The vagaries of passion! Subtleties! Risks! What sacrifices are not laid willfully upon its altar! In a little while this more than average residence to which Cowperwood had referred was prepared solely to effect a satisfactory method of concealment. The house was governed by a seemingly recently-bereaved widow, and it was possible for Aileen to call without seeming strangely out of place. In such surroundings, and under such circumstances, it was not difficult to persuade her to give herself wholly to her lover, governed as she was by her wild and unreasoning affection and passion. In a way, there was a saving element of love, for truly, above all others, she wanted this man. She had no thought or feeling toward any other. All her mind ran toward visions of the future, when, somehow, she and he might be together for all time. Mrs. Cowperwood might die, or he might run away with her at thirty-five when he had a million. Some adjustment would be made, somehow. Nature had given her this man. She relied on him implicitly. When he told her that he would take care of her so that nothing evil should befall, she believed him fully. Such sins are the commonplaces of the confessional.
It is a curious fact that by some subtlety of logic in the Christian world, it has come to be believed that there can be no love outside the conventional process of courtship and marriage. One life, one love, is the Christian idea, and into this sluice or mold it has been endeavoring to compress the whole world. Pagan thought held no such belief. A writing of divorce for trivial causes was the theory of the elders; and in the primeval world nature apparently holds no scheme for the unity of two beyond the temporary care of the young. That the modern home is the most beautiful of schemes, when based upon mutual sympathy and understanding between two, need not be questioned. And yet this fact should not necessarily carry with it a condemnation of all love not so fortunate as to find so happy a denouement. Life cannot be put into any mold, and the attempt might as well be abandoned at once. Those so fortunate as to find harmonious companionship for life should congratulate themselves and strive to be worthy of it. Those not so blessed, though they be written down as pariahs, have yet some justification. And, besides, whether we will or not, theory or no theory, the basic facts of chemistry and physics remain. Like is drawn to like. Changes in temperament bring changes in relationship. Dogma may bind some minds; fear, others. But there are always those in whom the chemistry and physics of life are large, and in whom neither dogma nor fear is operative. Society lifts its hands in horror; but from age to age the Helens, the Messalinas, the Du Barrys, the Pompadours, the Maintenons, and the Nell Gwyns flourish and point a freer basis of relationship than we have yet been able to square with our lives.
These two felt unutterably bound to each other. Cowperwood, once he came to understand her, fancied that he had found the one person with whom he could live happily the rest of his life. She was so young, so confident, so hopeful, so undismayed. All these months since they had first begun to reach out to each other he had been hourly contrasting her with his wife. As a matter of fact, his dissatisfaction, though it may be said to have been faint up to this time, was now surely tending to become real enough. Still, his children were pleasing to him; his home beautiful. Lillian, phlegmatic and now thin, was still not homely. All these years he had found her satisfactory enough; but now his dissatisfaction with her began to increase. She was not like Aileen — not young, not vivid, not as unschooled in the commonplaces of life. And while ordinarily, he was not one who was inclined to be querulous, still now on occasion, he could be. He began by asking questions concerning his wife’s appearance — irritating little whys which are so trivial and yet so exasperating and discouraging to a woman. Why didn’t she get a mauve hat nearer the shade of her dress? Why didn’t she go out more? Exercise would do her good. Why didn’t she do this, and why didn’t she do that? He scarcely noticed that he was doing this; but she did, and she felt the undertone — the real significance — and took umbrage.
“Oh, why — why?” she retorted, one day, curtly. “Why do you ask so many questions? You don’t care so much for me any more; that’s why. I can tell.”
He leaned back startled by the thrust. It had not been based on any evidence of anything save his recent remarks; but he was not absolutely sure. He was just the least bit sorry that he had irritated her, and he said so.
“Oh, it’s all right,” she replied. “I don’t care. But I notice that you don’t pay as much attention to me as you used to. It’s your business now, first, last, and all the time. You can’t get your mind off of that.”
He breathed a sigh of relief. She didn’t suspect, then.
But after a little time, as he grew more and more in sympathy with Aileen, he was not so disturbed as to whether his wife might suspect or not. He began to think on occasion, as his mind followed the various ramifications of the situation, that it would be better if she did. She was really not of the contentious fighting sort. He now decided because of various calculations in regard to her character that she might not offer as much resistance to some ultimate rearrangement, as he had originally imagined. She might even divorce him. Desire, dreams, even in him were evoking calculations not as sound as those which ordinarily generated in his brain.
No, as he now said to himself, the rub was not nearly so much in his own home, as it was in the Butler family. His relations with Edward Malia Butler had become very intimate. He was now advising with him constantly in regard to the handling of his securities, which were numerous. Butler held stocks in such things as the Pennsylvania Coal Company, the Delaware and Hudson Canal, the Morris and Essex Canal, the Reading Railroad. As the old gentleman’s mind had broadened to the significance of the local street-railway problem in Philadelphia, he had decided to close out his other securities at such advantageous terms as he could, and reinvest the money in local lines. He knew that Mollenhauer and Simpson were doing this, and they were excellent judges of the significance of local affairs. Like Cowperwood, he had the idea that if he controlled sufficient of the local situation in this field, he could at last effect a joint relationship with Mollenhauer and Simpson. Political legislation, advantageous to the combined lines, could then be so easily secured. Franchises and necessary extensions to existing franchises could be added. This conversion of his outstanding stock in other fields, and the picking up of odd lots in the local street-railway, was the business of Cowperwood. Butler, through his sons, Owen and Callum, was also busy planning a new line and obtaining a franchise, sacrificing, of course, great blocks of stock and actual cash to others, in order to obtain sufficient influence to have the necessary legislation passed. Yet it was no easy matter, seeing that others knew what the general advantages of the situation were, and because of this Cowperwood, who saw the great source of profit here, was able, betimes, to serve himself — buying blocks, a part of which only went to Butler, Mollenhauer or others. In short he was not as eager to serve Butler, or any one else, as he was to serve himself if he could.
In this connection, the scheme which George W. Stener had brought forward, representing actually in the background Strobik, Wycroft, and Harmon, was an opening wedge for himself. Stener’s plan was to loan him money out of the city treasury at two per cent., or, if he would waive all commissions, for nothing (an agent for self-protective purposes was absolutely necessary), and with it take over the North Pennsylvania Company’s line on Front Street, which, because of the shortness of its length, one mile and a half, and the brevity of the duration of its franchise, was neither doing very well nor being rated very high. Cowperwood in return for his manipulative skill was to have a fair proportion of the stock — twenty per cent. Strobik and Wycroft knew the parties from whom the bulk of the stock could be secured if engineered properly. Their plan was then, with this borrowed treasury money, to extend its franchise and then the line itself, and then later again, by issuing a great block of stock and hypothecating it with a favored bank, be able to return the principal to the city treasury and pocket their profits from the line as earned. There was no trouble in this, in so far as Cowperwood was concerned, except that it divided the stock very badly among these various individuals, and left him but a comparatively small share — for his thought and pains.
But Cowperwood was an opportunist. And by this time his financial morality had become special and local in its character. He did not think it was wise for any one to steal anything from anybody where the act of taking or profiting was directly and plainly considered stealing. That was unwise — dangerous — hence wrong. There were so many situations wherein what one might do in the way of taking or profiting was open to discussion and doubt. Morality varied, in his mind at least, with conditions, if not climates. Here, in Philadelphia, the tradition (politically, mind you — not generally) was that the city treasurer might use the money of the city without interest so long as he returned the principal intact. The city treasury and the city treasurer were like a honey-laden hive and a queen bee around which the drones — the politicians — swarmed in the hope of profit. The one disagreeable thing in connection with this transaction with Stener was that neither Butler, Mollenhauer nor Simpson, who were the actual superiors of Stener and Strobik, knew anything about it. Stener and those behind him were, through him, acting for themselves. If the larger powers heard of this, it might alienate them. He had to think of this. Still, if he refused to make advantageous deals with Stener or any other man influential in local affairs, he was cutting off his nose to spite his face, for other bankers and brokers would, and gladly. And besides it was not at all certain that Butler, Mollenhauer, and Simpson would ever hear.
In this connection, there was another line, which he rode on occasionally, the Seventeenth and Nineteenth Street line, which he felt was a much more interesting thing for him to think about, if he could raise the money. It had been originally capitalized for five hundred thousand dollars; but there had been a series of bonds to the value of two hundred and fifty thousand dollars added for improvements, and the company was finding great difficulty in meeting the interest. The bulk of the stock was scattered about among small investors, and it would require all of two hundred and fifty thousand dollars to collect it and have himself elected president or chairman of the board of directors. Once in, however, he could vote this stock as he pleased, hypothecating it meanwhile at his father’s bank for as much as he could get, and issuing more stocks with which to bribe legislators in the matter of extending the line, and in taking up other opportunities to either add to it by purchase or supplement it by working agreements. The word “bribe” is used here in this matter-of-fact American way, because bribery was what was in every one’s mind in connection with the State legislature. Terrence Relihan — the small, dark-faced Irishman, a dandy in dress and manners — who represented the financial interests at Harrisburg, and who had come to Cowperwood after the five million bond deal had been printed, had told him that nothing could be done at the capital without money, or its equivalent, negotiable securities. Each significant legislator, if he yielded his vote or his influence, must be looked after. If he, Cowperwood, had any scheme which he wanted handled at any time, Relihan had intimated to him that he would be glad to talk with him. Cowperwood had figured on this Seventeenth and Nineteenth Street line scheme more than once, but he had never felt quite sure that he was willing to undertake it. His obligations in other directions were so large. But the lure was there, and he pondered and pondered.
Stener’s scheme of loaning him money wherewith to manipulate the North Pennsylvania line deal put this Seventeenth and Nineteenth Street dream in a more favorable light. As it was he was constantly watching the certificates of loan issue, for the city treasury, — buying large quantities when the market was falling to protect it and selling heavily, though cautiously, when he saw it rising and to do this he had to have a great deal of free money to permit him to do it. He was constantly fearful of some break in the market which would affect the value of all his securities and result in the calling of his loans. There was no storm in sight. He did not see that anything could happen in reason; but he did not want to spread himself out too thin. As he saw it now, therefore if he took one hundred and fifty thousand dollars of this city money and went after this Seventeenth and Nineteenth Street matter it would not mean that he was spreading himself out too thin, for because of this new proposition could he not call on Stener for more as a loan in connection with these other ventures? But if anything should happen — well —
“Frank,” said Stener, strolling into his office one afternoon after four o’clock when the main rush of the day’s work was over — the relationship between Cowperwood and Stener had long since reached the “Frank” and “George” period —“Strobik thinks he has that North Pennsylvania deal arranged so that we can take it up if we want to. The principal stockholder, we find, is a man by the name of Coltan — not Ike Colton, but Ferdinand. How’s that for a name?” Stener beamed fatly and genially.
Things had changed considerably for him since the days when he had been fortuitously and almost indifferently made city treasurer. His method of dressing had so much improved since he had been inducted into office, and his manner expressed so much more good feeling, confidence, aplomb, that he would not have recognized himself if he had been permitted to see himself as had those who had known him before. An old, nervous shifting of the eyes had almost ceased, and a feeling of restfulness, which had previously been restlessness, and had sprung from a sense of necessity, had taken its place. His large feet were incased in good, square-toed, soft-leather shoes; his stocky chest and fat legs were made somewhat agreeable to the eye by a well-cut suit of brownish-gray cloth; and his neck was now surrounded by a low, wing-point white collar and brown-silk tie. His ample chest, which spread out a little lower in around and constantly enlarging stomach, was ornamented by a heavy-link gold chain, and his white cuffs had large gold cuff-buttons set with rubies of a very notable size. He was rosy and decidedly well fed. In fact, he was doing very well indeed.
He had moved his family from a shabby two-story frame house in South Ninth Street to a very comfortable brick one three stories in height, and three times as large, on Spring Garden Street. His wife had a few acquaintances — the wives of other politicians. His children were attending the high school, a thing he had hardly hoped for in earlier days. He was now the owner of fourteen or fifteen pieces of cheap real estate in different portions of the city, which might eventually become very valuable, and he was a silent partner in the South Philadelphia Foundry Company and the American Beef and Pork Company, two corporations on paper whose principal business was subletting contracts secured from the city to the humble butchers and foundrymen who would carry out orders as given and not talk too much or ask questions.
“Well, that is an odd name,” said Cowperwood, blandly. “So he has it? I never thought that road would pay, as it was laid out. It’s too short. It ought to run about three miles farther out into the Kensington section.”
“You’re right,” said Stener, dully.
“Did Strobik say what Colton wants for his shares?”
“Sixty-eight, I think.”
“The current market rate. He doesn’t want much, does he? Well, George, at that rate it will take about”— he calculated quickly on the basis of the number of shares Cotton was holding —“one hundred and twenty thousand to get him out alone. That isn’t all. There’s Judge Kitchen and Joseph Zimmerman and Senator Donovan”— he was referring to the State senator of that name. “You’ll be paying a pretty fair price for that stud when you get it. It will cost considerable more to extend the line. It’s too much, I think.”
Cowperwood was thinking how easy it would be to combine this line with his dreamed-of Seventeenth and Nineteenth Street line, and after a time and with this in view he added:
“Say, George, why do you work all your schemes through Strobik and Harmon and Wycroft? Couldn’t you and I manage some of these things for ourselves alone instead of for three or four? It seems to me that plan would be much more profitable to you.”
“It would, it would!” exclaimed Stener, his round eyes fixed on Cowperwood in a rather helpless, appealing way. He liked Cowperwood and had always been hoping that mentally as well as financially he could get close to him. “I’ve thought of that. But these fellows have had more experience in these matters than I have had, Frank. They’ve been longer at the game. I don’t know as much about these things as they do.”
Cowperwood smiled in his soul, though his face remained passive.
“Don’t worry about them, George,” he continued genially and confidentially. “You and I together can know and do as much as they ever could and more. I’m telling you. Take this railroad deal you’re in on now, George; you and I could manipulate that just as well and better than it can be done with Wycroft, Strobik, and Harmon in on it. They’re not adding anything to the wisdom of the situation. They’re not putting up any money. You’re doing that. All they’re doing is agreeing to see it through the legislature and the council, and as far as the legislature is concerned, they can’t do any more with that than any one else could — than I could, for instance. It’s all a question of arranging things with Relihan, anyhow, putting up a certain amount of money for him to work with. Here in town there are other people who can reach the council just as well as Strobik.” He was thinking (once he controlled a road of his own) of conferring with Butler and getting him to use his influence. It would serve to quiet Strobik and his friends. “I’m not asking you to change your plans on this North Pennsylvania deal. You couldn’t do that very well. But there are other things. In the future why not let’s see if you and I can’t work some one thing together? You’ll be much better off, and so will I. We’ve done pretty well on the city-loan proposition so far, haven’t we?”
The truth was, they had done exceedingly well. Aside from what the higher powers had made, Stener’s new house, his lots, his bank-account, his good clothes, and his changed and comfortable sense of life were largely due to Cowperwood’s successful manipulation of these city-loan certificates. Already there had been four issues of two hundred thousand dollars each. Cowperwood had bought and sold nearly three million dollars’ worth of these certificates, acting one time as a “bull” and another as a “bear.” Stener was now worth all of one hundred and fifty thousand dollars.
“There’s a line that I know of here in the city which could be made into a splendidly paying property,” continued Cowperwood, meditatively, “if the right things could be done with it. Just like this North Pennsylvania line, it isn’t long enough. The territory it serves isn’t big enough. It ought to be extended; but if you and I could get it, it might eventually be worked with this North Pennsylvania Company or some other as one company. That would save officers and offices and a lot of things. There is always money to be made out of a larger purchasing power.”
He paused and looked out the window of his handsome little hardwood office, speculating upon the future. The window gave nowhere save into a back yard behind another office building which had formerly been a residence. Some grass grew feebly there. The red wall and old-fashioned brick fence which divided it from the next lot reminded him somehow of his old home in New Market Street, to which his Uncle Seneca used to come as a Cuban trader followed by his black Portuguese servitor. He could see him now as he sat here looking at the yard.
“Well,” asked Stener, ambitiously, taking the bait, “why don’t we get hold of that — you and me? I suppose I could fix it so far as the money is concerned. How much would it take?”
Cowperwood smiled inwardly again.
“I don’t know exactly,” he said, after a time. “I want to look into it more carefully. The one trouble is that I’m carrying a good deal of the city’s money as it is. You see, I have that two hundred thousand dollars against your city-loan deals. And this new scheme will take two or three hundred thousand more. If that were out of the way —”
He was thinking of one of the inexplicable stock panics — those strange American depressions which had so much to do with the temperament of the people, and so little to do with the basic conditions of the country. “If this North Pennsylvania deal were through and done with —”
He rubbed his chin and pulled at his handsome silky mustache.
“Don’t ask me any more about it, George,” he said, finally, as he saw that the latter was beginning to think as to which line it might be. “Don’t say anything at all about it. I want to get my facts exactly right, and then I’ll talk to you. I think you and I can do this thing a little later, when we get the North Pennsylvania scheme under way. I’m so rushed just now I’m not sure that I want to undertake it at once; but you keep quiet and we’ll see.” He turned toward his desk, and Stener got up.
“I’ll make any sized deposit with you that you wish, the moment you think you’re ready to act, Frank,” exclaimed Stener, and with the thought that Cowperwood was not nearly as anxious to do this as he should be, since he could always rely on him (Stener) when there was anything really profitable in the offing. Why should not the able and wonderful Cowperwood be allowed to make the two of them rich? “Just notify Stires, and he’ll send you a check. Strobik thought we ought to act pretty soon.”
“I’ll tend to it, George,” replied Cowperwood, confidently. “It will come out all right. Leave it to me.”
Stener kicked his stout legs to straighten his trousers, and extended his hand. He strolled out in the street thinking of this new scheme. Certainly, if he could get in with Cowperwood right he would be a rich man, for Cowperwood was so successful and so cautious. His new house, this beautiful banking office, his growing fame, and his subtle connections with Butler and others put Stener in considerable awe of him. Another line! They would control it and the North Pennsylvania! Why, if this went on, he might become a magnate — he really might — he, George W. Stener, once a cheap real-estate and insurance agent. He strolled up the street thinking, but with no more idea of the importance of his civic duties and the nature of the social ethics against which he was offending than if they had never existed.
The services which Cowperwood performed during the ensuing year and a half for Stener, Strobik, Butler, State Treasurer Van Nostrand, State Senator Relihan, representative of “the interests,” so-called, at Harrisburg, and various banks which were friendly to these gentlemen, were numerous and confidential. For Stener, Strobik, Wycroft, Harmon and himself he executed the North Pennsylvania deal, by which he became a holder of a fifth of the controlling stock. Together he and Stener joined to purchase the Seventeenth and Nineteenth Street line and in the concurrent gambling in stocks.
By the summer of 1871, when Cowperwood was nearly thirty-four years of age, he had a banking business estimated at nearly two million dollars, personal holdings aggregating nearly half a million, and prospects which other things being equal looked to wealth which might rival that of any American. The city, through its treasurer — still Mr. Stener — was a depositor with him to the extent of nearly five hundred thousand dollars. The State, through its State treasurer, Van Nostrand, carried two hundred thousand dollars on his books. Bode was speculating in street-railway stocks to the extent of fifty thousand dollars. Relihan to the same amount. A small army of politicians and political hangers-on were on his books for various sums. And for Edward Malia Butler he occasionally carried as high as one hundred thousand dollars in margins. His own loans at the banks, varying from day to day on variously hypothecated securities, were as high as seven and eight hundred thousand dollars. Like a spider in a spangled net, every thread of which he knew, had laid, had tested, he had surrounded and entangled himself in a splendid, glittering network of connections, and he was watching all the details.
His one pet idea, the thing he put more faith in than anything else, was his street-railway manipulations, and particularly his actual control of the Seventeenth and Nineteenth Street line. Through an advance to him, on deposit, made in his bank by Stener at a time when the stock of the Seventeenth and Nineteenth Street line was at a low ebb, he had managed to pick up fifty-one per cent. of the stock for himself and Stener, by virtue of which he was able to do as he pleased with the road. To accomplish this, however, he had resorted to some very “peculiar” methods, as they afterward came to be termed in financial circles, to get this stock at his own valuation. Through agents he caused suits for damages to be brought against the company for non-payment of interest due. A little stock in the hands of a hireling, a request made to a court of record to examine the books of the company in order to determine whether a receivership were not advisable, a simultaneous attack in the stock market, selling at three, five, seven, and ten points off, brought the frightened stockholders into the market with their holdings. The banks considered the line a poor risk, and called their loans in connection with it. His father’s bank had made one loan to one of the principal stockholders, and that was promptly called, of course. Then, through an agent, the several heaviest shareholders were approached and an offer was made to help them out. The stocks would be taken off their hands at forty. They had not really been able to discover the source of all their woes; and they imagined that the road was in bad condition, which it was not. Better let it go. The money was immediately forthcoming, and Cowperwood and Stener jointly controlled fifty-one per cent. But, as in the case of the North Pennsylvania line, Cowperwood had been quietly buying all of the small minority holdings, so that he had in reality fifty-one per cent. of the stock, and Stener twenty-five per cent. more.
This intoxicated him, for immediately he saw the opportunity of fulfilling his long-contemplated dream — that of reorganizing the company in conjunction with the North Pennsylvania line, issuing three shares where one had been before and after unloading all but a control on the general public, using the money secured to buy into other lines which were to be boomed and sold in the same way. In short, he was one of those early, daring manipulators who later were to seize upon other and ever larger phases of American natural development for their own aggrandizement.
In connection with this first consolidation, his plan was to spread rumors of the coming consolidation of the two lines, to appeal to the legislature for privileges of extension, to get up an arresting prospectus and later annual reports, and to boom the stock on the stock exchange as much as his swelling resources would permit. The trouble is that when you are trying to make a market for a stock — to unload a large issue such as his was (over five hundred thousand dollars’ worth)— while retaining five hundred thousand for yourself, it requires large capital to handle it. The owner in these cases is compelled not only to go on the market and do much fictitious buying, thus creating a fictitious demand, but once this fictitious demand has deceived the public and he has been able to unload a considerable quantity of his wares, he is, unless he rids himself of all his stock, compelled to stand behind it. If, for instance, he sold five thousand shares, as was done in this instance, and retained five thousand, he must see that the public price of the outstanding five thousand shares did not fall below a certain point, because the value of his private shares would fall with it. And if, as is almost always the case, the private shares had been hypothecated with banks and trust companies for money wherewith to conduct other enterprises, the falling of their value in the open market merely meant that the banks would call for large margins to protect their loans or call their loans entirely. This meant that his work was a failure, and he might readily fail. He was already conducting one such difficult campaign in connection with this city-loan deal, the price of which varied from day to day, and which he was only too anxious to have vary, for in the main he profited by these changes.
But this second burden, interesting enough as it was, meant that he had to be doubly watchful. Once the stock was sold at a high price, the money borrowed from the city treasurer could be returned; his own holdings created out of foresight, by capitalizing the future, by writing the shrewd prospectuses and reports, would be worth their face value, or little less. He would have money to invest in other lines. He might obtain the financial direction of the whole, in which case he would be worth millions. One shrewd thing he did, which indicated the foresight and subtlety of the man, was to make a separate organization or company of any extension or addition which he made to his line. Thus, if he had two or three miles of track on a street, and he wanted to extend it two or three miles farther on the same street, instead of including this extension in the existing corporation, he would make a second corporation to control the additional two or three miles of right of way. This corporation he would capitalize at so much, and issue stocks and bonds for its construction, equipment, and manipulation. Having done this he would then take the sub-corporation over into the parent concern, issuing more stocks and bonds of the parent company wherewith to do it, and, of course, selling these bonds to the public. Even his brothers who worked for him did not know the various ramifications of his numerous deals, and executed his orders blindly. Sometimes Joseph said to Edward, in a puzzled way, “Well, Frank knows what he is about, I guess.”
On the other hand, he was most careful to see that every current obligation was instantly met, and even anticipated, for he wanted to make a great show of regularity. Nothing was so precious as reputation and standing. His forethought, caution, and promptness pleased the bankers. They thought he was one of the sanest, shrewdest men they had ever met.
However, by the spring and summer of 1871, Cowperwood had actually, without being in any conceivable danger from any source, spread himself out very thin. Because of his great success he had grown more liberal — easier — in his financial ventures. By degrees, and largely because of his own confidence in himself, he had induced his father to enter upon his street-car speculations, to use the resources of the Third National to carry a part of his loans and to furnish capital at such times as quick resources were necessary. In the beginning the old gentleman had been a little nervous and skeptical, but as time had worn on and nothing but profit eventuated, he grew bolder and more confident.
“Frank,” he would say, looking up over his spectacles, “aren’t you afraid you’re going a little too fast in these matters? You’re carrying a lot of loans these days.”
“No more than I ever did, father, considering my resources. You can’t turn large deals without large loans. You know that as well as I do.”
“Yes, I know, but — now that Green and Coates — aren’t you going pretty strong there?”
“Not at all. I know the inside conditions there. The stock is bound to go up eventually. I’ll bull it up. I’ll combine it with my other lines, if necessary.”
Cowperwood stared at his boy. Never was there such a defiant, daring manipulator.
“You needn’t worry about me, father. If you are going to do that, call my loans. Other banks will loan on my stocks. I’d like to see your bank have the interest.”
So Cowperwood, Sr., was convinced. There was no gainsaying this argument. His bank was loaning Frank heavily, but not more so than any other. And as for the great blocks of stocks he was carrying in his son’s companies, he was to be told when to get out should that prove necessary. Frank’s brothers were being aided in the same way to make money on the side, and their interests were also now bound up indissolubly with his own.
With his growing financial opportunities, however, Cowperwood had also grown very liberal in what might be termed his standard of living. Certain young art dealers in Philadelphia, learning of his artistic inclinations and his growing wealth, had followed him up with suggestions as to furniture, tapestries, rugs, objects of art, and paintings — at first the American and later the foreign masters exclusively. His own and his father’s house had not been furnished fully in these matters, and there was that other house in North Tenth Street, which he desired to make beautiful. Aileen had always objected to the condition of her own home. Love of distinguished surroundings was a basic longing with her, though she had not the gift of interpreting her longings. But this place where they were secretly meeting must be beautiful. She was as keen for that as he was. So it became a veritable treasure-trove, more distinguished in furnishings than some of the rooms of his own home. He began to gather here some rare examples of altar cloths, rugs, and tapestries of the Middle Ages. He bought furniture after the Georgian theory — a combination of Chippendale, Sheraton, and Heppelwhite modified by the Italian Renaissance and the French Louis. He learned of handsome examples of porcelain, statuary, Greek vase forms, lovely collections of Japanese ivories and netsukes. Fletcher Gray, a partner in Cable & Gray, a local firm of importers of art objects, called on him in connection with a tapestry of the fourteenth century weaving. Gray was an enthusiast and almost instantly he conveyed some of his suppressed and yet fiery love of the beautiful to Cowperwood.
“There are fifty periods of one shade of blue porcelain alone, Mr. Cowperwood,” Gray informed him. “There are at least seven distinct schools or periods of rugs — Persian, Armenian, Arabian, Flemish, Modern Polish, Hungarian, and so on. If you ever went into that, it would be a distinguished thing to get a complete — I mean a representative — collection of some one period, or of all these periods. They are beautiful. I have seen some of them, others I’ve read about.”
“You’ll make a convert of me yet, Fletcher,” replied Cowperwood. “You or art will be the ruin of me. I’m inclined that way temperamentally as it is, I think, and between you and Ellsworth and Gordon Strake”— another young man intensely interested in painting —“you’ll complete my downfall. Strake has a splendid idea. He wants me to begin right now — I’m using that word ‘right’ in the sense of ‘properly,’” he commented —“and get what examples I can of just the few rare things in each school or period of art which would properly illustrate each. He tells me the great pictures are going to increase in value, and what I could get for a few hundred thousand now will be worth millions later. He doesn’t want me to bother with American art.”
“He’s right,” exclaimed Gray, “although it isn’t good business for me to praise another art man. It would take a great deal of money, though.”
“Not so very much. At least, not all at once. It would be a matter of years, of course. Strake thinks that some excellent examples of different periods could be picked up now and later replaced if anything better in the same held showed up.”
His mind, in spite of his outward placidity, was tinged with a great seeking. Wealth, in the beginning, had seemed the only goal, to which had been added the beauty of women. And now art, for art’s sake — the first faint radiance of a rosy dawn — had begun to shine in upon him, and to the beauty of womanhood he was beginning to see how necessary it was to add the beauty of life — the beauty of material background — how, in fact, the only background for great beauty was great art. This girl, this Aileen Butler, her raw youth and radiance, was nevertheless creating in him a sense of the distinguished and a need for it which had never existed in him before to the same degree. It is impossible to define these subtleties of reaction, temperament on temperament, for no one knows to what degree we are marked by the things which attract us. A love affair such as this had proved to be was little less or more than a drop of coloring added to a glass of clear water, or a foreign chemical agent introduced into a delicate chemical formula.
In short, for all her crudeness, Aileen Butler was a definite force personally. Her nature, in a way, a protest against the clumsy conditions by which she found herself surrounded, was almost irrationally ambitious. To think that for so long, having been born into the Butler family, she had been the subject, as well as the victim of such commonplace and inartistic illusions and conditions, whereas now, owing to her contact with, and mental subordination to Cowperwood, she was learning so many wonderful phases of social, as well as financial, refinement of which previously she had guessed nothing. The wonder, for instance, of a future social career as the wife of such a man as Frank Cowperwood. The beauty and resourcefulness of his mind, which, after hours of intimate contact with her, he was pleased to reveal, and which, so definite were his comments and instructions, she could not fail to sense. The wonder of his financial and artistic and future social dreams. And, oh, oh, she was his, and he was hers. She was actually beside herself at times with the glory, as well as the delight of all this.
At the same time, her father’s local reputation as a quondam garbage contractor (“slop-collector” was the unfeeling comment of the vulgarian cognoscenti); her own unavailing efforts to right a condition of material vulgarity or artistic anarchy in her own home; the hopelessness of ever being admitted to those distinguished portals which she recognized afar off as the last sanctum sanctorum of established respectability and social distinction, had bred in her, even at this early age, a feeling of deadly opposition to her home conditions as they stood. Such a house compared to Cowperwood’s! Her dear, but ignorant, father! And this great man, her lover, had now condescended to love her — see in her his future wife. Oh, God, that it might not fail! Through the Cowperwoods at first she had hoped to meet a few people, young men and women — and particularly men — who were above the station in which she found herself, and to whom her beauty and prospective fortune would commend her; but this had not been the case. The Cowperwoods themselves, in spite of Frank Cowperwood’s artistic proclivities and growing wealth, had not penetrated the inner circle as yet. In fact, aside from the subtle, preliminary consideration which they were receiving, they were a long way off.
None the less, and instinctively in Cowperwood Aileen recognized a way out — a door — and by the same token a subtle, impending artistic future of great magnificence. This man would rise beyond anything he now dreamed of — she felt it. There was in him, in some nebulous, unrecognizable form, a great artistic reality which was finer than anything she could plan for herself. She wanted luxury, magnificence, social station. Well, if she could get this man they would come to her. There were, apparently, insuperable barriers in the way; but hers was no weakling nature, and neither was his. They ran together temperamentally from the first like two leopards. Her own thoughts — crude, half formulated, half spoken — nevertheless matched his to a degree in the equality of their force and their raw directness.
“I don’t think papa knows how to do,” she said to him, one day. “It isn’t his fault. He can’t help it. He knows that he can’t. And he knows that I know it. For years I wanted him to move out of that old house there. He knows that he ought to. But even that wouldn’t do much good.”
She paused, looking at him with a straight, clear, vigorous glance. He liked the medallion sharpness of her features — their smooth, Greek modeling.
“Never mind, pet,” he replied. “We will arrange all these things later. I don’t see my way out of this just now; but I think the best thing to do is to confess to Lillian some day, and see if some other plan can’t be arranged. I want to fix it so the children won’t suffer. I can provide for them amply, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Lillian would be willing to let me go. She certainly wouldn’t want any publicity.”
He was counting practically, and man-fashion, on her love for her children.
Aileen looked at him with clear, questioning, uncertain eyes. She was not wholly without sympathy, but in a way this situation did not appeal to her as needing much. Mrs. Cowperwood was not friendly in her mood toward her. It was not based on anything save a difference in their point of view. Mrs. Cowperwood could never understand how a girl could carry her head so high and “put on such airs,” and Aileen could not understand how any one could be so lymphatic and lackadaisical as Lillian Cowperwood. Life was made for riding, driving, dancing, going. It was made for airs and banter and persiflage and coquetry. To see this woman, the wife of a young, forceful man like Cowperwood, acting, even though she were five years older and the mother of two children, as though life on its romantic and enthusiastic pleasurable side were all over was too much for her. Of course Lillian was unsuited to Frank; of course he needed a young woman like herself, and fate would surely give him to her. Then what a delicious life they would lead!
“Oh, Frank,” she exclaimed to him, over and over, “if we could only manage it. Do you think we can?”
“Do I think we can? Certainly I do. It’s only a matter of time. I think if I were to put the matter to her clearly, she wouldn’t expect me to stay. You look out how you conduct your affairs. If your father or your brother should ever suspect me, there’d be an explosion in this town, if nothing worse. They’d fight me in all my money deals, if they didn’t kill me. Are you thinking carefully of what you are doing?”
“All the time. If anything happens I’ll deny everything. They can’t prove it, if I deny it. I’ll come to you in the long run, just the same.”
They were in the Tenth Street house at the time. She stroked his cheeks with the loving fingers of the wildly enamored woman.
“I’ll do anything for you, sweetheart,” she declared. “I’d die for you if I had to. I love you so.”
“Well, pet, no danger. You won’t have to do anything like that. But be careful.”
Then, after several years of this secret relationship, in which the ties of sympathy and understanding grew stronger instead of weaker, came the storm. It burst unexpectedly and out of a clear sky, and bore no relation to the intention or volition of any individual. It was nothing more than a fire, a distant one — the great Chicago fire, October 7th, 1871, which burned that city — its vast commercial section — to the ground, and instantly and incidentally produced a financial panic, vicious though of short duration in various other cities in America. The fire began on Saturday and continued apparently unabated until the following Wednesday. It destroyed the banks, the commercial houses, the shipping conveniences, and vast stretches of property. The heaviest loss fell naturally upon the insurance companies, which instantly, in many cases — the majority — closed their doors. This threw the loss back on the manufacturers and wholesalers in other cities who had had dealings with Chicago as well as the merchants of that city. Again, very grievous losses were borne by the host of eastern capitalists which had for years past partly owned, or held heavy mortgages on, the magnificent buildings for business purposes and residences in which Chicago was already rivaling every city on the continent. Transportation was disturbed, and the keen scent of Wall Street, and Third Street in Philadelphia, and State Street in Boston, instantly perceived in the early reports the gravity of the situation. Nothing could be done on Saturday or Sunday after the exchange closed, for the opening reports came too late. On Monday, however, the facts were pouring in thick and fast; and the owners of railroad securities, government securities, street-car securities, and, indeed, all other forms of stocks and bonds, began to throw them on the market in order to raise cash. The banks naturally were calling their loans, and the result was a stock stampede which equaled the Black Friday of Wall Street of two years before.
Cowperwood and his father were out of town at the time the fire began. They had gone with several friends — bankers — to look at a proposed route of extension of a local steam-railroad, on which a loan was desired. In buggies they had driven over a good portion of the route, and were returning to Philadelphia late Sunday evening when the cries of newsboys hawking an “extra” reached their ears.
“Ho! Extra! Extra! All about the big Chicago fire!”
“Ho! Extra! Extra! Chicago burning down! Extra! Extra!”
The cries were long-drawn-out, ominous, pathetic. In the dusk of the dreary Sunday afternoon, when the city had apparently retired to Sabbath meditation and prayer, with that tinge of the dying year in the foliage and in the air, one caught a sense of something grim and gloomy.
“Hey, boy,” called Cowperwood, listening, seeing a shabbily clothed misfit of a boy with a bundle of papers under his arm turning a corner. “What’s that? Chicago burning!”
He looked at his father and the other men in a significant way as he reached for the paper, and then, glancing at the headlines, realized the worst.
ALL CHICAGO BURNING
FIRE RAGES UNCHECKED IN COMMERCIAL SECTION SINCE YESTERDAY EVENING. BANKS, COMMERCIAL HOUSES, PUBLIC BUILDINGS IN RUINS. DIRECT TELEGRAPHIC COMMUNICATION SUSPENDED SINCE THREE O’CLOCK TO-DAY. NO END TO PROGRESS OF DISASTER IN SIGHT.
“That looks rather serious,” he said, calmly, to his companions, a cold, commanding force coming into his eyes and voice. To his father he said a little later, “It’s panic, unless the majority of the banks and brokerage firms stand together.”
He was thinking quickly, brilliantly, resourcefully of his own outstanding obligations. His father’s bank was carrying one hundred thousand dollars’ worth of his street-railway securities at sixty, and fifty thousand dollars’ worth of city loan at seventy. His father had “up with him” over forty thousand dollars in cash covering market manipulations in these stocks. The banking house of Drexel & Co. was on his books as a creditor for one hundred thousand, and that loan would be called unless they were especially merciful, which was not likely. Jay Cooke & Co. were his creditors for another one hundred and fifty thousand. They would want their money. At four smaller banks and three brokerage companies he was debtor for sums ranging from fifty thousand dollars down. The city treasurer was involved with him to the extent of nearly five hundred thousand dollars, and exposure of that would create a scandal; the State treasurer for two hundred thousand. There were small accounts, hundreds of them, ranging from one hundred dollars up to five and ten thousand. A panic would mean not only a withdrawal of deposits and a calling of loans, but a heavy depression of securities. How could he realize on his securities? — that was the question — how without selling so many points off that his fortune would be swept away and he would be ruined?
He figured briskly the while he waved adieu to his friends, who hurried away, struck with their own predicament.
“You had better go on out to the house, father, and I’ll send some telegrams.” (The telephone had not yet been invented.) “I’ll be right out and we’ll go into this thing together. It looks like black weather to me. Don’t say anything to any one until after we have had our talk; then we can decide what to do.”
Cowperwood, Sr., was already plucking at his side-whiskers in a confused and troubled way. He was cogitating as to what might happen to him in case his son failed, for he was deeply involved with him. He was a little gray in his complexion now, frightened, for he had already strained many points in his affairs to accommodate his son. If Frank should not be able promptly on the morrow to meet the call which the bank might have to make for one hundred and fifty thousand dollars, the onus and scandal of the situation would be on him.
On the other hand, his son was meditating on the tangled relation in which he now found himself in connection with the city treasurer and the fact that it was not possible for him to support the market alone. Those who should have been in a position to help him were now as bad off as himself. There were many unfavorable points in the whole situation. Drexel & Co. had been booming railway stocks — loaning heavily on them. Jay Cooke & Co. had been backing Northern Pacific — were practically doing their best to build that immense transcontinental system alone. Naturally, they were long on that and hence in a ticklish position. At the first word they would throw over their surest securities — government bonds, and the like — in order to protect their more speculative holdings. The bears would see the point. They would hammer and hammer, selling short all along the line. But he did not dare to do that. He would be breaking his own back quickly, and what he needed was time. If he could only get time — three days, a week, ten days — this storm would surely blow over.
The thing that was troubling him most was the matter of the half-million invested with him by Stener. A fall election was drawing near. Stener, although he had served two terms, was slated for reelection. A scandal in connection with the city treasury would be a very bad thing. It would end Stener’s career as an official — would very likely send him to the penitentiary. It might wreck the Republican party’s chances to win. It would certainly involve himself as having much to do with it. If that happened, he would have the politicians to reckon with. For, if he were hard pressed, as he would be, and failed, the fact that he had been trying to invade the city street-railway preserves which they held sacred to themselves, with borrowed city money, and that this borrowing was liable to cost them the city election, would all come out. They would not view all that with a kindly eye. It would be useless to say, as he could, that he had borrowed the money at two per cent. (most of it, to save himself, had been covered by a protective clause of that kind), or that he had merely acted as an agent for Stener. That might go down with the unsophisticated of the outer world, but it would never be swallowed by the politicians. They knew better than that.
There was another phase to this situation, however, that encouraged him, and that was his knowledge of how city politics were going in general. It was useless for any politician, however loftly, to take a high and mighty tone in a crisis like this. All of them, great and small, were profiting in one way and another through city privileges. Butler, Mollenhauer, and Simpson, he knew, made money out of contracts — legal enough, though they might be looked upon as rank favoritism — and also out of vast sums of money collected in the shape of taxes — land taxes, water taxes, etc.— which were deposited in the various banks designated by these men and others as legal depositories for city money. The banks supposedly carried the city’s money in their vaults as a favor, without paying interest of any kind, and then reinvested it — for whom? Cowperwood had no complaint to make, for he was being well treated, but these men could scarcely expect to monopolize all the city’s benefits. He did not know either Mollenhauer or Simpson personally — but he knew they as well as Butler had made money out of his own manipulation of city loan. Also, Butler was most friendly to him. It was not unreasonable for him to think, in a crisis like this, that if worst came to worst, he could make a clean breast of it to Butler and receive aid. In case he could not get through secretly with Stener’s help, Cowperwood made up his mind that he would do this.
His first move, he decided, would be to go at once to Stener’s house and demand the loan of an additional three or four hundred thousand dollars. Stener had always been very tractable, and in this instance would see how important it was that his shortage of half a million should not be made public. Then he must get as much more as possible. But where to get it? Presidents of banks and trust companies, large stock jobbers, and the like, would have to be seen. Then there was a loan of one hundred thousand dollars he was carrying for Butler. The old contractor might be induced to leave that. He hurried to his home, secured his runabout, and drove rapidly to Stener’s.
As it turned out, however, much to his distress and confusion, Stener was out of town — down on the Chesapeake with several friends shooting ducks and fishing, and was not expected back for several days. He was in the marshes back of some small town. Cowperwood sent an urgent wire to the nearest point and then, to make assurance doubly sure, to several other points in the same neighborhood, asking him to return immediately. He was not at all sure, however, that Stener would return in time and was greatly nonplussed and uncertain for the moment as to what his next step would be. Aid must be forthcoming from somewhere and at once.
Suddenly a helpful thought occurred to him. Butler and Mollenhauer and Simpson were long on local street-railways. They must combine to support the situation and protect their interests. They could see the big bankers, Drexel & Co. and Cooke & Co., and others and urge them to sustain the market. They could strengthen things generally by organizing a buying ring, and under cover of their support, if they would, he might sell enough to let him out, and even permit him to go short and make something — a whole lot. It was a brilliant thought, worthy of a greater situation, and its only weakness was that it was not absolutely certain of fulfillment.
He decided to go to Butler at once, the only disturbing thought being that he would now be compelled to reveal his own and Stener’s affairs. So reentering his runabout he drove swiftly to the Butler home.
When he arrived there the famous contractor was at dinner. He had not heard the calling of the extras, and of course, did not understand as yet the significance of the fire. The servant’s announcement of Cowperwood brought him smiling to the door.
“Won’t you come in and join us? We’re just havin’ a light supper. Have a cup of coffee or tea, now — do.”
“I can’t,” replied Cowperwood. “Not to-night, I’m in too much of a hurry. I want to see you for just a few moments, and then I’ll be off again. I won’t keep you very long.”
“Why, if that’s the case, I’ll come right out.” And Butler returned to the dining-room to put down his napkin. Aileen, who was also dining, had heard Cowperwood’s voice, and was on the qui vive to see him. She wondered what it was that brought him at this time of night to see her father. She could not leave the table at once, but hoped to before he went. Cowperwood was thinking of her, even in the face of this impending storm, as he was of his wife, and many other things. If his affairs came down in a heap it would go hard with those attached to him. In this first clouding of disaster, he could not tell how things would eventuate. He meditated on this desperately, but he was not panic-stricken. His naturally even-molded face was set in fine, classic lines; his eyes were as hard as chilled steel.
“Well, now,” exclaimed Butler, returning, his countenance manifesting a decidedly comfortable relationship with the world as at present constituted. “What’s up with you to-night? Nawthin’ wrong, I hope. It’s been too fine a day.”
“Nothing very serious, I hope myself,” replied Cowperwood, “But I want to talk with you a few minutes, anyhow. Don’t you think we had better go up to your room?”
“I was just going to say that,” replied Butler —“the cigars are up there.”
They started from the reception-room to the stairs, Butler preceding and as the contractor mounted, Aileen came out from the dining-room in a frou-frou of silk. Her splendid hair was drawn up from the base of the neck and the line of the forehead into some quaint convolutions which constituted a reddish-gold crown. Her complexion was glowing, and her bare arms and shoulders shone white against the dark red of her evening gown. She realized there was something wrong.
“Oh, Mr. Cowperwood, how do you do?” she exclaimed, coming forward and holding out her hand as her father went on upstairs. She was delaying him deliberately in order to have a word with him and this bold acting was for the benefit of the others.
“What’s the trouble, honey?” she whispered, as soon as her father was out of hearing. “You look worried.”
“Nothing much, I hope, sweet,” he said. “Chicago is burning up and there’s going to be trouble to-morrow. I have to talk to your father.”
She had time only for a sympathetic, distressed “Oh,” before he withdrew his hand and followed Butler upstairs. She squeezed his arm, and went through the reception-room to the parlor. She sat down, thinking, for never before had she seen Cowperwood’s face wearing such an expression of stern, disturbed calculation. It was placid, like fine, white wax, and quite as cold; and those deep, vague, inscrutable eyes! So Chicago was burning. What would happen to him? Was he very much involved? He had never told her in detail of his affairs. She would not have understood fully any more than would have Mrs. Cowperwood. But she was worried, nevertheless, because it was her Frank, and because she was bound to him by what to her seemed indissoluble ties.
Literature, outside of the masters, has given us but one idea of the mistress, the subtle, calculating siren who delights to prey on the souls of men. The journalism and the moral pamphleteering of the time seem to foster it with almost partisan zeal. It would seem that a censorship of life had been established by divinity, and the care of its execution given into the hands of the utterly conservative. Yet there is that other form of liaison which has nothing to do with conscious calculation. In the vast majority of cases it is without design or guile. The average woman, controlled by her affections and deeply in love, is no more capable than a child of anything save sacrificial thought — the desire to give; and so long as this state endures, she can only do this. She may change — Hell hath no fury, etc.— but the sacrificial, yielding, solicitous attitude is more often the outstanding characteristic of the mistress; and it is this very attitude in contradistinction to the grasping legality of established matrimony that has caused so many wounds in the defenses of the latter. The temperament of man, either male or female, cannot help falling down before and worshiping this nonseeking, sacrificial note. It approaches vast distinction in life. It appears to be related to that last word in art, that largeness of spirit which is the first characteristic of the great picture, the great building, the great sculpture, the great decoration — namely, a giving, freely and without stint, of itself, of beauty. Hence the significance of this particular mood in Aileen.
All the subtleties of the present combination were troubling Cowperwood as he followed Butler into the room upstairs.
“Sit down, sit down. You won’t take a little somethin’? You never do. I remember now. Well, have a cigar, anyhow. Now, what’s this that’s troublin’ you to-night?”
Voices could be heard faintly in the distance, far off toward the thicker residential sections.
“Extra! Extra! All about the big Chicago fire! Chicago burning down!”
“Just that,” replied Cowperwood, hearkening to them. “Have you heard the news?”
“No. What’s that they’re calling?”
“It’s a big fire out in Chicago.”
“Oh,” replied Butler, still not gathering the significance of it.
“It’s burning down the business section there, Mr. Butler,” went on Cowperwood ominously, “and I fancy it’s going to disturb financial conditions here to-morrow. That is what I have come to see you about. How are your investments? Pretty well drawn in?”
Butler suddenly gathered from Cowperwood’s expression that there was something very wrong. He put up his large hand as he leaned back in his big leather chair, and covered his mouth and chin with it. Over those big knuckles, and bigger nose, thick and cartilaginous, his large, shaggy-eyebrowed eyes gleamed. His gray, bristly hair stood up stiffly in a short, even growth all over his head.
“So that’s it,” he said. “You’re expectin’ trouble to-morrow. How are your own affairs?”
“I’m in pretty good shape, I think, all told, if the money element of this town doesn’t lose its head and go wild. There has to be a lot of common sense exercised to-morrow, or to-night, even. You know we are facing a real panic. Mr. Butler, you may as well know that. It may not last long, but while it does it will be bad. Stocks are going to drop to-morrow ten or fifteen points on the opening. The banks are going to call their loans unless some arrangement can be made to prevent them. No one man can do that. It will have to be a combination of men. You and Mr. Simpson and Mr. Mollenhauer might do it — that is, you could if you could persuade the big banking people to combine to back the market. There is going to be a raid on local street-railways — all of them. Unless they are sustained the bottom is going to drop out. I have always known that you were long on those. I thought you and Mr. Mollenhauer and some of the others might want to act. If you don’t I might as well confess that it is going to go rather hard with me. I am not strong enough to face this thing alone.”
He was meditating on how he should tell the whole truth in regard to Stener.
“Well, now, that’s pretty bad,” said Butler, calmly and meditatively. He was thinking of his own affairs. A panic was not good for him either, but he was not in a desperate state. He could not fail. He might lose some money, but not a vast amount — before he could adjust things. Still he did not care to lose any money.
“How is it you’re so bad off?” he asked, curiously. He was wondering how the fact that the bottom was going to drop out of local street-railways would affect Cowperwood so seriously. “You’re not carryin’ any of them things, are you?” he added.
It was now a question of lying or telling the truth, and Cowperwood was literally afraid to risk lying in this dilemma. If he did not gain Butler’s comprehending support he might fail, and if he failed the truth would come out, anyhow.
“I might as well make a clean breast of this, Mr. Butler,” he said, throwing himself on the old man’s sympathies and looking at him with that brisk assurance which Butler so greatly admired. He felt as proud of Cowperwood at times as he did of his own sons. He felt that he had helped to put him where he was.
“The fact is that I have been buying street-railway stocks, but not for myself exactly. I am going to do something now which I think I ought not to do, but I cannot help myself. If I don’t do it, it will injure you and a lot of people whom I do not wish to injure. I know you are naturally interested in the outcome of the fall election. The truth is I have been carrying a lot of stocks for Mr. Stener and some of his friends. I do not know that all the money has come from the city treasury, but I think that most of it has. I know what that means to Mr. Stener and the Republican party and your interests in case I fail. I don’t think Mr. Stener started this of his own accord in the first place — I think I am as much to blame as anybody — but it grew out of other things. As you know, I handled that matter of city loan for him and then some of his friends wanted me to invest in street-railways for them. I have been doing that ever since. Personally I have borrowed considerable money from Mr. Stener at two per cent. In fact, originally the transactions were covered in that way. Now I don’t want to shift the blame on any one. It comes back to me and I am willing to let it stay there, except that if I fail Mr. Stener will be blamed and that will reflect on the administration. Naturally, I don’t want to fail. There is no excuse for my doing so. Aside from this panic I have never been in a better position in my life. But I cannot weather this storm without assistance, and I want to know if you won’t help me. If I pull through I will give you my word that I will see that the money which has been taken from the treasury is put back there. Mr. Stener is out of town or I would have brought him here with me.”
Cowperwood was lying out of the whole cloth in regard to bringing Stener with him, and he had no intention of putting the money back in the city treasury except by degrees and in such manner as suited his convenience; but what he had said sounded well and created a great seeming of fairness.
“How much money is it Stener has invested with you?” asked Butler. He was a little confused by this curious development. It put Cowperwood and Stener in an odd light.
“About five hundred thousand dollars,” replied Cowperwood.
The old man straightened up. “Is it as much as that?” he said.
“Just about — a little more or a little less; I’m not sure which.”
The old contractor listened solemnly to all Cowperwood had to say on this score, thinking of the effect on the Republican party and his own contracting interests. He liked Cowperwood, but this was a rough thing the latter was telling him — rough, and a great deal to ask. He was a slow-thinking and a slow-moving man, but he did well enough when he did think. He had considerable money invested in Philadelphia street-railway stocks — perhaps as much as eight hundred thousand dollars. Mollenhauer had perhaps as much more. Whether Senator Simpson had much or little he could not tell. Cowperwood had told him in the past that he thought the Senator had a good deal. Most of their holdings, as in the case of Cowperwood’s, were hypothecated at the various banks for loans and these loans invested in other ways. It was not advisable or comfortable to have these loans called, though the condition of no one of the triumvirate was anything like as bad as that of Cowperwood. They could see themselves through without much trouble, though not without probable loss unless they took hurried action to protect themselves.
He would not have thought so much of it if Cowperwood had told him that Stener was involved, say, to the extent of seventy-five or a hundred thousand dollars. That might be adjusted. But five hundred thousand dollars!
“That’s a lot of money,” said Butler, thinking of the amazing audacity of Stener, but failing at the moment to identify it with the astute machinations of Cowperwood. “That’s something to think about. There’s no time to lose if there’s going to be a panic in the morning. How much good will it do ye if we do support the market?”
“A great deal,” returned Cowperwood, “although of course I have to raise money in other ways. I have that one hundred thousand dollars of yours on deposit. Is it likely that you’ll want that right away?”
“It may be,” said Butler.
“It’s just as likely that I’ll need it so badly that I can’t give it up without seriously injuring myself,” added Cowperwood. “That’s just one of a lot of things. If you and Senator Simpson and Mr. Mollenhauer were to get together — you’re the largest holders of street-railway stocks — and were to see Mr. Drexel and Mr. Cooke, you could fix things so that matters would be considerably easier. I will be all right if my loans are not called, and my loans will not be called if the market does not slump too heavily. If it does, all my securities are depreciated, and I can’t hold out.”
Old Butler got up. “This is serious business,” he said. “I wish you’d never gone in with Stener in that way. It don’t look quite right and it can’t be made to. It’s bad, bad business,” he added dourly. “Still, I’ll do what I can. I can’t promise much, but I’ve always liked ye and I’ll not be turning on ye now unless I have to. But I’m sorry — very. And I’m not the only one that has a hand in things in this town.” At the same time he was thinking it was right decent of Cowperwood to forewarn him this way in regard to his own affairs and the city election, even though he was saving his own neck by so doing. He meant to do what he could.
“I don’t suppose you could keep this matter of Stener and the city treasury quiet for a day or two until I see how I come out?” suggested Cowperwood warily.
“I can’t promise that,” replied Butler. “I’ll have to do the best I can. I won’t lave it go any further than I can help — you can depend on that.” He was thinking how the effect of Stener’s crime could be overcome if Cowperwood failed.
“Owen!”
He stepped to the door, and, opening it, called down over the banister.
“Yes, father.”
“Have Dan hitch up the light buggy and bring it around to the door. And you get your hat and coat. I want you to go along with me.”
“Yes, father.”
He came back.
“Sure that’s a nice little storm in a teapot, now, isn’t it? Chicago begins to burn, and I have to worry here in Philadelphia. Well, well —” Cowperwood was up now and moving to the door. “And where are you going?”
“Back to the house. I have several people coming there to see me. But I’ll come back here later, if I may.”
“Yes, yes,” replied Butler. “To be sure I’ll be here by midnight, anyhow. Well, good night. I’ll see you later, then, I suppose. I’ll tell you what I find out.”
He went back in his room for something, and Cowperwood descended the stair alone. From the hangings of the reception-room entryway Aileen signaled him to draw near.
“I hope it’s nothing serious, honey?” she sympathized, looking into his solemn eyes.
It was not time for love, and he felt it.
“No,” he said, almost coldly, “I think not.”
“Frank, don’t let this thing make you forget me for long, please. You won’t, will you? I love you so.”
“No, no, I won’t!” he replied earnestly, quickly and yet absently.
“I can’t! Don’t you know I won’t?” He had started to kiss her, but a noise disturbed him. “Sh!”
He walked to the door, and she followed him with eager, sympathetic eyes.
What if anything should happen to her Frank? What if anything could? What would she do? That was what was troubling her. What would, what could she do to help him? He looked so pale — strained.
The condition of the Republican party at this time in Philadelphia, its relationship to George W. Stener, Edward Malia Butler, Henry A. Mollenhauer, Senator Mark Simpson, and others, will have to be briefly indicated here, in order to foreshadow Cowperwood’s actual situation. Butler, as we have seen, was normally interested in and friendly to Cowperwood. Stener was Cowperwood’s tool. Mollenhauer and Senator Simpson were strong rivals of Butler for the control of city affairs. Simpson represented the Republican control of the State legislature, which could dictate to the city if necessary, making new election laws, revising the city charter, starting political investigations, and the like. He had many influential newspapers, corporations, banks, at his beck and call. Mollenhauer represented the Germans, some Americans, and some large stable corporations — a very solid and respectable man. All three were strong, able, and dangerous politically. The two latter counted on Butler’s influence, particularly with the Irish, and a certain number of ward leaders and Catholic politicians and laymen, who were as loyal to him as though he were a part of the church itself. Butler’s return to these followers was protection, influence, aid, and good-will generally. The city’s return to him, via Mollenhauer and Simpson, was in the shape of contracts — fat ones — street-paving, bridges, viaducts, sewers. And in order for him to get these contracts the affairs of the Republican party, of which he was a beneficiary as well as a leader, must be kept reasonably straight. At the same time it was no more a part of his need to keep the affairs of the party straight than it was of either Mollenhauer’s or Simpson’s, and Stener was not his appointee. The latter was more directly responsible to Mollenhauer than to any one else.
As Butler stepped into the buggy with his son he was thinking about this, and it was puzzling him greatly.
“Cowperwood’s just been here,” he said to Owen, who had been rapidly coming into a sound financial understanding of late, and was already a shrewder man politically and socially than his father, though he had not the latter’s magnetism. “He’s been tellin’ me that he’s in a rather tight place. You hear that?” he continued, as some voice in the distance was calling “Extra! Extra!” “That’s Chicago burnin’, and there’s goin’ to be trouble on the stock exchange to-morrow. We have a lot of our street-railway stocks around at the different banks. If we don’t look sharp they’ll be callin’ our loans. We have to ‘tend to that the first thing in the mornin’. Cowperwood has a hundred thousand of mine with him that he wants me to let stay there, and he has some money that belongs to Stener, he tells me.”
“Stener?” asked Owen, curiously. “Has he been dabbling in stocks?” Owen had heard some rumors concerning Stener and others only very recently, which he had not credited nor yet communicated to his father. “How much money of his has Cowperwood?” he asked.
Butler meditated. “Quite a bit, I’m afraid,” he finally said. “As a matter of fact, it’s a great deal — about five hundred thousand dollars. If that should become known, it would be makin’ a good deal of noise, I’m thinkin’.”
“Whew!” exclaimed Owen in astonishment. “Five hundred thousand dollars! Good Lord, father! Do you mean to say Stener has got away with five hundred thousand dollars? Why, I wouldn’t think he was clever enough to do that. Five hundred thousand dollars! It will make a nice row if that comes out.”
“Aisy, now! Aisy, now!” replied Butler, doing his best to keep all phases of the situation in mind. “We can’t tell exactly what the circumstances were yet. He mayn’t have meant to take so much. It may all come out all right yet. The money’s invested. Cowperwood hasn’t failed yet. It may be put back. The thing to be settled on now is whether anything can be done to save him. If he’s tellin’ me the truth — and I never knew him to lie — he can get out of this if street-railway stocks don’t break too heavy in the mornin’. I’m going over to see Henry Mollenhauer and Mark Simpson. They’re in on this. Cowperwood wanted me to see if I couldn’t get them to get the bankers together and have them stand by the market. He thought we might protect our loans by comin’ on and buyin’ and holdin’ up the price.”
Owen was running swiftly in his mind over Cowperwood’s affairs — as much as he knew of them. He felt keenly that the banker ought to be shaken out. This dilemma was his fault, not Stener’s — he felt. It was strange to him that his father did not see it and resent it.
“You see what it is, father,” he said, dramatically, after a time. “Cowperwood’s been using this money of Stener’s to pick up stocks, and he’s in a hole. If it hadn’t been for this fire he’d have got away with it; but now he wants you and Simpson and Mollenhauer and the others to pull him out. He’s a nice fellow, and I like him fairly well; but you’re a fool if you do as he wants you to. He has more than belongs to him already. I heard the other day that he has the Front Street line, and almost all of Green and Coates; and that he and Stener own the Seventeenth and Nineteenth; but I didn’t believe it. I’ve been intending to ask you about it. I think Cowperwood has a majority for himself stowed away somewhere in every instance. Stener is just a pawn. He moves him around where he pleases.”
Owen’s eyes gleamed avariciously, opposingly. Cowperwood ought to be punished, sold out, driven out of the street-railway business in which Owen was anxious to rise.
“Now you know,” observed Butler, thickly and solemnly, “I always thought that young felly was clever, but I hardly thought he was as clever as all that. So that’s his game. You’re pretty shrewd yourself, aren’t you? Well, we can fix that, if we think well of it. But there’s more than that to all this. You don’t want to forget the Republican party. Our success goes with the success of that, you know”— and he paused and looked at his son. “If Cowperwood should fail and that money couldn’t be put back —” He broke off abstractedly. “The thing that’s troublin’ me is this matter of Stener and the city treasury. If somethin’ ain’t done about that, it may go hard with the party this fall, and with some of our contracts. You don’t want to forget that an election is comin’ along in November. I’m wonderin’ if I ought to call in that one hundred thousand dollars. It’s goin’ to take considerable money to meet my loans in the mornin’.”
It is a curious matter of psychology, but it was only now that the real difficulties of the situation were beginning to dawn on Butler. In the presence of Cowperwood he was so influenced by that young man’s personality and his magnetic presentation of his need and his own liking for him that he had not stopped to consider all the phases of his own relationship to the situation. Out here in the cool night air, talking to Owen, who was ambitious on his own account and anything but sentimentally considerate of Cowperwood, he was beginning to sober down and see things in their true light. He had to admit that Cowperwood had seriously compromised the city treasury and the Republican party, and incidentally Butler’s own private interests. Nevertheless, he liked Cowperwood. He was in no way prepared to desert him. He was now going to see Mollenhauer and Simpson as much to save Cowperwood really as the party and his own affairs. And yet a scandal. He did not like that — resented it. This young scalawag! To think he should be so sly. None the less he still liked him, even here and now, and was feeling that he ought to do something to help the young man, if anything could help him. He might even leave his hundred-thousand-dollar loan with him until the last hour, as Cowperwood had requested, if the others were friendly.
“Well, father,” said Owen, after a time, “I don’t see why you need to worry any more than Mollenhauer or Simpson. If you three want to help him out, you can; but for the life of me I don’t see why you should. I know this thing will have a bad effect on the election, if it comes out before then; but it could be hushed up until then, couldn’t it? Anyhow, your street-railway holdings are more important than this election, and if you can see your way clear to getting the street-railway lines in your hands you won’t need to worry about any elections. My advice to you is to call that one-hundred-thousand-dollar loan of yours in the morning, and meet the drop in your stocks that way. It may make Cowperwood fail, but that won’t hurt you any. You can go into the market and buy his stocks. I wouldn’t be surprised if he would run to you and ask you to take them. You ought to get Mollenhauer and Simpson to scare Stener so that he won’t loan Cowperwood any more money. If you don’t, Cowperwood will run there and get more. Stener’s in too far now. If Cowperwood won’t sell out, well and good; the chances are he will bust, anyhow, and then you can pick up as much on the market as any one else. I think he’ll sell. You can’t afford to worry about Stener’s five hundred thousand dollars. No one told him to loan it. Let him look out for himself. It may hurt the party, but you can look after that later. You and Mollenhauer can fix the newspapers so they won’t talk about it till after election.”
“Aisy! Aisy!” was all the old contractor would say. He was thinking hard.
The residence of Henry A. Mollenhauer was, at that time, in a section of the city which was almost as new as that in which Butler was living. It was on South Broad Street, near a handsome library building which had been recently erected. It was a spacious house of the type usually affected by men of new wealth in those days — a structure four stories in height of yellow brick and white stone built after no school which one could readily identify, but not unattractive in its architectural composition. A broad flight of steps leading to a wide veranda gave into a decidedly ornate door, which was set on either side by narrow windows and ornamented to the right and left with pale-blue jardinieres of considerable charm of outline. The interior, divided into twenty rooms, was paneled and parqueted in the most expensive manner for homes of that day. There was a great reception-hall, a large parlor or drawing-room, a dining-room at least thirty feet square paneled in oak; and on the second floor were a music-room devoted to the talents of Mollenhauer’s three ambitious daughters, a library and private office for himself, a boudoir and bath for his wife, and a conservatory.
Mollenhauer was, and felt himself to be, a very important man. His financial and political judgment was exceedingly keen. Although he was a German, or rather an American of German parentage, he was a man of a rather impressive American presence. He was tall and heavy and shrewd and cold. His large chest and wide shoulders supported a head of distinguished proportions, both round and long when seen from different angles. The frontal bone descended in a protruding curve over the nose, and projected solemnly over the eyes, which burned with a shrewd, inquiring gaze. And the nose and mouth and chin below, as well as his smooth, hard cheeks, confirmed the impression that he knew very well what he wished in this world, and was very able without regard to let or hindrance to get it. It was a big face, impressive, well modeled. He was an excellent friend of Edward Malia Butler’s, as such friendships go, and his regard for Mark Simpson was as sincere as that of one tiger for another. He respected ability; he was willing to play fair when fair was the game. When it was not, the reach of his cunning was not easily measured.
When Edward Butler and his son arrived on this Sunday evening, this distinguished representative of one-third of the city’s interests was not expecting them. He was in his library reading and listening to one of his daughters playing the piano. His wife and his other two daughters had gone to church. He was of a domestic turn of mind. Still, Sunday evening being an excellent one for conference purposes generally in the world of politics, he was not without the thought that some one or other of his distinguished confreres might call, and when the combination footman and butler announced the presence of Butler and his son, he was well pleased.
“So there you are,” he remarked to Butler, genially, extending his hand. “I’m certainly glad to see you. And Owen! How are you, Owen? What will you gentlemen have to drink, and what will you smoke? I know you’ll have something. John”— to the servitor —-“see if you can find something for these gentlemen. I have just been listening to Caroline play; but I think you’ve frightened her off for the time being.”
He moved a chair into position for Butler, and indicated to Owen another on the other side of the table. In a moment his servant had returned with a silver tray of elaborate design, carrying whiskies and wines of various dates and cigars in profusion. Owen was the new type of young financier who neither smoked nor drank. His father temperately did both.
“It’s a comfortable place you have here,” said Butler, without any indication of the important mission that had brought him. “I don’t wonder you stay at home Sunday evenings. What’s new in the city?”
“Nothing much, so far as I can see,” replied Mollenhauer, pacifically. “Things seem to be running smooth enough. You don’t know anything that we ought to worry about, do you?”
“Well, yes,” said Butler, draining off the remainder of a brandy and soda that had been prepared for him. “One thing. You haven’t seen an avenin’ paper, have you?”
“No, I haven’t,” said Mollenhauer, straightening up. “Is there one out? What’s the trouble anyhow?”
“Nothing — except Chicago’s burning, and it looks as though we’d have a little money-storm here in the morning.”
“You don’t say! I didn’t hear that. There’s a paper out, is there? Well, well — is it much of a fire?”
“The city is burning down, so they say,” put in Owen, who was watching the face of the distinguished politician with considerable interest.
“Well, that is news. I must send out and get a paper. John!” he called. His man-servant appeared. “See if you can get me a paper somewhere.” The servant disappeared. “What makes you think that would have anything to do with us?” observed Mollenhauer, returning to Butler.
“Well, there’s one thing that goes with that that I didn’t know till a little while ago and that is that our man Stener is apt to be short in his accounts, unless things come out better than some people seem to think,” suggested Butler, calmly. “That might not look so well before election, would it?” His shrewd gray Irish eyes looked into Mollenhauer’s, who returned his gaze.
“Where did you get that?” queried Mr. Mollenhauer icily. “He hasn’t deliberately taken much money, has he? How much has he taken — do you know?”
“Quite a bit,” replied Butler, quietly. “Nearly five hundred thousand, so I understand. Only I wouldn’t say that it has been taken as yet. It’s in danger of being lost.”
“Five hundred thousand!” exclaimed Mollenhauer in amazement, and yet preserving his usual calm. “You don’t tell me! How long has this been going on? What has he been doing with the money?”
“He’s loaned a good deal — about five hundred thousand dollars to this young Cowperwood in Third Street, that’s been handlin’ city loan. They’ve been investin’ it for themselves in one thing and another — mostly in buyin’ up street-railways.” (At the mention of street-railways Mollenhauer’s impassive countenance underwent a barely perceptible change.) “This fire, accordin’ to Cowperwood, is certain to produce a panic in the mornin’, and unless he gets considerable help he doesn’t see how he’s to hold out. If he doesn’t hold out, there’ll be five hundred thousand dollars missin’ from the city treasury which can’t be put back. Stener’s out of town and Cowperwood’s come to me to see what can be done about it. As a matter of fact, he’s done a little business for me in times past, and he thought maybe I could help him now — that is, that I might get you and the Senator to see the big bankers with me and help support the market in the mornin’. If we don’t he’s goin’ to fail, and he thought the scandal would hurt us in the election. He doesn’t appear to me to be workin’ any game — just anxious to save himself and do the square thing by me — by us, if he can.” Butler paused.
Mollenhauer, sly and secretive himself, was apparently not at all moved by this unexpected development. At the same time, never having thought of Stener as having any particular executive or financial ability, he was a little stirred and curious. So his treasurer was using money without his knowing it, and now stood in danger of being prosecuted! Cowperwood he knew of only indirectly, as one who had been engaged to handle city loan. He had profited by his manipulation of city loan. Evidently the banker had made a fool of Stener, and had used the money for street-railway shares! He and Stener must have quite some private holdings then. That did interest Mollenhauer greatly.
“Five hundred thousand dollars!” he repeated, when Butler had finished. “That is quite a little money. If merely supporting the market would save Cowperwood we might do that, although if it’s a severe panic I do not see how anything we can do will be of very much assistance to him. If he’s in a very tight place and a severe slump is coming, it will take a great deal more than our merely supporting the market to save him. I’ve been through that before. You don’t know what his liabilities are?”
“I do not,” said Butler.
“He didn’t ask for money, you say?”
“He wants me to l’ave a hundred thousand he has of mine until he sees whether he can get through or not.”
“Stener is really out of town, I suppose?” Mollenhauer was innately suspicious.
“So Cowperwood says. We can send and find out.”
Mollenhauer was thinking of the various aspects of the case. Supporting the market would be all very well if that would save Cowperwood, and the Republican party and his treasurer. At the same time Stener could then be compelled to restore the five hundred thousand dollars to the city treasury, and release his holdings to some one — preferably to him — Mollenhauer. But here was Butler also to be considered in this matter. What might he not want? He consulted with Butler and learned that Cowperwood had agreed to return the five hundred thousand in case he could get it together. The various street-car holdings were not asked after. But what assurance had any one that Cowperwood could be so saved? And could, or would get the money together? And if he were saved would he give the money back to Stener? If he required actual money, who would loan it to him in a time like this — in case a sharp panic was imminent? What security could he give? On the other hand, under pressure from the right parties he might be made to surrender all his street-railway holdings for a song — his and Stener’s. If he (Mollenhauer) could get them he would not particularly care whether the election was lost this fall or not, although he felt satisfied, as had Owen, that it would not be lost. It could be bought, as usual. The defalcation — if Cowperwood’s failure made Stener’s loan into one — could be concealed long enough, Mollenhauer thought, to win. Personally as it came to him now he would prefer to frighten Stener into refusing Cowperwood additional aid, and then raid the latter’s street-railway stock in combination with everybody else’s, for that matter — Simpson’s and Butler’s included. One of the big sources of future wealth in Philadelphia lay in these lines. For the present, however, he had to pretend an interest in saving the party at the polls.
“I can’t speak for the Senator, that’s sure,” pursued Mollenhauer, reflectively. “I don’t know what he may think. As for myself, I am perfectly willing to do what I can to keep up the price of stocks, if that will do any good. I would do so naturally in order to protect my loans. The thing that we ought to be thinking about, in my judgment, is how to prevent exposure, in case Mr. Cowperwood does fail, until after election. We have no assurance, of course, that however much we support the market we will be able to sustain it.”
“We have not,” replied Butler, solemnly.
Owen thought he could see Cowperwood’s approaching doom quite plainly. At that moment the door-bell rang. A maid, in the absence of the footman, brought in the name of Senator Simpson.
“Just the man,” said Mollenhauer. “Show him up. You can see what he thinks.”
“Perhaps I had better leave you alone now,” suggested Owen to his father. “Perhaps I can find Miss Caroline, and she will sing for me. I’ll wait for you, father,” he added.
Mollenhauer cast him an ingratiating smile, and as he stepped out Senator Simpson walked in.
A more interesting type of his kind than Senator Mark Simpson never flourished in the State of Pennsylvania, which has been productive of interesting types. Contrasted with either of the two men who now greeted him warmly and shook his hand, he was physically unimpressive. He was small — five feet nine inches, to Mollenhauer’s six feet and Butler’s five feet eleven inches and a half, and then his face was smooth, with a receding jaw. In the other two this feature was prominent. Nor were his eyes as frank as those of Butler, nor as defiant as those of Mollenhauer; but for subtlety they were unmatched by either — deep, strange, receding, cavernous eyes which contemplated you as might those of a cat looking out of a dark hole, and suggesting all the artfulness that has ever distinguished the feline family. He had a strange mop of black hair sweeping down over a fine, low, white forehead, and a skin as pale and bluish as poor health might make it; but there was, nevertheless, resident here a strange, resistant, capable force that ruled men — the subtlety with which he knew how to feed cupidity with hope and gain and the ruthlessness with which he repaid those who said him nay. He was a still man, as such a man might well have been — feeble and fish-like in his handshake, wan and slightly lackadaisical in his smile, but speaking always with eyes that answered for every defect.
“Av’nin’, Mark, I’m glad to see you,” was Butler’s greeting.
“How are you, Edward?” came the quiet reply.
“Well, Senator, you’re not looking any the worse for wear. Can I pour you something?”
“Nothing to-night, Henry,” replied Simpson. “I haven’t long to stay. I just stopped by on my way home. My wife’s over here at the Cavanaghs’, and I have to stop by to fetch her.”
“Well, it’s a good thing you dropped in, Senator, just when you did,” began Mollenhauer, seating himself after his guest. “Butler here has been telling me of a little political problem that has arisen since I last saw you. I suppose you’ve heard that Chicago is burning?”
“Yes; Cavanagh was just telling me. It looks to be quite serious. I think the market will drop heavily in the morning.”
“I wouldn’t be surprised myself,” put in Mollenhauer, laconically.
“Here’s the paper now,” said Butler, as John, the servant, came in from the street bearing the paper in his hand. Mollenhauer took it and spread it out before them. It was among the earliest of the “extras” that were issued in this country, and contained a rather impressive spread of type announcing that the conflagration in the lake city was growing hourly worse since its inception the day before.
“Well, that is certainly dreadful,” said Simpson. “I’m very sorry for Chicago. I have many friends there. I shall hope to hear that it is not so bad as it seems.”
The man had a rather grandiloquent manner which he never abandoned under any circumstances.
“The matter that Butler was telling me about,” continued Mollenhauer, “has something to do with this in a way. You know the habit our city treasurers have of loaning out their money at two per cent.?”
“Yes?” said Simpson, inquiringly.
“Well, Mr. Stener, it seems, has been loaning out a good deal of the city’s money to this young Cowperwood, in Third Street, who has been handling city loans.”
“You don’t say!” said Simpson, putting on an air of surprise. “Not much, I hope?” The Senator, like Butler and Mollenhauer, was profiting greatly by cheap loans from the same source to various designated city depositories.
“Well, it seems that Stener has loaned him as much as five hundred thousand dollars, and if by any chance Cowperwood shouldn’t be able to weather this storm, Stener is apt to be short that amount, and that wouldn’t look so good as a voting proposition to the people in November, do you think? Cowperwood owes Mr. Butler here one hundred thousand dollars, and because of that he came to see him to-night. He wanted Butler to see if something couldn’t be done through us to tide him over. If not”— he waved one hand suggestively —“well, he might fail.”
Simpson fingered his strange, wide mouth with his delicate hand. “What have they been doing with the five hundred thousand dollars?” he asked.
“Oh, the boys must make a little somethin’ on the side,” said Butler, cheerfully. “I think they’ve been buyin’ up street-railways, for one thing.” He stuck his thumbs in the armholes of his vest. Both Mollenhauer and Simpson smiled wan smiles.
“Quite so,” said Mollenhauer. Senator Simpson merely looked the deep things that he thought.
He, too, was thinking how useless it was for any one to approach a group of politicians with a proposition like this, particularly in a crisis such as bid fair to occur. He reflected that if he and Butler and Mollenhauer could get together and promise Cowperwood protection in return for the surrender of his street-railway holdings it would be a very different matter. It would be very easy in this case to carry the city treasury loan along in silence and even issue more money to support it; but it was not sure, in the first place, that Cowperwood could be made to surrender his stocks, and in the second place that either Butler or Mollenhauer would enter into any such deal with him, Simpson. Butler had evidently come here to say a good word for Cowperwood. Mollenhauer and himself were silent rivals. Although they worked together politically it was toward essentially different financial ends. They were allied in no one particular financial proposition, any more than Mollenhauer and Butler were. And besides, in all probability Cowperwood was no fool. He was not equally guilty with Stener; the latter had loaned him money. The Senator reflected on whether he should broach some such subtle solution of the situation as had occurred to him to his colleagues, but he decided not. Really Mollenhauer was too treacherous a man to work with on a thing of this kind. It was a splendid chance but dangerous. He had better go it alone. For the present they should demand of Stener that he get Cowperwood to return the five hundred thousand dollars if he could. If not, Stener could be sacrificed for the benefit of the party, if need be. Cowperwood’s stocks, with this tip as to his condition, would, Simpson reflected, offer a good opportunity for a little stock-exchange work on the part of his own brokers. They could spread rumors as to Cowperwood’s condition and then offer to take his shares off his hands — for a song, of course. It was an evil moment that led Cowperwood to Butler.
“Well, now,” said the Senator, after a prolonged silence, “I might sympathize with Mr. Cowperwood in his situation, and I certainly don’t blame him for buying up street-railways if he can; but I really don’t see what can be done for him very well in this crisis. I don’t know about you, gentlemen, but I am rather certain that I am not in a position to pick other people’s chestnuts out of the fire if I wanted to, just now. It all depends on whether we feel that the danger to the party is sufficient to warrant our going down into our pockets and assisting him.”
At the mention of real money to be loaned Mollenhauer pulled a long face. “I can’t see that I will be able to do very much for Mr. Cowperwood,” he sighed.
“Begad,” said Buler, with a keen sense of humor, “it looks to me as if I’d better be gettin’ in my one hundred thousand dollars. That’s the first business of the early mornin’.” Neither Simpson nor Mollenhauer condescended on this occasion to smile even the wan smile they had smiled before. They merely looked wise and solemn.
“But this matter of the city treasury, now,” said Senator Simpson, after the atmosphere had been allowed to settle a little, “is something to which we shall have to devote a little thought. If Mr. Cowperwood should fail, and the treasury lose that much money, it would embarrass us no little. What lines are they,” he added, as an afterthought, “that this man has been particularly interested in?”
“I really don’t know,” replied Butler, who did not care to say what Owen had told him on the drive over.
“I don’t see,” said Mollenhauer, “unless we can make Stener get the money back before this man Cowperwood fails, how we can save ourselves from considerable annoyance later; but if we did anything which would look as though we were going to compel restitution, he would probably shut up shop anyhow. So there’s no remedy in that direction. And it wouldn’t be very kind to our friend Edward here to do it until we hear how he comes out on his affair.” He was referring to Butler’s loan.
“Certainly not,” said Senator Simpson, with true political sagacity and feeling.
“I’ll have that one hundred thousand dollars in the mornin’,” said Butler, “and never fear.”
“I think,” said Simpson, “if anything comes of this matter that we will have to do our best to hush it up until after the election. The newspapers can just as well keep silent on that score as not. There’s one thing I would suggest”— and he was now thinking of the street-railway properties which Cowperwood had so judiciously collected —“and that is that the city treasurer be cautioned against advancing any more money in a situation of this kind. He might readily be compromised into advancing much more. I suppose a word from you, Henry, would prevent that.”
“Yes; I can do that,” said Mollenhauer, solemnly.
“My judgement would be,” said Butler, in a rather obscure manner, thinking of Cowperwood’s mistake in appealing to these noble protectors of the public, “that it’s best to let sleepin’ dogs run be thimselves.”
Thus ended Frank Cowperwood’s dreams of what Butler and his political associates might do for him in his hour of distress.
The energies of Cowperwood after leaving Butler were devoted to the task of seeing others who might be of some assistance to him. He had left word with Mrs. Stener that if any message came from her husband he was to be notified at once. He hunted up Walter Leigh, of Drexel & Co., Avery Stone of Jay Cooke & Co., and President Davison of the Girard National Bank. He wanted to see what they thought of the situation and to negotiate a loan with President Davison covering all his real and personal property.
“I can’t tell you, Frank,” Walter Leigh insisted, “I don’t know how things will be running by to-morrow noon. I’m glad to know how you stand. I’m glad you’re doing what you’re doing — getting all your affairs in shape. It will help a lot. I’ll favor you all I possibly can. But if the chief decides on a certain group of loans to be called, they’ll have to be called, that’s all. I’ll do my best to make things look better. If the whole of Chicago is wiped out, the insurance companies — some of them, anyhow — are sure to go, and then look out. I suppose you’ll call in all your loans?”
“Not any more than I have to.”
“Well, that’s just the way it is here — or will be.”
The two men shook hands. They liked each other. Leigh was of the city’s fashionable coterie, a society man to the manner born, but with a wealth of common sense and a great deal of worldly experience.
“I’ll tell you, Frank,” he observed at parting, “I’ve always thought you were carrying too much street-railway. It’s great stuff if you can get away with it, but it’s just in a pinch like this that you’re apt to get hurt. You’ve been making money pretty fast out of that and city loans.”
He looked directly into his long-time friend’s eyes, and they smiled.
It was the same with Avery Stone, President Davison, and others. They had all already heard rumors of disaster when he arrived. They were not sure what the morrow would bring forth. It looked very unpromising.
Cowperwood decided to stop and see Butler again for he felt certain his interview with Mollenhauer and Simpson was now over. Butler, who had been meditating what he should say to Cowperwood, was not unfriendly in his manner. “So you’re back,” he said, when Cowperwood appeared.
“Yes, Mr. Butler.”
“Well, I’m not sure that I’ve been able to do anything for you. I’m afraid not,” Butler said, cautiously. “It’s a hard job you set me. Mollenhauer seems to think that he’ll support the market, on his own account. I think he will. Simpson has interests which he has to protect. I’m going to buy for myself, of course.”
He paused to reflect.
“I couldn’t get them to call a conference with any of the big moneyed men as yet,” he added, warily. “They’d rather wait and see what happens in the mornin’. Still, I wouldn’t be down-hearted if I were you. If things turn out very bad they may change their minds. I had to tell them about Stener. It’s pretty bad, but they’re hopin’ you’ll come through and straighten that out. I hope so. About my own loan — well, I’ll see how things are in the mornin’. If I raisonably can I’ll lave it with you. You’d better see me again about it. I wouldn’t try to get any more money out of Stener if I were you. It’s pretty bad as it is.”
Cowperwood saw at once that he was to get no aid from the politicians. The one thing that disturbed him was this reference to Stener. Had they already communicated with him — warned him? If so, his own coming to Butler had been a bad move; and yet from the point of view of his possible failure on the morrow it had been advisable. At least now the politicians knew where he stood. If he got in a very tight corner he would come to Butler again — the politicians could assist him or not, as they chose. If they did not help him and he failed, and the election were lost, it was their own fault. Anyhow, if he could see Stener first the latter would not be such a fool as to stand in his own light in a crisis like this.
“Things look rather dark to-night, Mr. Butler,” he said, smartly, “but I still think I’ll come through. I hope so, anyhow. I’m sorry to have put you to so much trouble. I wish, of course, that you gentlemen could see your way clear to assist me, but if you can’t, you can’t. I have a number of things that I can do. I hope that you will leave your loan as long as you can.”
He went briskly out, and Butler meditated. “A clever young chap that,” he said. “It’s too bad. But he may come out all right at that.”
Cowperwood hurried to his own home only to find his father awake and brooding. To him he talked with that strong vein of sympathy and understanding which is usually characteristic of those drawn by ties of flesh and blood. He liked his father. He sympathized with his painstaking effort to get up in the world. He could not forget that as a boy he had had the loving sympathy and interest of his father. The loan which he had from the Third National, on somewhat weak Union Street Railway shares he could probably replace if stocks did not drop too tremendously. He must replace this at all costs. But his father’s investments in street-railways, which had risen with his own ventures, and which now involved an additional two hundred thousand — how could he protect those? The shares were hypothecated and the money was used for other things. Additional collateral would have to be furnished the several banks carrying them. It was nothing except loans, loans, loans, and the need of protecting them. If he could only get an additional deposit of two or three hundred thousand dollars from Stener. But that, in the face of possible financial difficulties, was rank criminality. All depended on the morrow.
Monday, the ninth, dawned gray and cheerless. He was up with the first ray of light, shaved and dressed, and went over, under the gray-green pergola, to his father’s house. He was up, also, and stirring about, for he had not been able to sleep. His gray eyebrows and gray hair looked rather shaggy and disheveled, and his side-whiskers anything but decorative. The old gentleman’s eyes were tired, and his face was gray. Cowperwood could see that he was worrying. He looked up from a small, ornate escritoire of buhl, which Ellsworth had found somewhere, and where he was quietly tabulating a list of his resources and liabilities. Cowperwood winced. He hated to see his father worried, but he could not help it. He had hoped sincerely, when they built their houses together, that the days of worry for his father had gone forever.
“Counting up?” he asked, familiarly, with a smile. He wanted to hearten the old gentleman as much as possible.
“I was just running over my affairs again to see where I stood in case —” He looked quizzically at his son, and Frank smiled again.
“I wouldn’t worry, father. I told you how I fixed it so that Butler and that crowd will support the market. I have Rivers and Targool and Harry Eltinge on ‘change helping me sell out, and they are the best men there. They’ll handle the situation carefully. I couldn’t trust Ed or Joe in this case, for the moment they began to sell everybody would know what was going on with me. This way my men will seem like bears hammering the market, but not hammering too hard. I ought to be able to unload enough at ten points off to raise five hundred thousand. The market may not go lower than that. You can’t tell. It isn’t going to sink indefinitely. If I just knew what the big insurance companies were going to do! The morning paper hasn’t come yet, has it?”
He was going to pull a bell, but remembered that the servants would scarcely be up as yet. He went to the front door himself. There were the Press and the Public Ledger lying damp from the presses. He picked them up and glanced at the front pages. His countenance fell. On one, the Press, was spread a great black map of Chicago, a most funereal-looking thing, the black portion indicating the burned section. He had never seen a map of Chicago before in just this clear, definite way. That white portion was Lake Michigan, and there was the Chicago River dividing the city into three almost equal portions — the north side, the west side, the south side. He saw at once that the city was curiously arranged, somewhat like Philadelphia, and that the business section was probably an area of two or three miles square, set at the juncture of the three sides, and lying south of the main stem of the river, where it flowed into the lake after the southwest and northwest branches had united to form it. This was a significant central area; but, according to this map, it was all burned out. “Chicago in Ashes” ran a great side-heading set in heavily leaded black type. It went on to detail the sufferings of the homeless, the number of the dead, the number of those whose fortunes had been destroyed. Then it descanted upon the probable effect in the East. Insurance companies and manufacturers might not be able to meet the great strain of all this.
“Damn!” said Cowperwood gloomily. “I wish I were out of this stock-jobbing business. I wish I had never gotten into it.” He returned to his drawing-room and scanned both accounts most carefully.
Then, though it was still early, he and his father drove to his office. There were already messages awaiting him, a dozen or more, to cancel or sell. While he was standing there a messenger-boy brought him three more. One was from Stener and said that he would be back by twelve o’clock, the very earliest he could make it. Cowperwood was relieved and yet distressed. He would need large sums of money to meet various loans before three. Every hour was precious. He must arrange to meet Stener at the station and talk to him before any one else should see him. Clearly this was going to be a hard, dreary, strenuous day.
Third Street, by the time he reached there, was stirring with other bankers and brokers called forth by the exigencies of the occasion. There was a suspicious hurrying of feet — that intensity which makes all the difference in the world between a hundred people placid and a hundred people disturbed. At the exchange, the atmosphere was feverish. At the sound of the gong, the staccato uproar began. Its metallic vibrations were still in the air when the two hundred men who composed this local organization at its utmost stress of calculation, threw themselves upon each other in a gibbering struggle to dispose of or seize bargains of the hour. The interests were so varied that it was impossible to say at which pole it was best to sell or buy.
Targool and Rivers had been delegated to stay at the center of things, Joseph and Edward to hover around on the outside and to pick up such opportunities of selling as might offer a reasonable return on the stock. The “bears” were determined to jam things down, and it all depended on how well the agents of Mollenhauer, Simpson, Butler, and others supported things in the street-railway world whether those stocks retained any strength or not. The last thing Butler had said the night before was that they would do the best they could. They would buy up to a certain point. Whether they would support the market indefinitely he would not say. He could not vouch for Mollenhauer and Simpson. Nor did he know the condition of their affairs.
While the excitement was at its highest Cowperwood came in. As he stood in the door looking to catch the eye of Rivers, the ‘change gong sounded, and trading stopped. All the brokers and traders faced about to the little balcony, where the secretary of the ‘change made his announcements; and there he stood, the door open behind him, a small, dark, clerkly man of thirty-eight or forty, whose spare figure and pale face bespoke the methodic mind that knows no venturous thought. In his right hand he held a slip of white paper.
“The American Fire Insurance Company of Boston announces its inability to meet its obligations.” The gong sounded again.
Immediately the storm broke anew, more voluble than before, because, if after one hour of investigation on this Monday morning one insurance company had gone down, what would four or five hours or a day or two bring forth? It meant that men who had been burned out in Chicago would not be able to resume business. It meant that all loans connected with this concern had been, or would be called now. And the cries of frightened “bulls” offering thousand and five thousand lot holdings in Northern Pacific, Illinois Central, Reading, Lake Shore, Wabash; in all the local streetcar lines; and in Cowperwood’s city loans at constantly falling prices was sufficient to take the heart out of all concerned. He hurried to Arthur Rivers’s side in the lull; but there was little he could say.
“It looks as though the Mollenhauer and Simpson crowds aren’t doing much for the market,” he observed, gravely.
“They’ve had advices from New York,” explained Rivers solemnly. “It can’t be supported very well. There are three insurance companies over there on the verge of quitting, I understand. I expect to see them posted any minute.”
They stepped apart from the pandemonium, to discuss ways and means. Under his agreement with Stener, Cowperwood could buy up to one hundred thousand dollars of city loan, above the customary wash sales, or market manipulation, by which they were making money. This was in case the market had to be genuinely supported. He decided to buy sixty thousand dollars worth now, and use this to sustain his loans elsewhere. Stener would pay him for this instantly, giving him more ready cash. It might help him in one way and another; and, anyhow, it might tend to strengthen the other securities long enough at least to allow him to realize a little something now at better than ruinous rates. If only he had the means “to go short” on this market! If only doing so did not really mean ruin to his present position. It was characteristic of the man that even in this crisis he should be seeing how the very thing that of necessity, because of his present obligations, might ruin him, might also, under slightly different conditions, yield him a great harvest. He could not take advantage of it, however. He could not be on both sides of this market. It was either “bear” or “bull,” and of necessity he was “bull.” It was strange but true. His subtlety could not avail him here. He was about to turn and hurry to see a certain banker who might loan him something on his house, when the gong struck again. Once more trading ceased. Arthur Rivers, from his position at the State securities post, where city loan was sold, and where he had started to buy for Cowperwood, looked significantly at him. Newton Targool hurried to Cowperwood’s side.
“You’re up against it,” he exclaimed. “I wouldn’t try to sell against this market. It’s no use. They’re cutting the ground from under you. The bottom’s out. Things are bound to turn in a few days. Can’t you hold out? Here’s more trouble.”
He raised his eyes to the announcer’s balcony.
“The Eastern and Western Fire Insurance Company of New York announces that it cannot meet its obligations.”
A low sound something like “Haw!” broke forth. The announcer’s gavel struck for order.
“The Erie Fire Insurance Company of Rochester announces that it cannot meet its obligations.”
Again that “H-a-a-a-w!”
Once more the gavel.
“The American Trust Company of New York has suspended payment.”
“H-a-a-a-w!”
The storm was on.
What do you think?” asked Targool. “You can’t brave this storm. Can’t you quit selling and hold out for a few days? Why not sell short?”
“They ought to close this thing up,” Cowperwood said, shortly. “It would be a splendid way out. Then nothing could be done.”
He hurried to consult with those who, finding themselves in a similar predicament with himself, might use their influence to bring it about. It was a sharp trick to play on those who, now finding the market favorable to their designs in its falling condition, were harvesting a fortune. But what was that to him? Business was business. There was no use selling at ruinous figures, and he gave his lieutenants orders to stop. Unless the bankers favored him heavily, or the stock exchange was closed, or Stener could be induced to deposit an additional three hundred thousand with him at once, he was ruined. He hurried down the street to various bankers and brokers suggesting that they do this — close the exchange. At a few minutes before twelve o’clock he drove rapidly to the station to meet Stener; but to his great disappointment the latter did not arrive. It looked as though he had missed his train. Cowperwood sensed something, some trick; and decided to go to the city hall and also to Stener’s house. Perhaps he had returned and was trying to avoid him.
Not finding him at his office, he drove direct to his house. Here he was not surprised to meet Stener just coming out, looking very pale and distraught. At the sight of Cowperwood he actually blanched.
“Why, hello, Frank,” he exclaimed, sheepishly, “where do you come from?”
“What’s up, George?” asked Cowperwood. “I thought you were coming into Broad Street.”
“So I was,” returned Stener, foolishly, “but I thought I would get off at West Philadelphia and change my clothes. I’ve a lot of things to ‘tend to yet this afternoon. I was coming in to see you.” After Cowperwood’s urgent telegram this was silly, but the young banker let it pass.
“Jump in, George,” he said. “I have something very important to talk to you about. I told you in my telegram about the likelihood of a panic. It’s on. There isn’t a moment to lose. Stocks are ‘way down, and most of my loans are being called. I want to know if you won’t let me have three hundred and fifty thousand dollars for a few days at four or five per cent. I’ll pay it all back to you. I need it very badly. If I don’t get it I’m likely to fail. You know what that means, George. It will tie up every dollar I have. Those street-car holdings of yours will be tied up with me. I won’t be able to let you realize on them, and that will put those loans of mine from the treasury in bad shape. You won’t be able to put the money back, and you know what that means. We’re in this thing together. I want to see you through safely, but I can’t do it without your help. I had to go to Butler last night to see about a loan of his, and I’m doing my best to get money from other sources. But I can’t see my way through on this, I’m afraid, unless you’re willing to help me.” Cowperwood paused. He wanted to put the whole case clearly and succinctly to him before he had a chance to refuse — to make him realize it as his own predicament.
As a matter of fact, what Cowperwood had keenly suspected was literally true. Stener had been reached. The moment Butler and Simpson had left him the night before, Mollenhauer had sent for his very able secretary, Abner Sengstack, and despatched him to learn the truth about Stener’s whereabouts. Sengstack had then sent a long wire to Strobik, who was with Stener, urging him to caution the latter against Cowperwood. The state of the treasury was known. Stener and Strobik were to be met by Sengstack at Wilmington (this to forefend against the possibility of Cowperwood’s reaching Stener first)— and the whole state of affairs made perfectly plain. No more money was to be used under penalty of prosecution. If Stener wanted to see any one he must see Mollenhauer. Sengstack, having received a telegram from Strobik informing him of their proposed arrival at noon the next day, had proceeded to Wilmington to meet them. The result was that Stener did not come direct into the business heart of the city, but instead got off at West Philadelphia, proposing to go first to his house to change his clothes and then to see Mollenhauer before meeting Cowperwood. He was very badly frightened and wanted time to think.
“I can’t do it, Frank,” he pleaded, piteously. “I’m in pretty bad in this matter. Mollenhauer’s secretary met the train out at Wilmington just now to warn me against this situation, and Strobik is against it. They know how much money I’ve got outstanding. You or somebody has told them. I can’t go against Mollenhauer. I owe everything I’ve got to him, in a way. He got me this place.”
“Listen, George. Whatever you do at this time, don’t let this political loyalty stuff cloud your judgment. You’re in a very serious position and so am I. If you don’t act for yourself with me now no one is going to act for you — now or later — no one. And later will be too late. I proved that last night when I went to Butler to get help for the two of us. They all know about this business of our street-railway holdings and they want to shake us out and that’s the big and little of it — nothing more and nothing less. It’s a case of dog eat dog in this game and this particular situation and it’s up to us to save ourselves against everybody or go down together, and that’s just what I’m here to tell you. Mollenhauer doesn’t care any more for you to-day than he does for that lamp-post. It isn’t that money you’ve paid out to me that’s worrying him, but who’s getting something for it and what. Well they know that you and I are getting street-railways, don’t you see, and they don’t want us to have them. Once they get those out of our hands they won’t waste another day on you or me. Can’t you see that? Once we’ve lost all we’ve invested, you’re down and so am I— and no one is going to turn a hand for you or me politically or in any other way. I want you to understand that, George, because it’s true. And before you say you won’t or you will do anything because Mollenhauer says so, you want to think over what I have to tell you.”
He was in front of Stener now, looking him directly in the eye and by the kinetic force of his mental way attempting to make Stener take the one step that might save him — Cowperwood — however little in the long run it might do for Stener. And, more interesting still, he did not care. Stener, as he saw him now, was a pawn in whosoever’s hands he happened to be at the time, and despite Mr. Mollenhauer and Mr. Simpson and Mr. Butler he proposed to attempt to keep him in his own hands if possible. And so he stood there looking at him as might a snake at a bird determined to galvanize him into selfish self-interest if possible. But Stener was so frightened that at the moment it looked as though there was little to be done with him. His face was a grayish-blue: his eyelids and eye rings puffy and his hands and lips moist. God, what a hole he was in now!
“Say that’s all right, Frank,” he exclaimed desperately. “I know what you say is true. But look at me and my position, if I do give you this money. What can’t they do to me, and won’t. If you only look at it from my point of view. If only you hadn’t gone to Butler before you saw me.”
“As though I could see you, George, when you were off duck shooting and when I was wiring everywhere I knew to try to get in touch with you. How could I? The situation had to be met. Besides, I thought Butler was more friendly to me than he proved. But there’s no use being angry with me now, George, for going to Butler as I did, and anyhow you can’t afford to be now. We’re in this thing together. It’s a case of sink or swim for just us two — not any one else — just us — don’t you get that? Butler couldn’t or wouldn’t do what I wanted him to do — get Mollenhauer and Simpson to support the market. Instead of that they are hammering it. They have a game of their own. It’s to shake us out — can’t you see that? Take everything that you and I have gathered. It is up to you and me, George, to save ourselves, and that’s what I’m here for now. If you don’t let me have three hundred and fifty thousand dollars — three hundred thousand, anyhow — you and I are ruined. It will be worse for you, George, than for me, for I’m not involved in this thing in any way — not legally, anyhow. But that’s not what I’m thinking of. What I want to do is to save us both — put us on easy street for the rest of our lives, whatever they say or do, and it’s in your power, with my help, to do that for both of us. Can’t you see that? I want to save my business so then I can help you to save your name and money.” He paused, hoping this had convinced Stener, but the latter was still shaking.
“But what can I do, Frank?” he pleaded, weakly. “I can’t go against Mollenhauer. They can prosecute me if I do that. They can do it, anyhow. I can’t do that. I’m not strong enough. If they didn’t know, if you hadn’t told them, it might be different, but this way —” He shook his head sadly, his gray eyes filled with a pale distress.
“George,” replied Cowperwood, who realized now that only the sternest arguments would have any effect here, “don’t talk about what I did. What I did I had to do. You’re in danger of losing your head and your nerve and making a serious mistake here, and I don’t want to see you make it. I have five hundred thousand of the city’s money invested for you — partly for me, and partly for you, but more for you than for me”— which, by the way, was not true —“and here you are hesitating in an hour like this as to whether you will protect your interest or not. I can’t understand it. This is a crisis, George. Stocks are tumbling on every side — everybody’s stocks. You’re not alone in this — neither am I. This is a panic, brought on by a fire, and you can’t expect to come out of a panic alive unless you do something to protect yourself. You say you owe your place to Mollenhauer and that you’re afraid of what he’ll do. If you look at your own situation and mine, you’ll see that it doesn’t make much difference what he does, so long as I don’t fail. If I fail, where are you? Who’s going to save you from prosecution? Will Mollenhauer or any one else come forward and put five hundred thousand dollars in the treasury for you? He will not. If Mollenhauer and the others have your interests at heart, why aren’t they helping me on ‘change today? I’ll tell you why. They want your street-railway holdings and mine, and they don’t care whether you go to jail afterward or not. Now if you’re wise you will listen to me. I’ve been loyal to you, haven’t I? You’ve made money through me — lots of it. If you’re wise, George, you’ll go to your office and write me your check for three hundred thousand dollars, anyhow, before you do a single other thing. Don’t see anybody and don’t do anything till you’ve done that. You can’t be hung any more for a sheep than you can for a lamb. No one can prevent you from giving me that check. You’re the city treasurer. Once I have that I can see my way out of this, and I’ll pay it all back to you next week or the week after — this panic is sure to end in that time. With that put back in the treasury we can see them about the five hundred thousand a little later. In three months, or less, I can fix it so that you can put that back. As a matter of fact, I can do it in fifteen days once I am on my feet again. Time is all I want. You won’t have lost your holdings and nobody will cause you any trouble if you put the money back. They don’t care to risk a scandal any more than you do. Now what’ll you do, George? Mollenhauer can’t stop you from doing this any more than I can make you. Your life is in your own hands. What will you do?”
Stener stood there ridiculously meditating when, as a matter of fact, his very financial blood was oozing away. Yet he was afraid to act. He was afraid of Mollenhauer, afraid of Cowperwood, afraid of life and of himself. The thought of panic, loss, was not so much a definite thing connected with his own property, his money, as it was with his social and political standing in the community. Few people have the sense of financial individuality strongly developed. They do not know what it means to be a controller of wealth, to have that which releases the sources of social action — its medium of exchange. They want money, but not for money’s sake. They want it for what it will buy in the way of simple comforts, whereas the financier wants it for what it will control — for what it will represent in the way of dignity, force, power. Cowperwood wanted money in that way; Stener not. That was why he had been so ready to let Cowperwood act for him; and now, when he should have seen more clearly than ever the significance of what Cowperwood was proposing, he was frightened and his reason obscured by such things as Mollenhauer’s probable opposition and rage, Cowperwood’s possible failure, his own inability to face a real crisis. Cowperwood’s innate financial ability did not reassure Stener in this hour. The banker was too young, too new. Mollenhauer was older, richer. So was Simpson; so was Butler. These men, with their wealth, represented the big forces, the big standards in his world. And besides, did not Cowperwood himself confess that he was in great danger — that he was in a corner. That was the worst possible confession to make to Stener — although under the circumstances it was the only one that could be made — for he had no courage to face danger.
So it was that now, Stener stood by Cowperwood meditating — pale, flaccid; unable to see the main line of his interests quickly, unable to follow it definitely, surely, vigorously — while they drove to his office. Cowperwood entered it with him for the sake of continuing his plea.
“Well, George,” he said earnestly, “I wish you’d tell me. Time’s short. We haven’t a moment to lose. Give me the money, won’t you, and I’ll get out of this quick. We haven’t a moment, I tell you. Don’t let those people frighten you off. They’re playing their own little game; you play yours.”
“I can’t, Frank,” said Stener, finally, very weakly, his sense of his own financial future, overcome for the time being by the thought of Mollenhauer’s hard, controlling face. “I’ll have to think. I can’t do it right now. Strobik just left me before I saw you, and —”
“Good God, George,” exclaimed Cowperwood, scornfully, “don’t talk about Strobik! What’s he got to do with it? Think of yourself. Think of where you will be. It’s your future — not Strobik’s — that you have to think of.”
“I know, Frank,” persisted Stener, weakly; “but, really, I don’t see how I can. Honestly I don’t. You say yourself you’re not sure whether you can come out of things all right, and three hundred thousand more is three hundred thousand more. I can’t, Frank. I really can’t. It wouldn’t be right. Besides, I want to talk to Mollenhauer first, anyhow.”
“Good God, how you talk!” exploded Cowperwood, angrily, looking at him with ill-concealed contempt. “Go ahead! See Mollenhauer! Let him tell you how to cut your own throat for his benefit. It won’t be right to loan me three hundred thousand dollars more, but it will be right to let the five hundred thousand dollars you have loaned stand unprotected and lose it. That’s right, isn’t it? That’s just what you propose to do — lose it, and everything else besides. I want to tell you what it is, George — you’ve lost your mind. You’ve let a single message from Mollenhauer frighten you to death, and because of that you’re going to risk your fortune, your reputation, your standing — everything. Do you really realize what this means if I fail? You will be a convict, I tell you, George. You will go to prison. This fellow Mollenhauer, who is so quick to tell you what not to do now, will be the last man to turn a hand for you once you’re down. Why, look at me — I’ve helped you, haven’t I? Haven’t I handled your affairs satisfactorily for you up to now? What in Heaven’s name has got into you? What have you to be afraid of?”
Stener was just about to make another weak rejoinder when the door from the outer office opened, and Albert Stires, Stener’s chief clerk, entered. Stener was too flustered to really pay any attention to Stires for the moment; but Cowperwood took matters in his own hands.
“What is it, Albert?” he asked, familiarly.
“Mr. Sengstack from Mr. Mollenhauer to see Mr. Stener.”
At the sound of this dreadful name Stener wilted like a leaf. Cowperwood saw it. He realized that his last hope of getting the three hundred thousand dollars was now probably gone. Still he did not propose to give up as yet.
“Well, George,” he said, after Albert had gone out with instructions that Stener would see Sengstack in a moment. “I see how it is. This man has got you mesmerized. You can’t act for yourself now — you’re too frightened. I’ll let it rest for the present; I’ll come back. But for Heaven’s sake pull yourself together. Think what it means. I’m telling you exactly what’s going to happen if you don’t. You’ll be independently rich if you do. You’ll be a convict if you don’t.”
And deciding he would make one more effort in the street before seeing Butler again, he walked out briskly, jumped into his light spring runabout waiting outside — a handsome little yellow-glazed vehicle, with a yellow leather cushion seat, drawn by a young, high-stepping bay mare — and sent her scudding from door to door, throwing down the lines indifferently and bounding up the steps of banks and into office doors.
But all without avail. All were interested, considerate; but things were very uncertain. The Girard National Bank refused an hour’s grace, and he had to send a large bundle of his most valuable securities to cover his stock shrinkage there. Word came from his father at two that as president of the Third National he would have to call for his one hundred and fifty thousand dollars due there. The directors were suspicious of his stocks. He at once wrote a check against fifty thousand dollars of his deposits in that bank, took twenty-five thousand of his available office funds, called a loan of fifty thousand against Tighe & Co., and sold sixty thousand Green & Coates, a line he had been tentatively dabbling in, for one-third their value — and, combining the general results, sent them all to the Third National. His father was immensely relieved from one point of view, but sadly depressed from another. He hurried out at the noon-hour to see what his own holdings would bring. He was compromising himself in a way by doing it, but his parental heart, as well as is own financial interests, were involved. By mortgaging his house and securing loans on his furniture, carriages, lots, and stocks, he managed to raise one hundred thousand in cash, and deposited it in his own bank to Frank’s credit; but it was a very light anchor to windward in this swirling storm, at that. Frank had been counting on getting all of his loans extended three or four days at least. Reviewing his situation at two o’clock of this Monday afternoon, he said to himself thoughtfully but grimly: “Well, Stener has to loan me three hundred thousand — that’s all there is to it. And I’ll have to see Butler now, or he’ll be calling his loan before three.”
He hurried out, and was off to Butler’s house, driving like mad.
Things had changed greatly since last Cowperwood had talked with Butler. Although most friendly at the time the proposition was made that he should combine with Mollenhauer and Simpson to sustain the market, alas, now on this Monday morning at nine o’clock, an additional complication had been added to the already tangled situation which had changed Butler’s attitude completely. As he was leaving his home to enter his runabout, at nine o’clock in the morning of this same day in which Cowperwood was seeking Stener’s aid, the postman, coming up, had handed Butler four letters, all of which he paused for a moment to glance at. One was from a sub-contractor by the name of O’Higgins, the second was from Father Michel, his confessor, of St. Timothy’s, thanking him for a contribution to the parish poor fund; a third was from Drexel & Co. relating to a deposit, and the fourth was an anonymous communication, on cheap stationery from some one who was apparently not very literate — a woman most likely — written in a scrawling hand, which read:
DEAR SIR— This is to warn you that your daughter Aileen is running around with a man that she shouldn’t, Frank A. Cowperwood, the banker. If you don’t believe it, watch the house at 931 North Tenth Street. Then you can see for yourself.
There was neither signature nor mark of any kind to indicate from whence it might have come. Butler got the impression strongly that it might have been written by some one living in the vicinity of the number indicated. His intuitions were keen at times. As a matter of fact, it was written by a girl, a member of St. Timothy’s Church, who did live in the vicinity of the house indicated, and who knew Aileen by sight and was jealous of her airs and her position. She was a thin, anemic, dissatisfied creature who had the type of brain which can reconcile the gratification of personal spite with a comforting sense of having fulfilled a moral duty. Her home was some five doors north of the unregistered Cowperwood domicile on the opposite side of the street, and by degrees, in the course of time, she made out, or imagined that she had, the significance of this institution, piecing fact to fancy and fusing all with that keen intuition which is so closely related to fact. The result was eventually this letter which now spread clear and grim before Butler’s eyes.
The Irish are a philosophic as well as a practical race. Their first and strongest impulse is to make the best of a bad situation — to put a better face on evil than it normally wears. On first reading these lines the intelligence they conveyed sent a peculiar chill over Butler’s sturdy frame. His jaw instinctively closed, and his gray eyes narrowed. Could this be true? If it were not, would the author of the letter say so practically, “If you don’t believe it, watch the house at 931 North Tenth Street”? Wasn’t that in itself proof positive — the hard, matter-of-fact realism of it? And this was the man who had come to him the night before seeking aid — whom he had done so much to assist. There forced itself into his naturally slow-moving but rather accurate mind a sense of the distinction and charm of his daughter — a considerably sharper picture than he had ever had before, and at the same time a keener understanding of the personality of Frank Algernon Cowperwood. How was it he had failed to detect the real subtlety of this man? How was it he had never seen any sign of it, if there had been anything between Cowperwood and Aileen?
Parents are frequently inclined, because of a time-flattered sense of security, to take their children for granted. Nothing ever has happened, so nothing ever will happen. They see their children every day, and through the eyes of affection; and despite their natural charm and their own strong parental love, the children are apt to become not only commonplaces, but ineffably secure against evil. Mary is naturally a good girl — a little wild, but what harm can befall her? John is a straight-forward, steady-going boy — how could he get into trouble? The astonishment of most parents at the sudden accidental revelation of evil in connection with any of their children is almost invariably pathetic. “My John! My Mary! Impossible!” But it is possible. Very possible. Decidedly likely. Some, through lack of experience or understanding, or both, grow hard and bitter on the instant. They feel themselves astonishingly abased in the face of notable tenderness and sacrifice. Others collapse before the grave manifestation of the insecurity and uncertainty of life — the mystic chemistry of our being. Still others, taught roughly by life, or endowed with understanding or intuition, or both, see in this the latest manifestation of that incomprehensible chemistry which we call life and personality, and, knowing that it is quite vain to hope to gainsay it, save by greater subtlety, put the best face they can upon the matter and call a truce until they can think. We all know that life is unsolvable — we who think. The remainder imagine a vain thing, and are full of sound and fury signifying nothing.
So Edward Butler, being a man of much wit and hard, grim experience, stood there on his doorstep holding in his big, rough hand his thin slip of cheap paper which contained such a terrific indictment of his daughter. There came to him now a picture of her as she was when she was a very little girl — she was his first baby girl — and how keenly he had felt about her all these years. She had been a beautiful child — her red-gold hair had been pillowed on his breast many a time, and his hard, rough fingers had stroked her soft cheeks, lo, these thousands of times. Aileen, his lovely, dashing daughter of twenty-three! He was lost in dark, strange, unhappy speculations, without any present ability to think or say or do the right thing. He did not know what the right thing was, he finally confessed to himself. Aileen! Aileen! His Aileen! If her mother knew this it would break her heart. She mustn’t! She mustn’t! And yet mustn’t she?
The heart of a father! The world wanders into many strange by-paths of affection. The love of a mother for her children is dominant, leonine, selfish, and unselfish. It is concentric. The love of a husband for his wife, or of a lover for his sweetheart, is a sweet bond of agreement and exchange trade in a lovely contest. The love of a father for his son or daughter, where it is love at all, is a broad, generous, sad, contemplative giving without thought of return, a hail and farewell to a troubled traveler whom he would do much to guard, a balanced judgment of weakness and strength, with pity for failure and pride in achievement. It is a lovely, generous, philosophic blossom which rarely asks too much, and seeks only to give wisely and plentifully. “That my boy may succeed! That my daughter may be happy!” Who has not heard and dwelt upon these twin fervors of fatherly wisdom and tenderness?
As Butler drove downtown his huge, slow-moving, in some respects chaotic mind turned over as rapidly as he could all of the possibilities in connection with this unexpected, sad, and disturbing revelation. Why had Cowperwood not been satisfied with his wife? Why should he enter into his (Butler’s) home, of all places, to establish a clandestine relationship of this character? Was Aileen in any way to blame? She was not without mental resources of her own. She must have known what she was doing. She was a good Catholic, or, at least, had been raised so. All these years she had been going regularly to confession and communion. True, of late Butler had noticed that she did not care so much about going to church, would sometimes make excuses and stay at home on Sundays; but she had gone, as a rule. And now, now — his thoughts would come to the end of a blind alley, and then he would start back, as it were, mentally, to the center of things, and begin all over again.
He went up the stairs to his own office slowly. He went in and sat down, and thought and thought. Ten o’clock came, and eleven. His son bothered him with an occasional matter of interest, but, finding him moody, finally abandoned him to his own speculations. It was twelve, and then one, and he was still sitting there thinking, when the presence of Cowperwood was announced.
Cowperwood, on finding Butler not at home, and not encountering Aileen, had hurried up to the office of the Edward Butler Contracting Company, which was also the center of some of Butler’s street-railway interests. The floor space controlled by the company was divided into the usual official compartments, with sections for the bookkeepers, the road-managers, the treasurer, and so on. Owen Butler, and his father had small but attractively furnished offices in the rear, where they transacted all the important business of the company.
During this drive, curiously, by reason of one of those strange psychologic intuitions which so often precede a human difficulty of one sort or another, he had been thinking of Aileen. He was thinking of the peculiarity of his relationship with her, and of the fact that now he was running to her father for assistance. As he mounted the stairs he had a peculiar sense of the untoward; but he could not, in his view of life, give it countenance. One glance at Butler showed him that something had gone amiss. He was not so friendly; his glance was dark, and there was a certain sternness to his countenance which had never previously been manifested there in Cowperwood’s memory. He perceived at once that here was something different from a mere intention to refuse him aid and call his loan. What was it? Aileen? It must be that. Somebody had suggested something. They had been seen together. Well, even so, nothing could be proved. Butler would obtain no sign from him. But his loan — that was to be called, surely. And as for an additional loan, he could see now, before a word had been said, that that thought was useless.
“I came to see you about that loan of yours, Mr. Butler,” he observed, briskly, with an old-time, jaunty air. You could not have told from his manner or his face that he had observed anything out of the ordinary.
Butler, who was alone in the room — Owen having gone into an adjoining room — merely stared at him from under his shaggy brows.
“I’ll have to have that money,” he said, brusquely, darkly.
An old-time Irish rage suddenly welled up in his bosom as he contemplated this jaunty, sophisticated undoer of his daughter’s virtue. He fairly glared at him as he thought of him and her.
“I judged from the way things were going this morning that you might want it,” Cowperwood replied, quietly, without sign of tremor. “The bottom’s out, I see.”
“The bottom’s out, and it’ll not be put back soon, I’m thinkin’. I’ll have to have what’s belongin’ to me to-day. I haven’t any time to spare.”
“Very well,” replied Cowperwood, who saw clearly how treacherous the situation was. The old man was in a dour mood. His presence was an irritation to him, for some reason — a deadly provocation. Cowperwood felt clearly that it must be Aileen, that he must know or suspect something.
He must pretend business hurry and end this. “I’m sorry. I thought I might get an extension; but that’s all right. I can get the money, though. I’ll send it right over.”
He turned and walked quickly to the door.
Butler got up. He had thought to manage this differently.
He had thought to denounce or even assault this man. He was about to make some insinuating remark which would compel an answer, some direct charge; but Cowperwood was out and away as jaunty as ever.
The old man was flustered, enraged, disappointed. He opened the small office door which led into the adjoining room, and called, “Owen!”
“Yes, father.”
“Send over to Cowperwood’s office and get that money.”
“You decided to call it, eh?”
“I have.”
Owen was puzzled by the old man’s angry mood. He wondered what it all meant, but thought he and Cowperwood might have had a few words. He went out to his desk to write a note and call a clerk. Butler went to the window and stared out. He was angry, bitter, brutal in his vein.
“The dirty dog!” he suddenly exclaimed to himself, in a low voice. “I’ll take every dollar he’s got before I’m through with him. I’ll send him to jail, I will. I’ll break him, I will. Wait!”
He clinched his big fists and his teeth.
“I’ll fix him. I’ll show him. The dog! The damned scoundrel!”
Never in his life before had he been so bitter, so cruel, so relentless in his mood.
He walked his office floor thinking what he could do. Question Aileen — that was what he would do. If her face, or her lips, told him that his suspicion was true, he would deal with Cowperwood later. This city treasurer business, now. It was not a crime in so far as Cowperwood was concerned; but it might be made to be.
So now, telling the clerk to say to Owen that he had gone down the street for a few moments, he boarded a street-car and rode out to his home, where he found his elder daughter just getting ready to go out. She wore a purple-velvet street dress edged with narrow, flat gilt braid, and a striking gold-and-purple turban. She had on dainty new boots of bronze kid and long gloves of lavender suede. In her ears was one of her latest affectations, a pair of long jet earrings. The old Irishman realized on this occasion, when he saw her, perhaps more clearly than he ever had in his life, that he had grown a bird of rare plumage.
“Where are you going, daughter?” he asked, with a rather unsuccessful attempt to conceal his fear, distress, and smoldering anger.
“To the library,” she said easily, and yet with a sudden realization that all was not right with her father. His face was too heavy and gray. He looked tired and gloomy.
“Come up to my office a minute,” he said. “I want to see you before you go.”
Aileen heard this with a strange feeling of curiosity and wonder. It was not customary for her father to want to see her in his office just when she was going out; and his manner indicated, in this instance, that the exceptional procedure portended a strange revelation of some kind. Aileen, like every other person who offends against a rigid convention of the time, was conscious of and sensitive to the possible disastrous results which would follow exposure. She had often thought about what her family would think if they knew what she was doing; she had never been able to satisfy herself in her mind as to what they would do. Her father was a very vigorous man. But she had never known him to be cruel or cold in his attitude toward her or any other member of the family, and especially not toward her. Always he seemed too fond of her to be completely alienated by anything that might happen; yet she could not be sure.
Butler led the way, planting his big feet solemnly on the steps as he went up. Aileen followed with a single glance at herself in the tall pier-mirror which stood in the hall, realizing at once how charming she looked and how uncertain she was feeling about what was to follow. What could her father want? It made the color leave her cheeks for the moment, as she thought what he might want.
Butler strolled into his stuffy room and sat down in the big leather chair, disproportioned to everything else in the chamber, but which, nevertheless, accompanied his desk. Before him, against the light, was the visitor’s chair, in which he liked to have those sit whose faces he was anxious to study. When Aileen entered he motioned her to it, which was also ominous to her, and said, “Sit down there.”
She took the seat, not knowing what to make of his procedure. On the instant her promise to Cowperwood to deny everything, whatever happened, came back to her. If her father was about to attack her on that score, he would get no satisfaction, she thought. She owed it to Frank. Her pretty face strengthened and hardened on the instant. Her small, white teeth set themselves in two even rows; and her father saw quite plainly that she was consciously bracing herself for an attack of some kind. He feared by this that she was guilty, and he was all the more distressed, ashamed, outraged, made wholly unhappy. He fumbled in the left-hand pocket of his coat and drew forth from among the various papers the fatal communication so cheap in its physical texture. His big fingers fumbled almost tremulously as he fished the letter-sheet out of the small envelope and unfolded it without saying a word. Aileen watched his face and his hands, wondering what it could be that he had here. He handed the paper over, small in his big fist, and said, “Read that.”
Aileen took it, and for a second was relieved to be able to lower her eyes to the paper. Her relief vanished in a second, when she realized how in a moment she would have to raise them again and look him in the face.
DEAR SIR— This is to warn you that your daughter Aileen is running around with a man that she shouldn’t, Frank A. Cowperwood, the banker. If you don’t believe it, watch the house at 931 North Tenth Street. Then you can see for yourself.
In spite of herself the color fled from her cheeks instantly, only to come back in a hot, defiant wave.
“Why, what a lie!” she said, lifting her eyes to her father’s. “To think that any one should write such a thing of me! How dare they! I think it’s a shame!”
Old Butler looked at her narrowly, solemnly. He was not deceived to any extent by her bravado. If she were really innocent, he knew she would have jumped to her feet in her defiant way. Protest would have been written all over her. As it was, she only stared haughtily. He read through her eager defiance to the guilty truth.
“How do ye know, daughter, that I haven’t had the house watched?” he said, quizzically. “How do ye know that ye haven’t been seen goin’ in there?”
Only Aileen’s solemn promise to her lover could have saved her from this subtle thrust. As it was, she paled nervously; but she saw Frank Cowperwood, solemn and distinguished, asking her what she would say if she were caught.
“It’s a lie!” she said, catching her breath. “I wasn’t at any house at that number, and no one saw me going in there. How can you ask me that, father?”
In spite of his mixed feelings of uncertainty and yet unshakable belief that his daughter was guilty, he could not help admiring her courage — she was so defiant, as she sat there, so set in her determination to lie and thus defend herself. Her beauty helped her in his mood, raised her in his esteem. After all, what could you do with a woman of this kind? She was not a ten-year-old girl any more, as in a way he sometimes continued to fancy her.
“Ye oughtn’t to say that if it isn’t true, Aileen,” he said. “Ye oughtn’t to lie. It’s against your faith. Why would anybody write a letter like that if it wasn’t so?”
“But it’s not so,” insisted Aileen, pretending anger and outraged feeling, “and I don’t think you have any right to sit there and say that to me. I haven’t been there, and I’m not running around with Mr. Cowperwood. Why, I hardly know the man except in a social way.”
Butler shook his head solemnly.
“It’s a great blow to me, daughter. It’s a great blow to me,” he said. “I’m willing to take your word if ye say so; but I can’t help thinkin’ what a sad thing it would be if ye were lyin’ to me. I haven’t had the house watched. I only got this this mornin’. And what’s written here may not be so. I hope it isn’t. But we’ll not say any more about that now. If there is anythin’ in it, and ye haven’t gone too far yet to save yourself, I want ye to think of your mother and your sister and your brothers, and be a good girl. Think of the church ye was raised in, and the name we’ve got to stand up for in the world. Why, if ye were doin’ anything wrong, and the people of Philadelphy got a hold of it, the city, big as it is, wouldn’t be big enough to hold us. Your brothers have got a reputation to make, their work to do here. You and your sister want to get married sometime. How could ye expect to look the world in the face and do anythin’ at all if ye are doin’ what this letter says ye are, and it was told about ye?”
The old man’s voice was thick with a strange, sad, alien emotion. He did not want to believe that his daughter was guilty, even though he knew she was. He did not want to face what he considered in his vigorous, religious way to be his duty, that of reproaching her sternly. There were some fathers who would have turned her out, he fancied. There were others who might possibly kill Cowperwood after a subtle investigation. That course was not for him. If vengeance he was to have, it must be through politics and finance — he must drive him out. But as for doing anything desperate in connection with Aileen, he could not think of it.
“Oh, father,” returned Aileen, with considerable histrionic ability in her assumption of pettishness, “how can you talk like this when you know I’m not guilty? When I tell you so?”
The old Irishman saw through her make-believe with profound sadness — the feeling that one of his dearest hopes had been shattered. He had expected so much of her socially and matrimonially. Why, any one of a dozen remarkable young men might have married her, and she would have had lovely children to comfort him in his old age.
“Well, we’ll not talk any more about it now, daughter,” he said, wearily. “Ye’ve been so much to me during all these years that I can scarcely belave anythin’ wrong of ye. I don’t want to, God knows. Ye’re a grown woman, though, now; and if ye are doin’ anythin’ wrong I don’t suppose I could do so much to stop ye. I might turn ye out, of course, as many a father would; but I wouldn’t like to do anythin’ like that. But if ye are doin’ anythin’ wrong”— and he put up his hand to stop a proposed protest on the part of Aileen —“remember, I’m certain to find it out in the long run, and Philadelphy won’t be big enough to hold me and the man that’s done this thing to me. I’ll get him,” he said, getting up dramatically. “I’ll get him, and when I do —” He turned a livid face to the wall, and Aileen saw clearly that Cowperwood, in addition to any other troubles which might beset him, had her father to deal with. Was this why Frank had looked so sternly at her the night before?
“Why, your mother would die of a broken heart if she thought there was anybody could say the least word against ye,” pursued Butler, in a shaken voice. “This man has a family — a wife and children, Ye oughtn’t to want to do anythin’ to hurt them. They’ll have trouble enough, if I’m not mistaken — facin’ what’s comin’ to them in the future,” and Butler’s jaw hardened just a little. “Ye’re a beautiful girl. Ye’re young. Ye have money. There’s dozens of young men’d be proud to make ye their wife. Whatever ye may be thinkin’ or doin’, don’t throw away your life. Don’t destroy your immortal soul. Don’t break my heart entirely.”
Aileen, not ungenerous — fool of mingled affection and passion — could now have cried. She pitied her father from her heart; but her allegiance was to Cowperwood, her loyalty unshaken. She wanted to say something, to protest much more; but she knew that it was useless. Her father knew that she was lying.
“Well, there’s no use of my saying anything more, father,” she said, getting up. The light of day was fading in the windows. The downstairs door closed with a light slam, indicating that one of the boys had come in. Her proposed trip to the library was now without interest to her. “You won’t believe me, anyhow. I tell you, though, that I’m innocent just the same.”
Butler lifted his big, brown hand to command silence. She saw that this shameful relationship, as far as her father was concerned, had been made quite clear, and that this trying conference was now at an end. She turned and walked shamefacedly out. He waited until he heard her steps fading into faint nothings down the hall toward her room. Then he arose. Once more he clinched his big fists.
“The scoundrel!” he said. “The scoundrel! I’ll drive him out of Philadelphy, if it takes the last dollar I have in the world.”
For the first time in his life Cowperwood felt conscious of having been in the presence of that interesting social phenomenon — the outraged sentiment of a parent. While he had no absolute knowledge as to why Butler had been so enraged, he felt that Aileen was the contributing cause. He himself was a father. His boy, Frank, Jr., was to him not so remarkable. But little Lillian, with her dainty little slip of a body and bright-aureoled head, had always appealed to him. She was going to be a charming woman one day, he thought, and he was going to do much to establish her safely. He used to tell her that she had “eyes like buttons,” “feet like a pussy-cat,” and hands that were “just five cents’ worth,” they were so little. The child admired her father and would often stand by his chair in the library or the sitting-room, or his desk in his private office, or by his seat at the table, asking him questions.
This attitude toward his own daughter made him see clearly how Butler might feel toward Aileen. He wondered how he would feel if it were his own little Lillian, and still he did not believe he would make much fuss over the matter, either with himself or with her, if she were as old as Aileen. Children and their lives were more or less above the willing of parents, anyhow, and it would be a difficult thing for any parent to control any child, unless the child were naturally docile-minded and willing to be controlled.
It also made him smile, in a grim way, to see how fate was raining difficulties on him. The Chicago fire, Stener’s early absence, Butler, Mollenhauer, and Simpson’s indifference to Stener’s fate and his. And now this probable revelation in connection with Aileen. He could not be sure as yet, but his intuitive instincts told him that it must be something like this.
Now he was distressed as to what Aileen would do, say if suddenly she were confronted by her father. If he could only get to her! But if he was to meet Butler’s call for his loan, and the others which would come yet to-day or on the morrow, there was not a moment to lose. If he did not pay he must assign at once. Butler’s rage, Aileen, his own danger, were brushed aside for the moment. His mind concentrated wholly on how to save himself financially.
He hurried to visit George Waterman; David Wiggin, his wife’s brother, who was now fairly well to do; Joseph Zimmerman, the wealthy dry-goods dealer who had dealt with him in the past; Judge Kitchen, a private manipulator of considerable wealth; Frederick Van Nostrand, the State treasurer, who was interested in local street-railway stocks, and others. Of all those to whom he appealed one was actually not in a position to do anything for him; another was afraid; a third was calculating eagerly to drive a hard bargain; a fourth was too deliberate, anxious to have much time. All scented the true value of his situation, all wanted time to consider, and he had no time to consider. Judge Kitchen did agree to lend him thirty thousand dollars — a paltry sum. Joseph Zimmerman would only risk twenty-five thousand dollars. He could see where, all told, he might raise seventy-five thousand dollars by hypothecating double the amount in shares; but this was ridiculously insufficient. He had figured again, to a dollar, and he must have at least two hundred and fifty thousand dollars above all his present holdings, or he must close his doors. To-morrow at two o’clock he would know. If he didn’t he would be written down as “failed” on a score of ledgers in Philadelphia.
What a pretty pass for one to come to whose hopes had so recently run so high! There was a loan of one hundred thousand dollars from the Girard National Bank which he was particularly anxious to clear off. This bank was the most important in the city, and if he retained its good will by meeting this loan promptly he might hope for favors in the future whatever happened. Yet, at the moment, he did not see how he could do it. He decided, however, after some reflection, that he would deliver the stocks which Judge Kitchen, Zimmerman, and others had agreed to take and get their checks or cash yet this night. Then he would persuade Stener to let him have a check for the sixty thousand dollars’ worth of city loan he had purchased this morning on ‘change. Out of it he could take twenty-five thousand dollars to make up the balance due the bank, and still have thirty-five thousand for himself.
The one unfortunate thing about such an arrangement was that by doing it he was building up a rather complicated situation in regard to these same certificates. Since their purchase in the morning, he had not deposited them in the sinking-fund, where they belonged (they had been delivered to his office by half past one in the afternoon), but, on the contrary, had immediately hypothecated them to cover another loan. It was a risky thing to have done, considering that he was in danger of failing and that he was not absolutely sure of being able to take them up in time.
But, he reasoned, he had a working agreement with the city treasurer (illegal of course), which would make such a transaction rather plausible, and almost all right, even if he failed, and that was that none of his accounts were supposed necessarily to be put straight until the end of the month. If he failed, and the certificates were not in the sinking-fund, he could say, as was the truth, that he was in the habit of taking his time, and had forgotten. This collecting of a check, therefore, for these as yet undeposited certificates would be technically, if not legally and morally, plausible. The city would be out only an additional sixty thousand dollars — making five hundred and sixty thousand dollars all told, which in view of its probable loss of five hundred thousand did not make so much difference. But his caution clashed with his need on this occasion, and he decided that he would not call for the check unless Stener finally refused to aid him with three hundred thousand more, in which case he would claim it as his right. In all likelihood Stener would not think to ask whether the certificates were in the sinking-fund or not. If he did, he would have to lie — that was all.
He drove rapidly back to his office, and, finding Butler’s note, as he expected, wrote a check on his father’s bank for the one hundred thousand dollars which had been placed to his credit by his loving parent, and sent it around to Butler’s office. There was another note, from Albert Stires, Stener’s secretary, advising him not to buy or sell any more city loan — that until further notice such transactions would not be honored. Cowperwood immediately sensed the source of this warning. Stener had been in conference with Butler or Mollenhauer, and had been warned and frightened. Nevertheless, he got in his buggy again and drove directly to the city treasurer’s office.
Since Cowperwood’s visit Stener had talked still more with Sengstack, Strobik, and others, all sent to see that a proper fear of things financial had been put in his heart. The result was decidedly one which spelled opposition to Cowperwood.
Strobik was considerably disturbed himself. He and Wycroft and Harmon had also been using money out of the treasury — much smaller sums, of course, for they had not Cowperwood’s financial imagination — and were disturbed as to how they would return what they owed before the storm broke. If Cowperwood failed, and Stener was short in his accounts, the whole budget might be investigated, and then their loans would be brought to light. The thing to do was to return what they owed, and then, at least, no charge of malfeasance would lie against them.
“Go to Mollenhauer,” Strobik had advised Stener, shortly after Cowperwood had left the latter’s office, “and tell him the whole story. He put you here. He was strong for your nomination. Tell him just where you stand and ask him what to do. He’ll probably be able to tell you. Offer him your holdings to help you out. You have to. You can’t help yourself. Don’t loan Cowperwood another damned dollar, whatever you do. He’s got you in so deep now you can hardly hope to get out. Ask Mollenhauer if he won’t help you to get Cowperwood to put that money back. He may be able to influence him.”
There was more in this conversation to the same effect, and then Stener hurried as fast as his legs could carry him to Mollenhauer’s office. He was so frightened that he could scarcely breathe, and he was quite ready to throw himself on his knees before the big German-American financier and leader. Oh, if Mr. Mollenhauer would only help him! If he could just get out of this without going to jail!
“Oh, Lord! Oh, Lord! Oh, Lord!” he repeated, over and over to himself, as he walked. “What shall I do?”
The attitude of Henry A. Mollenhauer, grim, political boss that he was — trained in a hard school — was precisely the attitude of every such man in all such trying circumstances.
He was wondering, in view of what Butler had told him, just how much he could advantage himself in this situation. If he could, he wanted to get control of whatever street-railway stock Stener now had, without in any way compromising himself. Stener’s shares could easily be transferred on ‘change through Mollenhauer’s brokers to a dummy, who would eventually transfer them to himself (Mollenhauer). Stener must be squeezed thoroughly, though, this afternoon, and as for his five hundred thousand dollars’ indebtedness to the treasury, Mollenhauer did not see what could be done about that. If Cowperwood could not pay it, the city would have to lose it; but the scandal must be hushed up until after election. Stener, unless the various party leaders had more generosity than Mollenhauer imagined, would have to suffer exposure, arrest, trial, confiscation of his property, and possibly sentence to the penitentiary, though this might easily be commuted by the governor, once public excitement died down. He did not trouble to think whether Cowperwood was criminally involved or not. A hundred to one he was not. Trust a shrewd man like that to take care of himself. But if there was any way to shoulder the blame on to Cowperwood, and so clear the treasurer and the skirts of the party, he would not object to that. He wanted to hear the full story of Stener’s relations with the broker first. Meanwhile, the thing to do was to seize what Stener had to yield.
The troubled city treasurer, on being shown in Mr. Mollenhauer’s presence, at once sank feebly in a chair and collapsed. He was entirely done for mentally. His nerve was gone, his courage exhausted like a breath.
“Well, Mr. Stener?” queried Mr. Mollenhauer, impressively, pretending not to know what brought him.
“I came about this matter of my loans to Mr. Cowperwood.”
“Well, what about them?”
“Well, he owes me, or the city treasury rather, five hundred thousand dollars, and I understand that he is going to fail and that he can’t pay it back.”
“Who told you that?”
“Mr. Sengstack, and since then Mr. Cowperwood has been to see me. He tells me he must have more money or he will fail and he wants to borrow three hundred thousand dollars more. He says he must have it.”
“So!” said Mr. Mollenhauer, impressively, and with an air of astonishment which he did not feel. “You would not think of doing that, of course. You’re too badly involved as it is. If he wants to know why, refer him to me. Don’t advance him another dollar. If you do, and this case comes to trial, no court would have any mercy on you. It’s going to be difficult enough to do anything for you as it is. However, if you don’t advance him any more — we will see. It may be possible, I can’t say, but at any rate, no more money must leave the treasury to bolster up this bad business. It’s much too difficult as it now is.” He stared at Stener warningly. And he, shaken and sick, yet because of the faint suggestion of mercy involved somewhere in Mollenhauer’s remarks, now slipped from his chair to his knees and folded his hands in the uplifted attitude of a devotee before a sacred image.
“Oh, Mr. Mollenhauer,” he choked, beginning to cry, “I didn’t mean to do anything wrong. Strobik and Wycroft told me it was all right. You sent me to Cowperwood in the first place. I only did what I thought the others had been doing. Mr. Bode did it, just like I have been doing. He dealt with Tighe and Company. I have a wife and four children, Mr. Mollenhauer. My youngest boy is only seven years old. Think of them, Mr. Mollenhauer! Think of what my arrest will mean to them! I don’t want to go to jail. I didn’t think I was doing anything very wrong — honestly I didn’t. I’ll give up all I’ve got. You can have all my stocks and houses and lots — anything — if you’ll only get me out of this. You won’t let ’em send me to jail, will you?”
His fat, white lips were trembling — wabbling nervously — and big hot tears were coursing down his previously pale but now flushed cheeks. He presented one of those almost unbelievable pictures which are yet so intensely human and so true. If only the great financial and political giants would for once accurately reveal the details of their lives!
Mollenhauer looked at him calmly, meditatively. How often had he seen weaklings no more dishonest than himself, but without his courage and subtlety, pleading to him in this fashion, not on their knees exactly, but intellectually so! Life to him, as to every other man of large practical knowledge and insight, was an inexplicable tangle. What were you going to do about the so-called morals and precepts of the world? This man Stener fancied that he was dishonest, and that he, Mollenhauer, was honest. He was here, self-convicted of sin, pleading to him, Mollenhauer, as he would to a righteous, unstained saint. As a matter of fact, Mollenhauer knew that he was simply shrewder, more far-seeing, more calculating, not less dishonest. Stener was lacking in force and brains — not morals. This lack was his principal crime. There were people who believed in some esoteric standard of right — some ideal of conduct absolutely and very far removed from practical life; but he had never seen them practice it save to their own financial (not moral — he would not say that) destruction. They were never significant, practical men who clung to these fatuous ideals. They were always poor, nondescript, negligible dreamers. He could not have made Stener understand all this if he had wanted to, and he certainly did not want to. It was too bad about Mrs. Stener and the little Steners. No doubt she had worked hard, as had Stener, to get up in the world and be something — just a little more than miserably poor; and now this unfortunate complication had to arise to undo them — this Chicago fire. What a curious thing that was! If any one thing more than another made him doubt the existence of a kindly, overruling Providence, it was the unheralded storms out of clear skies — financial, social, anything you choose — that so often brought ruin and disaster to so many.
“Get Up, Stener,” he said, calmly, after a few moments. “You mustn’t give way to your feelings like this. You must not cry. These troubles are never unraveled by tears. You must do a little thinking for yourself. Perhaps your situation isn’t so bad.”
As he was saying this Stener was putting himself back in his chair, getting out his handkerchief, and sobbing hopelessly in it.
“I’ll do what I can, Stener. I won’t promise anything. I can’t tell you what the result will be. There are many peculiar political forces in this city. I may not be able to save you, but I am perfectly willing to try. You must put yourself absolutely under my direction. You must not say or do anything without first consulting with me. I will send my secretary to you from time to time. He will tell you what to do. You must not come to me unless I send for you. Do you understand that thoroughly?”
“Yes, Mr. Mollenhauer.”
“Well, now, dry your eyes. I don’t want you to go out of this office crying. Go back to your office, and I will send Sengstack to see you. He will tell you what to do. Follow him exactly. And whenever I send for you come at once.”
He got up, large, self-confident, reserved. Stener, buoyed up by the subtle reassurance of his remarks, recovered to a degree his equanimity. Mr. Mollenhauer, the great, powerful Mr. Mollenhauer was going to help him out of his scrape. He might not have to go to jail after all. He left after a few moments, his face a little red from weeping, but otherwise free of telltale marks, and returned to his office.
Three-quarters of an hour later, Sengstack called on him for the second time that day — Abner Sengstack, small, dark-faced, club-footed, a great sole of leather three inches thick under his short, withered right leg, his slightly Slavic, highly intelligent countenance burning with a pair of keen, piercing, inscrutable black eyes. Sengstack was a fit secretary for Mollenhauer. You could see at one glance that he would make Stener do exactly what Mollenhauer suggested. His business was to induce Stener to part with his street-railway holdings at once through Tighe & Co., Butler’s brokers, to the political sub-agent who would eventually transfer them to Mollenhauer. What little Stener received for them might well go into the treasury. Tighe & Co. would manage the “‘change” subtleties of this without giving any one else a chance to bid, while at the same time making it appear an open-market transaction. At the same time Sengstack went carefully into the state of the treasurer’s office for his master’s benefit — finding out what it was that Strobik, Wycroft, and Harmon had been doing with their loans. Via another source they were ordered to disgorge at once or face prosecution. They were a part of Mollenhauer’s political machine. Then, having cautioned Stener not to set over the remainder of his property to any one, and not to listen to any one, most of all to the Machiavellian counsel of Cowperwood, Sengstack left.
Needless to say, Mollenhauer was greatly gratified by this turn of affairs. Cowperwood was now most likely in a position where he would have to come and see him, or if not, a good share of the properties he controlled were already in Mollenhauer’s possession. If by some hook or crook he could secure the remainder, Simpson and Butler might well talk to him about this street-railway business. His holdings were now as large as any, if not quite the largest.
It was in the face of this very altered situation that Cowperwood arrived at Stener’s office late this Monday afternoon.
Stener was quite alone, worried and distraught. He was anxious to see Cowperwood, and at the same time afraid.
“George,” began Cowperwood, briskly, on seeing him, “I haven’t much time to spare now, but I’ve come, finally, to tell you that you’ll have to let me have three hundred thousand more if you don’t want me to fail. Things are looking very bad today. They’ve caught me in a corner on my loans; but this storm isn’t going to last. You can see by the very character of it that it can’t.”
He was looking at Stener’s face, and seeing fear and a pained and yet very definite necessity for opposition written there. “Chicago is burning, but it will be built up again. Business will be all the better for it later on. Now, I want you to be reasonable and help me. Don’t get frightened.”
Stener stirred uneasily. “Don’t let these politicians scare you to death. It will all blow over in a few days, and then we’ll be better off than ever. Did you see Mollenhauer?”
“Yes.”
“Well, what did he have to say?”
“He said just what I thought he’d say. He won’t let me do this. I can’t, Frank, I tell you!” exclaimed Stener, jumping up. He was so nervous that he had had a hard time keeping his seat during this short, direct conversation. “I can’t! They’ve got me in a corner! They’re after me! They all know what we’ve been doing. Oh, say, Frank”— he threw up his arms wildly —“you’ve got to get me out of this. You’ve got to let me have that five hundred thousand back and get me out of this. If you don’t, and you should fail, they’ll send me to the penitentiary. I’ve got a wife and four children, Frank. I can’t go on in this. It’s too big for me. I never should have gone in on it in the first place. I never would have if you hadn’t persuaded me, in a way. I never thought when I began that I would ever get in as bad as all this. I can’t go on, Frank. I can’t! I’m willing you should have all my stock. Only give me back that five hundred thousand, and we’ll call it even.” His voice rose nervously as he talked, and he wiped his wet forehead with his hand and stared at Cowperwood pleadingly, foolishly.
Cowperwood stared at him in return for a few moments with a cold, fishy eye. He knew a great deal about human nature, and he was ready for and expectant of any queer shift in an individual’s attitude, particularly in time of panic; but this shift of Stener’s was quite too much. “Whom else have you been talking to, George, since I saw you? Whom have you seen? What did Sengstack have to say?”
“He says just what Mollenhauer does, that I mustn’t loan any more money under any circumstances, and he says I ought to get that five hundred thousand back as quickly as possible.”
“And you think Mollenhauer wants to help you, do you?” inquired Cowperwood, finding it hard to efface the contempt which kept forcing itself into his voice.
“I think he does, yes. I don’t know who else will, Frank, if he don’t. He’s one of the big political forces in this town.”
“Listen to me,” began Cowperwood, eyeing him fixedly. Then he paused. “What did he say you should do about your holdings?”
“Sell them through Tighe & Company and put the money back in the treasury, if you won’t take them.”
“Sell them to whom?” asked Cowperwood, thinking of Stener’s last words.
“To any one on ‘change who’ll take them, I suppose. I don’t know.”
“I thought so,” said Cowperwood, comprehendingly. “I might have known as much. They’re working you, George. They’re simply trying to get your stocks away from you. Mollenhauer is leading you on. He knows I can’t do what you want — give you back the five hundred thousand dollars. He wants you to throw your stocks on the market so that he can pick them up. Depend on it, that’s all arranged for already. When you do, he’s got me in his clutches, or he thinks he has — he and Butler and Simpson. They want to get together on this local street-railway situation, and I know it, I feel it. I’ve felt it coming all along. Mollenhauer hasn’t any more intention of helping you than he has of flying. Once you’ve sold your stocks he’s through with you — mark my word. Do you think he’ll turn a hand to keep you out of the penitentiary once you’re out of this street-railway situation? He will not. And if you think so, you’re a bigger fool than I take you to be, George. Don’t go crazy. Don’t lose your head. Be sensible. Look the situation in the face. Let me explain it to you. If you don’t help me now — if you don’t let me have three hundred thousand dollars by to-morrow noon, at the very latest, I’m through, and so are you. There is not a thing the matter with our situation. Those stocks of ours are as good to-day as they ever were. Why, great heavens, man, the railways are there behind them. They’re paying. The Seventeenth and Nineteenth Street line is earning one thousand dollars a day right now. What better evidence do you want than that? Green & Coates is earning five hundred dollars. You’re frightened, George. These damned political schemers have scared you. Why, you’ve as good a right to loan that money as Bode and Murtagh had before you. They did it. You’ve been doing it for Mollenhauer and the others, only so long as you do it for them it’s all right. What’s a designated city depository but a loan?”
Cowperwood was referring to the system under which certain portions of city money, like the sinking-fund, were permitted to be kept in certain banks at a low rate of interest or no rate — banks in which Mollenhauer and Butler and Simpson were interested. This was their safe graft.
“Don’t throw your chances away, George. Don’t quit now. You’ll be worth millions in a few years, and you won’t have to turn a hand. All you will have to do will be to keep what you have. If you don’t help me, mark my word, they’ll throw you over the moment I’m out of this, and they’ll let you go to the penitentiary. Who’s going to put up five hundred thousand dollars for you, George? Where is Mollenhauer going to get it, or Butler, or anybody, in these times? They can’t. They don’t intend to. When I’m through, you’re through, and you’ll be exposed quicker than any one else. They can’t hurt me, George. I’m an agent. I didn’t ask you to come to me. You came to me in the first place of your own accord. If you don’t help me, you’re through, I tell you, and you’re going to be sent to the penitentiary as sure as there are jails. Why don’t you take a stand, George? Why don’t you stand your ground? You have your wife and children to look after. You can’t be any worse off loaning me three hundred thousand more than you are right now. What difference does it make — five hundred thousand or eight hundred thousand? It’s all one and the same thing, if you’re going to be tried for it. Besides, if you loan me this, there isn’t going to be any trial. I’m not going to fail. This storm will blow over in a week or ten days, and we’ll be rich again. For Heaven’s sake, George, don’t go to pieces this way! Be sensible! Be reasonable!”
He paused, for Stener’s face had become a jelly-like mass of woe.
“I can’t, Frank,” he wailed. “I tell you I can’t. They’ll punish me worse than ever if I do that. They’ll never let up on me. You don’t know these people.”
In Stener’s crumpling weakness Cowperwood read his own fate. What could you do with a man like that? How brace him up? You couldn’t! And with a gesture of infinite understanding, disgust, noble indifference, he threw up his hands and started to walk out. At the door he turned.
“George,” he said, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry for you, not for myself. I’ll come out of things all right, eventually. I’ll be rich. But, George, you’re making the one great mistake of your life. You’ll be poor; you’ll be a convict, and you’ll have only yourself to blame. There isn’t a thing the matter with this money situation except the fire. There isn’t a thing wrong with my affairs except this slump in stocks — this panic. You sit there, a fortune in your hands, and you allow a lot of schemers, highbinders, who don’t know any more of your affairs or mine than a rabbit, and who haven’t any interest in you except to plan what they can get out of you, to frighten you and prevent you from doing the one thing that will save your life. Three hundred thousand paltry dollars that in three or four weeks from now I can pay back to you four and five times over, and for that you will see me go broke and yourself to the penitentiary. I can’t understand it, George. You’re out of your mind. You’re going to rue this the longest day that you live.”
He waited a few moments to see if this, by any twist of chance, would have any effect; then, noting that Stener still remained a wilted, helpless mass of nothing, he shook his head gloomily and walked out.
It was the first time in his life that Cowperwood had ever shown the least sign of weakening or despair. He had felt all along as though there were nothing to the Greek theory of being pursued by the furies. Now, however, there seemed an untoward fate which was pursuing him. It looked that way. Still, fate or no fate, he did not propose to be daunted. Even in this very beginning of a tendency to feel despondent he threw back his head, expanded his chest, and walked as briskly as ever.
In the large room outside Stener’s private office he encountered Albert Stires, Stener’s chief clerk and secretary. He and Albert had exchanged many friendly greetings in times past, and all the little minor transactions in regard to city loan had been discussed between them, for Albert knew more of the intricacies of finance and financial bookkeeping than Stener would ever know.
At the sight of Stires the thought in regard to the sixty thousand dollars’ worth of city loan certificates, previously referred to, flashed suddenly through his mind. He had not deposited them in the sinking-fund, and did not intend to for the present — could not, unless considerable free money were to reach him shortly — for he had used them to satisfy other pressing demands, and had no free money to buy them back — or, in other words, release them. And he did not want to just at this moment. Under the law governing transactions of this kind with the city treasurer, he was supposed to deposit them at once to the credit of the city, and not to draw his pay therefor from the city treasurer until he had. To be very exact, the city treasurer, under the law, was not supposed to pay him for any transaction of this kind until he or his agents presented a voucher from the bank or other organization carrying the sinking-fund for the city showing that the certificates so purchased had actually been deposited there. As a matter of fact, under the custom which had grown up between him and Stener, the law had long been ignored in this respect. He could buy certificates of city loan for the sinking-fund up to any reasonable amount, hypothecate them where he pleased, and draw his pay from the city without presenting a voucher. At the end of the month sufficient certificates of city loan could usually be gathered from one source and another to make up the deficiency, or the deficiency could actually be ignored, as had been done on more than one occasion, for long periods of time, while he used money secured by hypothecating the shares for speculative purposes. This was actually illegal; but neither Cowperwood nor Stener saw it in that light or cared.
The trouble with this particular transaction was the note that he had received from Stener ordering him to stop both buying and selling, which put his relations with the city treasury on a very formal basis. He had bought these certificates before receiving this note, but had not deposited them. He was going now to collect his check; but perhaps the old, easy system of balancing matters at the end of the month might not be said to obtain any longer. Stires might ask him to present a voucher of deposit. If so, he could not now get this check for sixty thousand dollars, for he did not have the certificates to deposit. If not, he might get the money; but, also, it might constitute the basis of some subsequent legal action. If he did not eventually deposit the certificates before failure, some charge such as that of larceny might be brought against him. Still, he said to himself, he might not really fail even yet. If any of his banking associates should, for any reason, modify their decision in regard to calling his loans, he would not. Would Stener make a row about this if he so secured this check? Would the city officials pay any attention to him if he did? Could you get any district attorney to take cognizance of such a transaction, if Stener did complain? No, not in all likelihood; and, anyhow, nothing would come of it. No jury would punish him in the face of the understanding existing between him and Stener as agent or broker and principal. And, once he had the money, it was a hundred to one Stener would think no more about it. It would go in among the various unsatisfied liabilities, and nothing more would be thought about it. Like lightning the entire situation hashed through his mind. He would risk it. He stopped before the chief clerk’s desk.
“Albert,” he said, in a low voice, “I bought sixty thousand dollars’ worth of city loan for the sinking-fund this morning. Will you give my boy a check for it in the morning, or, better yet, will you give it to me now? I got your note about no more purchases. I’m going back to the office. You can just credit the sinking-fund with eight hundred certificates at from seventy-five to eighty. I’ll send you the itemized list later.”
“Certainly, Mr. Cowperwood, certainly,” replied Albert, with alacrity. “Stocks are getting an awful knock, aren’t they? I hope you’re not very much troubled by it?”
“Not very, Albert,” replied Cowperwood, smiling, the while the chief clerk was making out his check. He was wondering if by any chance Stener would appear and attempt to interfere with this. It was a legal transaction. He had a right to the check provided he deposited the certificates, as was his custom, with the trustee of the fund. He waited tensely while Albert wrote, and finally, with the check actually in his hand, breathed a sigh of relief. Here, at least, was sixty thousand dollars, and to-night’s work would enable him to cash the seventy-five thousand that had been promised him. To-morrow, once more he must see Leigh, Kitchen, Jay Cooke & Co., Edward Clark & Co.— all the long list of people to whom he owed loans and find out what could be done. If he could only get time! If he could get just a week!
But time was not a thing to be had in this emergency. With the seventy-five thousand dollars his friends had extended to him, and sixty thousand dollars secured from Stires, Cowperwood met the Girard call and placed the balance, thirty-five thousand dollars, in a private safe in his own home. He then made a final appeal to the bankers and financiers, but they refused to help him. He did not, however, commiserate himself in this hour. He looked out of his office window into the little court, and sighed. What more could he do? He sent a note to his father, asking him to call for lunch. He sent a note to his lawyer, Harper Steger, a man of his own age whom he liked very much, and asked him to call also. He evolved in his own mind various plans of delay, addresses to creditors and the like, but alas! he was going to fail. And the worst of it was that this matter of the city treasurer’s loans was bound to become a public, and more than a public, a political, scandal. And the charge of conniving, if not illegally, at least morally, at the misuse of the city’s money was the one thing that would hurt him most.
How industriously his rivals would advertise this fact! He might get on his feet again if he failed; but it would be uphill work. And his father! His father would be pulled down with him. It was probable that he would be forced out of the presidency of his bank. With these thoughts Cowperwood sat there waiting. As he did so Aileen Butler was announced by his office-boy, and at the same time Albert Stires.
“Show in Miss Butler,” he said, getting up. “Tell Mr. Stires to wait.” Aileen came briskly, vigorously in, her beautiful body clothed as decoratively as ever. The street suit that she wore was of a light golden-brown broadcloth, faceted with small, dark-red buttons. Her head was decorated with a brownish-red shake of a type she had learned was becoming to her, brimless and with a trailing plume, and her throat was graced by a three-strand necklace of gold beads. Her hands were smoothly gloved as usual, and her little feet daintily shod. There was a look of girlish distress in her eyes, which, however, she was trying hard to conceal.
“Honey,” she exclaimed, on seeing him, her arms extended —“what is the trouble? I wanted so much to ask you the other night. You’re not going to fail, are you? I heard father and Owen talking about you last night.”
“What did they say?” he inquired, putting his arm around her and looking quietly into her nervous eyes.
“Oh, you know, I think papa is very angry with you. He suspects. Some one sent him an anonymous letter. He tried to get it out of me last night, but he didn’t succeed. I denied everything. I was in here twice this morning to see you, but you were out. I was so afraid that he might see you first, and that you might say something.”
“Me, Aileen?”
“Well, no, not exactly. I didn’t think that. I don’t know what I thought. Oh, honey, I’ve been so worried. You know, I didn’t sleep at all. I thought I was stronger than that; but I was so worried about you. You know, he put me in a strong light by his desk, where he could see my face, and then he showed me the letter. I was so astonished for a moment I hardly know what I said or how I looked.”
“What did you say?”
“Why, I said: ‘What a shame! It isn’t so!’ But I didn’t say it right away. My heart was going like a trip-hammer. I’m afraid he must have been able to tell something from my face. I could hardly get my breath.”
“He’s a shrewd man, your father,” he commented. “He knows something about life. Now you see how difficult these situations are. It’s a blessing he decided to show you the letter instead of watching the house. I suppose he felt too bad to do that. He can’t prove anything now. But he knows. You can’t deceive him.”
“How do you know he knows?”
“I saw him yesterday.”
“Did he talk to you about it?”
“No; I saw his face. He simply looked at me.”
“Honey! I’m so sorry for him!”
“I know you are. So am I. But it can’t be helped now. We should have thought of that in the first place.”
“But I love you so. Oh, honey, he will never forgive me. He loves me so. He mustn’t know. I won’t admit anything. But, oh, dear!”
She put her hands tightly together on his bosom, and he looked consolingly into her eyes. Her eyelids, were trembling, and her lips. She was sorry for her father, herself, Cowperwood. Through her he could sense the force of Butler’s parental affection; the volume and danger of his rage. There were so many, many things as he saw it now converging to make a dramatic denouement.
“Never mind,” he replied; “it can’t be helped now. Where is my strong, determined Aileen? I thought you were going to be so brave? Aren’t you going to be? I need to have you that way now.”
“Do you?”
“Yes.”
“Are you in trouble?”
“I think I am going to fail, dear.”
“Oh, no!”
“Yes, honey. I’m at the end of my rope. I don’t see any way out just at present. I’ve sent for my father and my lawyer. You mustn’t stay here, sweet. Your father may come in here at any time. We must meet somewhere — to-morrow, say — to-morrow afternoon. You remember Indian Rock, out on the Wissahickon?”
“Yes.”
“Could you be there at four?”
“Yes.”
“Look out for who’s following. If I’m not there by four-thirty, don’t wait. You know why. It will be because I think some one is watching. There won’t be, though, if we work it right. And now you must run, sweet. We can’t use Nine-thirty-one any more. I’ll have to rent another place somewhere else.”
“Oh, honey, I’m so sorry.”
“Aren’t you going to be strong and brave? You see, I need you to be.”
He was almost, for the first time, a little sad in his mood.
“Yes, dear, yes,” she declared, slipping her arms under his and pulling him tight. “Oh, yes! You can depend on me. Oh, Frank, I love you so! I’m so sorry. Oh, I do hope you don’t fail! But it doesn’t make any difference, dear, between you and me, whatever happens, does it? We will love each other just the same. I’ll do anything for you, honey! I’ll do anything you say. You can trust me. They sha’n’t know anything from me.”
She looked at his still, pale face, and a sudden strong determination to fight for him welled up in her heart. Her love was unjust, illegal, outlawed; but it was love, just the same, and had much of the fiery daring of the outcast from justice.
“I love you! I love you! I love you, Frank!” she declared. He unloosed her hands.
“Run, sweet. To-morrow at four. Don’t fail. And don’t talk. And don’t admit anything, whatever you do.”
“I won’t.”
“And don’t worry about me. I’ll be all right.”
He barely had time to straighten his tie, to assume a nonchalant attitude by the window, when in hurried Stener’s chief clerk — pale, disturbed, obviously out of key with himself.
“Mr. Cowperwood! You know that check I gave you last night? Mr. Stener says it’s illegal, that I shouldn’t have given it to you, that he will hold me responsible. He says I can be arrested for compounding a felony, and that he will discharge me and have me sent to prison if I don’t get it back. Oh, Mr. Cowperwood, I am only a young man! I’m just really starting out in life. I’ve got my wife and little boy to look after. You won’t let him do that to me? You’ll give me that check back, won’t you? I can’t go back to the office without it. He says you’re going to fail, and that you knew it, and that you haven’t any right to it.”
Cowperwood looked at him curiously. He was surprised at the variety and character of these emissaries of disaster. Surely, when troubles chose to multiply they had great skill in presenting themselves in rapid order. Stener had no right to make any such statement. The transaction was not illegal. The man had gone wild. True, he, Cowperwood, had received an order after these securities were bought not to buy or sell any more city loan, but that did not invalidate previous purchases. Stener was browbeating and frightening his poor underling, a better man than himself, in order to get back this sixty-thousand-dollar check. What a petty creature he was! How true it was, as somebody had remarked, that you could not possibly measure the petty meannesses to which a fool could stoop!
“You go back to Mr. Stener, Albert, and tell him that it can’t be done. The certificates of loan were purchased before his order arrived, and the records of the exchange will prove it. There is no illegality here. I am entitled to that check and could have collected it in any qualified court of law. The man has gone out of his head. I haven’t failed yet. You are not in any danger of any legal proceedings; and if you are, I’ll help defend you. I can’t give you the check back because I haven’t it to give; and if I had, I wouldn’t. That would be allowing a fool to make a fool of me. I’m sorry, very, but I can’t do anything for you.”
“Oh, Mr. Cowperwood!” Tears were in Stires’s eyes. “He’ll discharge me! He’ll forfeit my sureties. I’ll be turned out into the street. I have only a little property of my own — outside of my salary!”
He wrung his hands, and Cowperwood shook his head sadly.
“This isn’t as bad as you think, Albert. He won’t do what he says. He can’t. It’s unfair and illegal. You can bring suit and recover your salary. I’ll help you in that as much as I’m able. But I can’t give you back this sixty-thousand-dollar check, because I haven’t it to give. I couldn’t if I wanted to. It isn’t here any more. I’ve paid for the securities I bought with it. The securities are not here. They’re in the sinking-fund, or will be.”
He paused, wishing he had not mentioned that fact. It was a slip of the tongue, one of the few he ever made, due to the peculiar pressure of the situation. Stires pleaded longer. It was no use, Cowperwood told him. Finally he went away, crestfallen, fearsome, broken. There were tears of suffering in his eyes. Cowperwood was very sorry. And then his father was announced.
The elder Cowperwood brought a haggard face. He and Frank had had a long conversation the evening before, lasting until early morning, but it had not been productive of much save uncertainty.
“Hello, father!” exclaimed Cowperwood, cheerfully, noting his father’s gloom. He was satisfied that there was scarcely a coal of hope to be raked out of these ashes of despair, but there was no use admitting it.
“Well?” said his father, lifting his sad eyes in a peculiar way.
“Well, it looks like stormy weather, doesn’t it? I’ve decided to call a meeting of my creditors, father, and ask for time. There isn’t anything else to do. I can’t realize enough on anything to make it worth while talking about. I thought Stener might change his mind, but he’s worse rather than better. His head bookkeeper just went out of here.”
“What did he want?” asked Henry Cowperwood.
“He wanted me to give him back a check for sixty thousand that he paid me for some city loan I bought yesterday morning.” Frank did not explain to his father, however, that he had hypothecated the certificates this check had paid for, and used the check itself to raise money enough to pay the Girard National Bank and to give himself thirty-five thousand in cash besides.
“Well, I declare!” replied the old man. “You’d think he’d have better sense than that. That’s a perfectly legitimate transaction. When did you say he notified you not to buy city loan?”
“Yesterday noon.”
“He’s out of his mind,” Cowperwood, Sr., commented, laconically.
“It’s Mollenhauer and Simpson and Butler, I know. They want my street-railway lines. Well, they won’t get them. They’ll get them through a receivership, and after the panic’s all over. Our creditors will have first chance at these. If they buy, they’ll buy from them. If it weren’t for that five-hundred-thousand-dollar loan I wouldn’t think a thing of this. My creditors would sustain me nicely. But the moment that gets noised around! . . . And this election! I hypothecated those city loan certificates because I didn’t want to get on the wrong side of Davison. I expected to take in enough by now to take them up. They ought to be in the sinking-fund, really.”
The old gentleman saw the point at once, and winced.
“They might cause you trouble, there, Frank.”
“It’s a technical question,” replied his son. “I might have been intending to take them up. As a matter of fact, I will if I can before three. I’ve been taking eight and ten days to deposit them in the past. In a storm like this I’m entitled to move my pawns as best I can.”
Cowperwood, the father, put his hand over his mouth again. He felt very disturbed about this. He saw no way out, however. He was at the end of his own resources. He felt the side-whiskers on his left cheek. He looked out of the window into the little green court. Possibly it was a technical question, who should say. The financial relations of the city treasury with other brokers before Frank had been very lax. Every banker knew that. Perhaps precedent would or should govern in this case. He could not say. Still, it was dangerous — not straight. If Frank could get them out and deposit them it would be so much better.
“I’d take them up if I were you and I could,” he added.
“I will if I can.”
“How much money have you?”
“Oh, twenty thousand, all told. If I suspend, though, I’ll have to have a little ready cash.”
“I have eight or ten thousand, or will have by night, I hope.”
He was thinking of some one who would give him a second mortgage on his house.
Cowperwood looked quietly at him. There was nothing more to be said to his father. “I’m going to make one more appeal to Stener after you leave here,” be said. “I’m going over there with Harper Steger when he comes. If he won’t change I’ll send out notice to my creditors, and notify the secretary of the exchange. I want you to keep a stiff upper lip, whatever happens. I know you will, though. I’m going into the thing head down. If Stener had any sense —” He paused. “But what’s the use talking about a damn fool?”
He turned to the window, thinking of how easy it would have been, if Aileen and he had not been exposed by this anonymous note, to have arranged all with Butler. Rather than injure the party, Butler, in extremis, would have assisted him. Now . . .!
His father got up to go. He was as stiff with despair as though he were suffering from cold.
“Well,” he said, wearily.
Cowperwood suffered intensely for him. What a shame! His father! He felt a great surge of sorrow sweep over him but a moment later mastered it, and settled to his quick, defiant thinking. As the old man went out, Harper Steger was brought in. They shook hands, and at once started for Stener’s office. But Stener had sunk in on himself like an empty gas-bag, and no efforts were sufficient to inflate him. They went out, finally, defeated.
“I tell you, Frank,” said Steger, “I wouldn’t worry. We can tie this thing up legally until election and after, and that will give all this row a chance to die down. Then you can get your people together and talk sense to them. They’re not going to give up good properties like this, even if Stener does go to jail.”
Steger did not know of the sixty thousand dollars’ worth of hypothecated securities as yet. Neither did he know of Aileen Butler and her father’s boundless rage.
There was one development in connection with all of this of which Cowperwood was as yet unaware. The same day that brought Edward Butler the anonymous communication in regard to his daughter, brought almost a duplicate of it to Mrs. Frank Algernon Cowperwood, only in this case the name of Aileen Butler had curiously been omitted.
Perhaps you don’t know that your husband is running with another woman. If you don’t believe it, watch the house at 931 North Tenth Street.
Mrs. Cowperwood was in the conservatory watering some plants when this letter was brought by her maid Monday morning. She was most placid in her thoughts, for she did not know what all the conferring of the night before meant. Frank was occasionally troubled by financial storms, but they did not see to harm him.
“Lay it on the table in the library, Annie. I’ll get it.”
She thought it was some social note.
In a little while (such was her deliberate way), she put down her sprinkling-pot and went into the library. There it was lying on the green leather sheepskin which constituted a part of the ornamentation of the large library table. She picked it up, glanced at it curiously because it was on cheap paper, and then opened it. Her face paled slightly as she read it; and then her hand trembled — not much. Hers was not a soul that ever loved passionately, hence she could not suffer passionately. She was hurt, disgusted, enraged for the moment, and frightened; but she was not broken in spirit entirely. Thirteen years of life with Frank Cowperwood had taught her a number of things. He was selfish, she knew now, self-centered, and not as much charmed by her as he had been. The fear she had originally felt as to the effect of her preponderance of years had been to some extent justified by the lapse of time. Frank did not love her as he had — he had not for some time; she had felt it. What was it?— she had asked herself at times — almost, who was it? Business was engrossing him so.
Finance was his master. Did this mean the end of her regime, she queried. Would he cast her off? Where would she go? What would she do? She was not helpless, of course, for she had money of her own which he was manipulating for her. Who was this other woman? Was she young, beautiful, of any social position? Was it —? Suddenly she stopped. Was it? Could it be, by any chance — her mouth opened — Aileen Butler?
She stood still, staring at this letter, for she could scarcely countenance her own thought. She had observed often, in spite of all their caution, how friendly Aileen had been to him and he to her. He liked her; he never lost a chance to defend her. Lillian had thought of them at times as being curiously suited to each other temperamentally. He liked young people. But, of course, he was married, and Aileen was infinitely beneath him socially, and he had two children and herself. And his social and financial position was so fixed and stable that he did not dare trifle with it. Still she paused; for forty years and two children, and some slight wrinkles, and the suspicion that we may be no longer loved as we once were, is apt to make any woman pause, even in the face of the most significant financial position. Where would she go if she left him? What would people think? What about the children? Could she prove this liaison? Could she entrap him in a compromising situation? Did she want to?
She saw now that she did not love him as some women love their husbands. She was not wild about him. In a way she had been taking him for granted all these years, had thought that he loved her enough not to be unfaithful to her; at least fancied that he was so engrossed with the more serious things of life that no petty liaison such as this letter indicated would trouble him or interrupt his great career. Apparently this was not true. What should she do? What say? How act? Her none too brilliant mind was not of much service in this crisis. She did not know very well how either to plan or to fight.
The conventional mind is at best a petty piece of machinery. It is oyster-like in its functioning, or, perhaps better, clam-like. It has its little siphon of thought-processes forced up or down into the mighty ocean of fact and circumstance; but it uses so little, pumps so faintly, that the immediate contiguity of the vast mass is not disturbed. Nothing of the subtlety of life is perceived. No least inkling of its storms or terrors is ever discovered except through accident. When some crude, suggestive fact, such as this letter proved to be, suddenly manifests itself in the placid flow of events, there is great agony or disturbance and clogging of the so-called normal processes. The siphon does not work right. It sucks in fear and distress. There is great grinding of maladjusted parts — not unlike sand in a machine — and life, as is so often the case, ceases or goes lamely ever after.
Mrs. Cowperwood was possessed of a conventional mind. She really knew nothing about life. And life could not teach her. Reaction in her from salty thought-processes was not possible. She was not alive in the sense that Aileen Butler was, and yet she thought that she was very much alive. All illusion. She wasn’t. She was charming if you loved placidity. If you did not, she was not. She was not engaging, brilliant, or forceful. Frank Cowperwood might well have asked himself in the beginning why he married her. He did not do so now because he did not believe it was wise to question the past as to one’s failures and errors. It was, according to him, most unwise to regret. He kept his face and thoughts to the future.
But Mrs. Cowperwood was truly distressed in her way, and she went about the house thinking, feeling wretchedly. She decided, since the letter asked her to see for herself, to wait. She must think how she would watch this house, if at all. Frank must not know. If it were Aileen Butler by any chance — but surely not — she thought she would expose her to her parents. Still, that meant exposing herself. She determined to conceal her mood as best she could at dinner-time — but Cowperwood was not able to be there. He was so rushed, so closeted with individuals, so closely in conference with his father and others, that she scarcely saw him this Monday night, nor the next day, nor for many days.
For on Tuesday afternoon at two-thirty he issued a call for a meeting of his creditors, and at five-thirty he decided to go into the hands of a receiver. And yet, as he stood before his principal creditors — a group of thirty men — in his office, he did not feel that his life was ruined. He was temporarily embarrassed. Certainly things looked very black. The city-treasurership deal would make a great fuss. Those hypothecated city loan certificates, to the extent of sixty thousand, would make another, if Stener chose. Still, he did not feel that he was utterly destroyed.
“Gentlemen,” he said, in closing his address of explanation at the meeting, quite as erect, secure, defiant, convincing as he had ever been, “you see how things are. These securities are worth just as much as they ever were. There is nothing the matter with the properties behind them. If you will give me fifteen days or twenty, I am satisfied that I can straighten the whole matter out. I am almost the only one who can, for I know all about it. The market is bound to recover. Business is going to be better than ever. It’s time I want. Time is the only significant factor in this situation. I want to know if you won’t give me fifteen or twenty days — a month, if you can. That is all I want.”
He stepped aside and out of the general room, where the blinds were drawn, into his private office, in order to give his creditors an opportunity to confer privately in regard to his situation. He had friends in the meeting who were for him. He waited one, two, nearly three hours while they talked. Finally Walter Leigh, Judge Kitchen, Avery Stone, of Jay Cooke & Co., and several others came in. They were a committee appointed to gather further information.
“Nothing more can be done to-day, Frank,” Walter Leigh informed him, quietly. “The majority want the privilege of examining the books. There is some uncertainty about this entanglement with the city treasurer which you say exists. They feel that you’d better announce a temporary suspension, anyhow; and if they want to let you resume later they can do so.”
“I’m sorry for that, gentlemen,” replied Cowperwood, the least bit depressed. “I would rather do anything than suspend for one hour, if I could help it, for I know just what it means. You will find assets here far exceeding the liabilities if you will take the stocks at their normal market value; but that won’t help any if I close my doors. The public won’t believe in me. I ought to keep open.”
“Sorry, Frank, old boy,” observed Leigh, pressing his hand affectionately. “If it were left to me personally, you could have all the time you want. There’s a crowd of old fogies out there that won’t listen to reason. They’re panic-struck. I guess they’re pretty hard hit themselves. You can scarcely blame them. You’ll come out all right, though I wish you didn’t have to shut up shop. We can’t do anything with them, however. Why, damn it, man, I don’t see how you can fail, really. In ten days these stocks will be all right.”
Judge Kitchen commiserated with him also; but what good did that do? He was being compelled to suspend. An expert accountant would have to come in and go over his books. Butler might spread the news of this city-treasury connection. Stener might complain of this last city-loan transaction. A half-dozen of his helpful friends stayed with him until four o’clock in the morning; but he had to suspend just the same. And when he did that, he knew he was seriously crippled if not ultimately defeated in his race for wealth and fame.
When he was really and finally quite alone in his private bedroom he stared at himself in the mirror. His face was pale and tired, he thought, but strong and effective. “Pshaw!” he said to himself, “I’m not whipped. I’m still young. I’ll get out of this in some way yet. Certainly I will. I’ll find some way out.”
And so, cogitating heavily, wearily, he began to undress. Finally he sank upon his bed, and in a little while, strange as it may seem, with all the tangle of trouble around him, slept. He could do that — sleep and gurgle most peacefully, the while his father paced the floor in his room, refusing to be comforted. All was dark before the older man — the future hopeless. Before the younger man was still hope.
And in her room Lillian Cowperwood turned and tossed in the face of this new calamity. For it had suddenly appeared from news from her father and Frank and Anna and her mother-in-law that Frank was about to fail, or would, or had — it was almost impossible to say just how it was. Frank was too busy to explain. The Chicago fire was to blame. There was no mention as yet of the city treasurership. Frank was caught in a trap, and was fighting for his life.
In this crisis, for the moment, she forgot about the note as to his infidelity, or rather ignored it. She was astonished, frightened, dumbfounded, confused. Her little, placid, beautiful world was going around in a dizzy ring. The charming, ornate ship of their fortune was being blown most ruthlessly here and there. She felt it a sort of duty to stay in bed and try to sleep; but her eyes were quite wide, and her brain hurt her. Hours before Frank had insisted that she should not bother about him, that she could do nothing; and she had left him, wondering more than ever what and where was the line of her duty. To stick by her husband, convention told her; and so she decided. Yes, religion dictated that, also custom. There were the children. They must not be injured. Frank must be reclaimed, if possible. He would get over this. But what a blow!