FROM GARDENS OVER SEAS
(A Rondel After Catulle Mendes)
I am the merle for whistling known,
And you, the sweet branch small and light;
I, gold and black; you, green and white;
I, full of songs; you, flower full-blown.
Take if you will my merry tone
And with your rose-blooms me requite;
I am the merle for whistling known,
And you the sweet branch small and light.
But should your blossoms – overthrown
By storm’s or wind’s or water’s might —
Be swept to earth in sudden plight,
Count not on me for grief or groan;
I am the merle for whistling known.
Thomas Walsh.
AN EDITORIAL
SYNOPSIS OF CHAPTERS I-XV OF “THE DELUGE,” BY DAVID GRAHAM PHILLIPS
Matthew Blacklock, the central figure of the story, is essentially a self-made man, who has made himself a power to be reckoned with. He is a man of great natural force, immense egotism, insatiable greed for notoriety and unswerving adherence to his own standards of morality. He has two devouring ambitions: First to become one of the inner circle that controls high finance and second to become one of the elect in society.
The opening chapters explain these ambitions. The magnate of the financial world is Roebuck, who has from time to time made use of Blacklock’s peculiar abilities and following. The latter has become dissatisfied with his role as a mere instrument and demands of Roebuck that he shall be given a place among the “seats of the mighty.” Roebuck makes a pretense of yielding to the demand.
Blacklock’s social ambition is awakened and stimulated by his meeting with Anita Ellersly, a young society girl whose family have been the recipients of many financial favors from him.
Using these obligations as a lever, he secures the entree to the Ellersly home, though it is soon made plain to him that his intentions with respect to Anita are extremely distasteful to her.
His first impulse is to regard his plans as hopeless, but his vanity comes to his rescue and strengthens his resolution to succeed. For assistance he turns to Monson, the trainer of his racing stable, an Englishman of good birth and breeding. Under Monson’s tuition he makes rapid progress in adapting himself to the requirements imposed upon aspirants for social distinction.
Blacklock persists in his attention to Anita and finally becomes engaged to her, though it is perfectly understood by both that she does not love him and accepts him only because he is rich and her family is poor.
Meantime, he has to some extent lost his hold upon his affairs in Wall Street and suddenly awakens to the fact that he has been betrayed by Mowbray Langdon, one of Roebuck’s trusted lieutenants, who, knowing that Blacklock is deeply involved in a short interest in Textile Trust stock, has taken advantage of the latter’s preoccupation with Miss Ellersly to boom the price of the stock. With ruin staring him in the face, Blacklock takes energetic measures to save himself.
He sees Anita, tells her the situation and frees her, but she refuses to accept her release when she hears of Langdon’s duplicity.
With the aid of money loaned to him by a gambler friend, he succeeds the next day, by means of large purchases of Textile Trust, in postponing the catastrophe.
Calling at the house of the Ellerslys, he has a violent scene with Mrs. Ellersly, who attempts to break the engagement between him and Anita, but it ends in his taking her with him from the house.
They go to the house of Blacklock’s partner, Joseph Ball, where they are married, after which Blacklock takes his wife to his own apartments, despite her protest that she wishes to go to her uncle’s.
Anita plainly shows her aversion to her husband, though he treats her with the greatest delicacy and consideration.
After some days the young wife receives a call from her parents, who seek to persuade her to leave Blacklock, telling her that they have private information that he will soon be a bankrupt. Anita refuses to go unless they will return to her husband all the money they have obtained from him.
All this she frankly tells Blacklock, who scoffs at the idea that he is in sore straits financially, though in his secret heart he knows that his position is indeed precarious.
In his extremity he goes to Roebuck, to ascertain, if he can, if he too is in the plot to ruin him.
THE DELUGE
By David Graham Phillips
[FOR SYNOPSIS OF PREVIOUS INSTALLMENTS SEE PRECEDING PAGE]
XV – (Continued)
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 Crœsus,” he cut away every kind of ostentation, and avoided attention more eagerly than he had once sought it. He took advantage of his having to remove to New York, where his vast interests centered; he bought a small and commonplace and, for a rich man, even mean house in East Fifty-second Street – one of a row 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. The dishes on his table, for example, were cheap and almost coarse, and the pictures on his walls were photographs or atrocious bargain-counter paintings. To his few intimates who were intimate enough to question him about his come-down from his Chicago splendors, he explained that with advancing years he was seeing with clearer eyes his responsibilities as a steward of the Lord, that luxury was sinful, and no man had the right to waste the Lord’s gifts that way. 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 anyone 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 more common than is generally supposed, 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 which they themselves had, and is ready to use the same 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 manservant would have been a “sinful” luxury, a manservant might be an assassin or might be hired by 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 which indicates that a servant feels he or she should get as high, or higher, wages, and less to do, 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 a 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 old 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 greatness 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 hast 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 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 reorganization 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 suspect I owe 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 Roebuck mausoleum he built: “Fear naught but the Lord.”
“When will the reorganization be announced?” I asked.
“I cannot say,” he answered. “Some difficulties – chiefly labor difficulties – have arisen. Until they are settled, nothing can be done. Come to me tomorrow, and we’ll talk about it.”
“That is all I wished to know,” said I. And, with a friendly, easy smile, I put out my hand. “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 insatiable 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 while I was 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.
As I drove away, I was proud of myself. I had listened to my death sentence with a face so smiling that he must almost have believed me unconscious; and also, it had not even entered my head, as I listened, to beg for mercy. Not that there would have been the least use in begging – as well try to pray a statue into life as try to soften that set will and purpose. Still, another sort of man than I would have weakened, and I felt – justly, I think – proud that I had not weakened. But when I was once more in my apartment – in our apartment – perhaps I did show that there was a weak streak through me. I fought against the impulse to see her once more that night; but I fought in vain. I knocked at the door of her sitting room – a timid knock, for me. No answer. I knocked again, more loudly – then a third time, still more loudly. The door opened and she stood there, like one of the angels that guarded the gates of Eden after the fall. Only, instead of a flaming sword, hers was of ice. She was in a dressing gown or tea gown, white and clinging and full of intoxicating hints and glimpses of all the beauties of her figure. Her face softened as she continued to look at me, and I entered.
“No – please don’t turn on any more lights,” I said, as she moved toward the electric buttons. “I just came in to – to see if I could do anything for you.” In fact, I had come, longing for her to do something for me, to show in look or tone or act some sympathy for me in my loneliness and trouble.
“No, thank you,” she said. Her voice was that of a stranger who wished to remain a stranger. And she was evidently waiting for me to go. You will see what a mood I was in when I say I felt as I had not since I, a very small boy indeed, ran away from home – it was one evening after I had been put to bed; I came back through the chilly night to take one last glimpse of the family that would soon be realizing how foolishly and wickedly unappreciative they had been of such a treasure as I; and when I saw them sitting about the big fire in the lamp light, heartlessly comfortable and unconcerned, it was all I could do to keep back the tears of self-pity – and I never saw them again.
“I’ve seen Roebuck,” said I to Anita, because I must say something, if I was to stay on.
“Roebuck?” she inquired. Her tone reminded me that his name conveyed nothing to her.
“He and I are in an enterprise together,” I explained. “He is the one man who could seriously cripple me.”
“Oh,” she said, and her indifference, forced though I thought it, wounded.
“Well,” said I, “your mother was right.”
She turned full toward me, and even in the dimness I saw her quick and full sympathy – an impulsive flash that was instantly gone. But it had been there!
“I came in here,” I went on, “to say that – Anita, it doesn’t in the least matter. No one in this world, no one and nothing, could hurt me except through you. So long as I have you, they – the rest – all of them together – can’t touch me.”
We were both silent for several minutes. Then she said, and her voice was like the smooth surface of the river where the boiling rapids run deep:
“But you haven’t me – and never shall have. I’ve told you that. I warned you long ago. No doubt you will pretend, and people will say, that I left you because you lost your money. But it won’t be so.”
I was beside her instantly, was looking into her face. “What do you mean?” I asked, and I did not speak gently.
She gazed at me without flinching. “And I suppose,” she said, satirically, “you wonder why I – why you – are repellent to me. Haven’t you learned that, while I may have been made into a moral coward, I’m not a physical coward? Don’t bully and threaten. It’s useless.”
I put my hand strongly on her shoulder – taunts and jeers do not turn me aside. “What do you mean?” I repeated.
“Take your hand off me,” she commanded.
“What did you mean?” I repeated, strongly. “Don’t be afraid to answer me.”
She was very young – so the taunt stung her. “I was about to tell you,” said she, “when you began to bluster.”
I took advantage of this to extricate myself from the awkward position in which she had put me – I took my hand from her shoulder.
“I am going to leave you,” she went on. “I am ready to go at any time. But if you wish it, I shall not go until my plans are arranged.”
“What plans?” I demanded.
“That is no concern of yours.”
“You forget that you are my wife,” said I, my brain on fire.
“I am not your wife,” was her answer, and if she had not looked so young and childlike, there in the moonlight all in white, I could not have held myself in check, so insolent was the tone and so hopeless of ever being able to win her did she make me feel.
“You are my wife, and you will stay here with me,” I reiterated.
“I am my own, and I shall go where I please, and do what I please,” was her contemptuous retort. “Why won’t you be reasonable? Why won’t you see how utterly unsuited we are? I don’t ask you to be a gentleman – but just a man, and be ashamed even to wish to detain a woman against her will.”
I drew up a chair so close to her that, to retreat, she was forced to sit in the broad window seat. Then I seated myself. “By all means, let us be reasonable,” said I. “Now, let me explain my position. I have heard you and your friends discussing the views of marriage you’ve just been expressing. Their views may be right, may be more civilized, more ‘advanced,’ than mine. No matter. They are not mine. I hold by the old standards – and you are my wife – mine. Do you understand?” All this as tranquilly as if we were discussing fair weather. “And you will live up to the obligation which the marriage service has put upon you.”
She might have been a marble statue pedestaled in that window seat.
“You married me of your own free will – for you could have protested to the preacher, and he would have sustained you. You put certain conditions on our marriage. I assented to them. I have respected them. I shall continue to respect them. But – when you married me, you didn’t marry a dawdling dude chattering ‘advanced ideas’ with his head full of libertinism. You married a man. And that man is your husband.”
I waited, but she made no comment – not even by gesture or movement. She simply sat, her hands interlaced in her lap, her eyes straight upon mine.
“You say, let us be reasonable,” I went on. “Well, let us be reasonable. There may come a time when a woman can be free and independent, but that time is a long way off yet. The world is organized on the basis of every woman having a protector – of every decent woman having a husband, unless she remains in the home of some of her blood relations. There may be women strong enough to set the world at defiance. But you are not one of them – and you know it. You have shown it to yourself again and again in the last forty-eight hours. Further, though you do not know it, your bringing up has made you more of a child than most of the inexperienced women. If you tried to assert your so-called independence, you would be the easy prey of a scoundrel or scoundrels. When I, who have lived in the thick of the fight all my life, who have learned by many a surprise and defeat never to sleep except sword and gun in hand, and one eye open – when I have been trapped as Roebuck and Langdon have just trapped me – what chance would a woman like you have?”
She did not answer, or change expression.
“Is what I say reasonable or unreasonable?” I asked, gently.
“Reasonable – from your standpoint,” she said.
She gazed out into the moonlight, up into the sky. And at the look in her face, the primeval savage in me strained to close round that slender white throat of hers and crush and crush until it had killed in her the thought of that other man which was transforming her from marble to flesh that glowed and blood that surged. I pushed back my chair with a sudden noise that startled her; by the way she trembled, I gauged how tense her nerves must have been. I rose and, in a fairly calm tone, said: “We understand each other?”
“Yes,” she answered. “As before.”
I ignored this. “Think it over, Anita,” I urged – she seemed to me so like a sweet, spoiled child again. I longed to go straight at her about that other man. I stood for a moment with Tom Langdon’s name on my lips, but I could not trust myself. I went away to my own rooms.
I thrust thoughts of her from my mind. I spent the night gnawing upon the ropes with which Mowbray Langdon and Roebuck had bound me, hand and foot.