built for themselves in the first excitement of their new wealth--a house with porches and balconies and towers and minarets and all sorts of gingerbread effects to compel the eye of the passer-by. But when he became enormously rich, so rich that his name was one of the synonyms for wealth, so rich that people said "rich as Roebuck" where they used to say "rich as Croesus," he cut away every kind of ostentation, and avoided attention. He took advantage of his having to remove to New York where his vast interests centered; he bought a small and commonplace and, far a rich man, even mean house in East Fifty-Second Street--one of a raw, and an almost dingy looking row at that. There he had an establishment a man with one-fiftieth of his fortune would have felt like apologizing for. To his few intimates who were intimate enough to question him about his come-down from his Chicago splendors he explained that he was seeing with clearer eyes his responsibilities as a steward of the Lord, that luxury was sinful, that no man had a right to waste the Lord's money. The general theory about him was that advancing years had developed his natural closeness into the stingiest avariciousness. But my notion is he was impelled by the fear of exciting envy, by the fear of assassination--the fear that made his eyes roam restlessly whenever strangers were near him, and so dried up the inside of his body that his dry tongue was constantly sliding along his dry lips. I have seen a convict stand in the door of his cell and, though it was impossible that any one could be behind him, look nervously over his shoulder every moment or so. Roebuck had the same trick--only his dread, I suspect, was not the officers of the law, even of the divine law, but the many, many victims of his merciless execution of "the Lord's will." This state of mind is not uncommon among the very rich men, especially those who have come up from poverty. Those who have inherited great wealth, and have always been used to it, get into the habit of looking upon the mass of mankind as inferiors, and move about with no greater sense of peril than a man has in venturing among a lot of dogs with tails wagging. But those who were born poor and have risen under the stimulus of a furious envy of the comfortable and the rich, fancy that everybody who isn't rich has the same savage hunger that they themselves had, and is ready to use similar desperate methods in gratifying it. Thus, where the rich of the Langdon sort are supercilious, the rich of the Roebuck sort are nervous and often become morbid on the subject of assassination as they grow richer and richer. The door of Roebuck's house was opened for me by a maid--a man-servant would have been a "sinful" luxury, a man-servant might be the hireling of plotters against his life. I may add that she looked the cheap maid-of-all-work, and her manners were of the free and fresh sort that indicates a feeling that as high, or higher, wages, and less to do could be got elsewhere. "I don't think you can see Mr. Roebuck," she said. "Take my card to him," I ordered, "and I'll wait in the parlor." "Parlor's in use," she retorted with a sarcastic grin, which I was soon to understand. So I stood by the old-fashioned coat and hat rack while she went in at the hall door of the back parlor. Soon Roebuck himself came out, his glasses on his nose, a family Bible under his arm. "Glad to see you, Matthew," said he with saintly kindliness, giving me a friendly hand. "We are just about to offer up our evening prayer. Come right in." I followed him into the back parlor. Both it and the front parlor were lighted; in a sort of circle extending into both rooms were all the Roebucks and the four servants. "This is my friend, Matthew Blacklock," said he, and the Roebucks in the circle gravely bowed. He drew up a chair for me, and we seated ourselves. Amid a solemn hush, he read a chapter from the big Bible spread out upon his lean lap. My glance wandered from face to face of the Roebucks, as plainly dressed as were their servants. I was able to look freely, mine being the only eyes not bent upon the floor. It was the first time in my life that I had witnessed family prayers. When I was a boy at home, my mother had taken literally the Scriptural injunction to pray in secret--in a closet, I think the passage of the Bible said. Many times each day she used to retire to a closet under the stairway and spend from one to twenty minutes shut in there. But we had no family prayers. I was therefore deeply interested in what was going on in those countrified parlors of one of the richest and most powerful men in the world--and this right in the heart of that district of New York where palaces stand in rows and in blocks, and where such few churches as there are resemble social clubs for snubbing climbers and patronizing the poor. It was astonishing how much every Roebuck in that circle, even the old lady, looked like Roebuck himself--the same smug piety, the same underfed appearance that, by the way, more often indicates a starved soul than a starved body. One difference--where his face had the look of power that compels respect and, to the shrewd, reveals relentless strength relentlessly used, the expressions of the others were simply small and mean and frost-nipped. And that is the rule--the second generation of a plutocrat inherits, with his money, the meanness that enabled him to hoard it, but not the scope that enabled him to make it. So absorbed was I in the study of the influence of his terrible master-character upon those closest to it, that I started when he said: "Let us pray." I followed the example of the others, and knelt. The audible prayer was offered up by his oldest daughter, Mrs. Wheeler, a widow. Roebuck punctuated each paragraph in her series of petitions with a loudly-whispered amen. When she prayed for "the stranger whom Thou has led seemingly by chance into our little circle," he whispered the amen more fervently and repeated it. And well he might, the old robber and assassin by proxy! The prayer ended and, us on our feet, the servants withdrew; then, awkwardly, all the family except Roebuck. That is, they closed the doors between the two rooms and left him and me alone in the front parlor. "I shall not detain you long, Mr. Roebuck," said I. "A report reached me this evening that sent me to you at once." "If possible, Matthew," said he, and he could not hide his uneasiness, "put off business until to-morrow. My mind--yours, too, I trust--is not in the frame for that kind of thoughts now." "Is the Coal organization to be announced the first of July?" I demanded. It has always been, and always shall be, my method to fight in the open. This, not from principle, but from expediency. Some men fight best in the brush; I don't. So I always begin battle by shelling the woods. "No," he said, amazing me by his instant frankness. "The announcement has been postponed." Why did he not lie to me? Why did he not put me off the scent, as he might easily have done, with some shrewd evasion? I suspected I owed it to my luck in catching him at family prayers. For I know that the general impression of him is erroneous; he is not merely a hypocrite before the world, but also a hypocrite before himself. A more profoundly, piously conscientious man never lived. Never was there a truer epitaph than the one implied in the sentence carved over his niche in the magnificent mausoleum he built: "Fear naught but the Lord." "When will the reorganization be announced?" I asked. "I can not say," he answered. "Some difficulties--chiefly labor difficulties--have arisen. Until they are settled, nothing can be done. Come to me to-morrow, and we'll talk about it." "That is all I wished to know," said I, with a friendly, easy smile. "Good night." It was his turn to be astonished--and he showed it, where I had given not a sign. "What was the report you heard?" he asked, to detain me. "That you and Mowbray Langdon had conspired to ruin me," said I, laughing. He echoed my laugh rather hollowly. "It was hardly necessary for you to come to me about such a--a statement." "Hardly," I answered dryly. Hardly, indeed! For I was seeing now all that I had been hiding from myself since I became infatuated with Anita and made marrying her my only real business in life. We faced each other, each measuring the other. And as his glance quailed before mine, I turned away to conceal my exultation. In a comparison of resources this man who had plotted to crush me was to me as giant to midget. But I had the joy of realizing that man to man, I was the stronger. He had craft, but I had daring. His vast wealth aggravated his natural cowardice--crafty men are invariably cowards, and their audacities under the compulsion of their ravenous greed are like a starving jackal's dashes into danger for food. My wealth belonged to me, not I to it; and, stripped of it, I would be like the prize-fighter stripped for the fight. Finally, he was old, I young. And there was the chief reason for his quailing. He knew that he must die long before me, that my turn must come, that I could dance upon his grave. _ |
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