_ CHAPTER XXXII. LANGDON COMES TO THE SURFACE
I shall not estimate the vast sums it cost the Roebuck-Langdon clique to maintain the prices of National Coal, and so give plausibility to the fiction that the public was buying eagerly. In the third week of my campaign, Melville was so deeply involved that he had to let the two others take the whole burden upon themselves.
In the fourth week, Langdon came to me.
The interval between his card and himself gave me a chance to recover from my amazement. When he entered he found me busily writing. Though I had nerved myself, it was several seconds before I ventured to look at him. There he stood, probably as handsome, as fascinating as ever, certainly as self-assured. But I could now, beneath that manner I had once envied, see the puny soul, with its brassy glitter of the vanity of luxury and show. I had been somewhat afraid of myself--afraid the sight of him would stir up in me a tempest of jealousy and hate; as I looked, I realized that I did not know my own nature. "She does not love this man," I thought. "If she did or could, she would not be the woman I love. He deceived her inexperience as he deceived mine."
"What can I do for you?" said I to him politely, much as if he were a stranger making an untimely interruption.
My look had disconcerted him; my tone threw him into confusion. "You keep out of the way, now that you've become famous," he began, with a halting but heroic attempt at his customary easy superiority. "Are you living up in Connecticut, too? Sam Ellersly tells me your wife is stopping there with old Howard Forrester. Sam wants me to use my good offices in making it up between you two and her family."
I was completely taken aback by this cool ignoring of the real situation between him and me. Impudence or ignorance?--I could not decide. It seemed impossible that Anita had not told him; yet it seemed impossible, too, that he would come to me if she had told him. "Have you any _business_ with me?" said I.
His eyelids twitched nervously, and he adjusted his lips several times before he was able to say:
"You and your wife don't care to make it up with the Ellerslys? I fancied so, and told Sam you'd simply think me meddlesome. The other matter is the Travelers Club. I've smoothed things out there. I'm going to put you up and rush you through."
"No, thanks," said I. It seemed incredible to me that I had ever cared about that club and the things it represented, as I could remember I undoubtedly did care. It was like looking at an outgrown toy and trying to feel again the emotions it once excited.
"I assure you, Matt, there won't be the slightest difficulty." His manner was that of a man playing the trump card in a desperate game--he feels it can not lose, yet the stake is so big that he can not but be a little nervous.
"I do not care to join the Travelers Club," said I, rising. "I must ask you to excuse me. I am exceedingly busy."
A flush appeared in his cheeks and deepened and spread until his whole body must have been afire. He seated himself. "You know what I've come for," he said sullenly, and humbly, too.
All his life he had been enthroned upon his wealth. Without realizing it, he had claimed and had received deference solely because he was rich. He had thought himself, in his own person, most superior; now, he found that like a silly child he had been standing on a chair and crying: "See how tall I am." And the airs, the cynicism, the graceful condescension, which had been so becoming to him, were now as out of place as crown and robes on a king taking a swimming lesson.
"What are your terms, Blacklock? Don't be too hard on an old friend," said he, trying to carry off his frank plea for mercy with a smile.
I should have thought he would cut his throat and jump off the Battery wall before he would get on his knees to any man for any reason. And he was doing it for mere money--to try to save, not his fortune, but only an imperiled part of it. "If Anita could see him now!" I thought.
To him I said, the more coldly because I did not wish to add to his humiliation by showing him that I pitied him: "I can only repeat, Mr. Langdon, you will have to excuse me. I have given you all the time I can spare."
His eyes were shifting and his hands trembling as he said: "I will transfer control of the Coal combine to you."
His tones, shameful as the offer they carried, made me ashamed for him. For money--just for money! And I had thought him a man. If he had been a self-deceiving hypocrite like Roebuck, or a frank believer in the right of might, like Updegraff, I might possibly, in the circumstances, have tried to release him from my net. But he had never for an instant deceived himself as to the real nature of the enterprises he plotted, promoted and profited by; he thought it "smart" to be bad, and he delighted in making the most cynical epigrams on the black deeds of himself and his associates.
"Better sell out to Roebuck," I suggested. "I control all the Coal stock I need."
"I don't care to have anything further to do with Roebuck," Langdon answered. "I've broken with him."
"When a man lies to me," said I, "he gives me the chance to see just how much of a fool he thinks I am, and also the chance to see just how much of a fool he is. I hesitate to think so poorly of you as your attempt to fool me seems to compel."
But he was unconvinced. "I've found he intends to abandon the ship and leave me to go down with it," he persisted. "He believes he can escape and denounce me as the arch rascal who planned the combine, and can convince people that I foozled him into it."
Ingenious; but I happened to know that it was false. "Pardon me, Mr. Langdon," said I with stiff courtesy. "I repeat, I can do nothing for you. Good morning." And I went at my work as if he were already gone.
Had I been vindictive, I would have led him on to humiliate himself more deeply, if greater depths of humiliation there are than those to which he voluntarily descended. But I wished to spare him; I let him see the uselessness of his mission. He looked at me in silence--the look of hate that can come only from a creature weak as well as wicked. I think it was all his keen sense of humor could do to save him from a melodramatic outbreak. He slipped into his habitual pose, rose and withdrew without another word. All this fright and groveling and treachery for plunder, the loss of which would not impair his fortune--plunder he had stolen with many a jest and gibe at his helpless victims. Like most of our debonair dollar chasers, he was a good sportsman only when the game was with him.
That afternoon he threw his Coal holdings on the market in great blocks. His treachery took Roebuck completely by surprise--for Roebuck believed in this fair-weather "gentleman," foul-weather coward, and neglected to allow for that quicksand that is always under the foundation of the man who has inherited, not earned, his wealth. But for the blundering credulity of rascals, would honest men ever get their dues? Roebuck's brokers had bought many thousands of Langdon's shares at the high artificial price before Roebuck grasped the situation--that it was not my followers recklessly gambling to break the prices, but Langdon unloading on his "pal." As soon as he saw, he abruptly withdrew from the market. When the Stock Exchange closed, National Coal securities were offered at prices ranging from eleven for the bonds to two for the common and three for the preferred--offered, and no takers.
"Well, you've done it," said Joe, coming with the news that Thornley, of the Discount and Deposit Bank, had been appointed receiver.
"I've made a beginning," replied I. And the last sentence of my next morning's "letter" was:
"To-morrow the first chapter of the History of the Industrial National Bank."
* * * * *
"I have felt for two years," said Roebuck to Schilling, who repeated it to me soon afterward, "that Blacklock was about the most dangerous fellow in the country. The first time I set eyes on him, I saw he was a born iconoclast. And I've known for a year that some day he would use that engine of publicity of his to cannonade the foundations of society."
"He knew me better than I knew myself," was my comment to Schilling. And I meant it--for I had not finished the demolition of the Coal combine when I began to realize that, whatever I might have thought of my own ambitions, I could never have tamed myself or been tamed into a devotee of dollars and of respectability. I simply had been keeping quiet until my tools were sharp and fate spun my opportunity within reach. But I must, in fairness, add, it was lucky for me that, when the hour struck, Roebuck was not twenty years younger and one-twentieth as rich. It's a heavy enough handicap, under the best of circumstances, to go to war burdened with years; add the burden of a monster fortune, and it isn't in human nature to fight well. Youth and a light knapsack!
But--to my fight on the big bank.
Until I opened fire, the public thought, in a general way, that a bank was an institution like Thornley's Discount and Deposit National--a place for the safe-keeping of money and for accommodating business men with loans to be used in carrying on and extending legitimate and useful enterprises. And there were many such banks. But the real object of the banking business, as exploited by the big bandits who controlled it and all industry, was to draw into a mass the money of the country that they might use it to manipulate the markets, to wreck and reorganize industries and wreck them again, to work off inflated bonds and stocks upon the public at inflated prices, to fight among themselves for rights to despoil, making the people pay the war budgets--in a word, to finance the thousand and one schemes whereby they and their friends and relatives, who neither produce nor help to produce, appropriate the bulk of all that is produced.
And before I finished with the National Industrial Bank, I had shown that it and several similar institutions in the big cities throughout the country were, in fact, so many dens to which rich and poor were lured for spoliation. I then took up the Universal Life, as a type. I showed how insuring was, with the companies controlled by the bandits, simply the decoy; that the real object was the same as the real object of the big bandit banks. When I had finished my series on the Universal Life I had named and pilloried Roebuck, Langdon, Melville, Wainwright, Updegraff, Van Steen, Epstein--the seven men of enormous wealth, leaders of the seven cliques that had the political and industrial United States at their mercy, and were plucking the people through an ever-increasing army of agents. The agents kept some of the feathers--"The Seven" could afford to pay liberally. But the bulk of the feather crop was passed on to "The Seven."
I shall answer in a paragraph the principal charges that were made against me. They say I bribed employees on the telegraph companies, and so got possession of incriminating telegrams that had been sent by "The Seven" in the course of their worst campaigns. I admit the charge. They say I bribed some of their confidential men to give me transcripts and photographs of secret ledgers and reports. I admit the charge. They say I bought translations of stenographic notes taken by eavesdroppers on certain important secret meetings. I admit the charge. But what was the chief element in my success in thus getting proofs of their crimes? Not the bribery, but the hatred that all the servants of such men have for them. I tempted no one to betray them. _Every item, of information I got was offered to me_. And I shall add these facts:
First, in not a single case did they suspect and discharge the "guilty" persons.
Second, I have to-day as good means of access to their secrets as I ever had--and, if they discharged all who now serve them, I should be able soon to reestablish my lines; men of their stripe can not hope to be served faithfully.
Third, I had offers from all but three of "The Seven" to "peach" on the others in return for immunity. There may be honor among some thieves, but not among "respectable" thieves. Hypocrisy and honor will be found in the same character when the sun shines at night--not before.
* * * * *
It was the sardonic humor of fate that Langdon, for all his desire to keep out of my way, should have compelled me to center my fire upon him; that I, who wished to spare him, if possible, should have been compelled to make of him my first "awful example."
I had decided to concentrate upon Roebuck, because he was the richest and most powerful of "The Seven." For, in my pictures of the three main phases of "finance"--the industrial, the life-insurance and the banking--he, as arch plotter in every kind of respectable skulduggery, was necessarily in the foreground. My original intention was to demolish the Power Trust--or, at least, to compel him to buy back all of its stock which he had worked off on the public. I had collected many interesting facts about it, facts typical of the conditions that "finance" has established in so many of our industries.
For instance, I was prepared to show that the actual earnings of the Power Trust were two and a half times what its reports to stock-holders alleged; that the concealed profits were diverted into the pockets of Roebuck, his sons, eleven other relatives and four of "The Seven," the lion's share going, of course, to the lion. Like almost all the great industrial enterprises, too strong for the law and too remote for the supervision of their stock-holders, it gathered in enormous revenues to disburse them chiefly in salaries and commissions and rake-offs on contracts to favorites. I had proof that in one year it had "written off" twelve millions of profit and loss, ten millions of which had found its way to Roebuck's pocket. That pocket! That "treasury of the Lord"!
Dishonest? Roebuck and most of the other leaders of the various gangs, comprising, with all their ramifications, the principal figures in religious, philanthropic, fashionable society, did not for an instant think their doings dishonest. They had no sense of trusteeship for this money intrusted to them as captains of industry bankers, life-insurance directors. They felt that it was theirs to do with as they pleased.
And they felt that their superiority in rank and in brains entitled them to whatever remuneration they could assign to themselves without rousing the wrath of a public too envious to admit the just claims of the "upper classes." They convinced themselves that without them crops would cease to grow, sellers and buyers would be unable to find their way to market, barbarism would spread its rank and choking weeds over the whole garden of civilization. And, so brainless is the parrot public, they have succeeded in creating a very widespread conviction that their own high opinion of their services is not too high, and that some dire calamity would come if they were swept from between producer and consumer! True, thieves are found only where there is property; but who but a chucklebrain would think the thieves made the property?
Roebuck was the keystone of the arch that sustained the structure of chicane. To dislodge him was the direct way to collapse it. I was about to set to work when Langdon, feeling that he ought to have a large supply of cash in the troublous times I was creating, increased the capital stock of his already enormously overcapitalized Textile Trust and offered the new issue to the public. As the Textile Trust was even better bulwarked, politically, than the Power Trust, it was easily able to declare tempting dividends out of its lootings. So the new stock could not be attacked in the one way that would make the public instantly shun it--I could not truthfully charge that it would not pay the promised dividends. Yet attack I must--for that issue was, in effect, a bold challenge of my charges against "The Seven." From all parts of the country inquiries poured in upon me: "What do you think of the new Textile issue? Shall we invest? Is the Textile Company sound?"
I had no choice. I must turn aside from Roebuck; I must first show that, while Textile was, in a sense, sound just at that time, it had been unsound, and would be unsound again as soon as Langdon had gathered in a sufficient number of lambs to make a battue worth the while of a man dealing in nothing less than seven figures. I proceeded to do so.
The market yielded slowly. Under my first day's attack Textile preferred fell six points, Textile common three. While I was in the midst of dictating my letter for the second day's attack, I suddenly came to a full stop. I found across my way this thought: "Isn't it strange that Langdon, after humbling himself to you, should make this bold challenge? It's a trap!"
"No more at present," said I, to my stenographer. "And don't write out what I've already dictated."
I shut myself in and busied myself at the telephone. Half an hour after I set my secret machinery in motion, a messenger brought me an envelop, the address type-written. It contained a sheet of paper on which appeared, in type-writing; these words, and nothing more:
"He is heavily short of Textiles."
It was indeed a trap. The new issue was a blind. He had challenged me to attack his stock, and as soon as I did, he had begun secretly to sell it for a fall. I worked at this new situation until midnight, trying to get together the proofs. At that hour--for I could delay no longer, and my proofs were not quite complete--I sent my newspapers two sentences:
"To-morrow I shall make a disclosure that will
send Textiles up. Do not sell Textiles!" _