The Deluge. David Graham Phillips
be no use to tell 'em that,” said he. “Character's something of a consideration in social matters, of course. But it isn't the chief consideration by a long shot, and the absence of it isn't necessarily fatal.”
“I'm the biggest single operator in the country,” I went on. “And it's my methods that give me success—because I know how to advertise—how to keep my name before the country, and how to make men say, whenever they hear it: 'There's a shrewd, honest fellow.' That and the people it brings me, in flocks, are my stock in trade. Honesty's a bluff with most of the big respectables; under cover of their respectability, of their 'old and honored names,' of their social connections, of their church-going and that, they do all sorts of queer work.”
“To hear you talk,” put in Sam, with a grin, “one would think you didn't shove off millions of dollars of suspicious stuff on the public through those damn clever letters of yours.”
“There's where you didn't stop to think, Sam,” said I. “When I say a stock's going to rise, it rises. When I stop talking about it, it may go on rising or it may fall. But I never advise anybody to buy except when I have every reason to believe it's a good thing. If they hold on too long, that's their own lookout.”
“But they invest—”
“You use words too carelessly,” I said. “When I say buy, I don't mean invest. When I mean invest, I say invest.” There I laughed. “It's a word I don't often use.”
“And that's what you call honesty!” jeered he.
“That's what I call honesty,” I retorted, “and that is honesty.” And I thought so then.
“Well—every man has a right to his own notion of what's honest,” he said. “But no man's got a right to complain if a fellow with a different notion criticizes him.”
“None in the world,” I assented. “Do you criticize me?”
“No, no, no, indeed!” he answered, nervous, and taking seriously what I had intended as a joke.
After a while I dragged in the subject. “One thing I can and will do to get myself in line for that club,” I said, like a seal on promenade. “I'm sick of the crowd I travel with—the men and the women. I feel it's about time I settled down. I've got a fortune and establishment that needs a woman to set it off. I can make some woman happy. You don't happen to know any nice girls—the right sort, I mean?”
“Not many.” said Sam. “You'd better go back to the country where you came from, and get her there. She'd be eternally grateful, and her head wouldn't be full of mercenary nonsense.”
“Excuse me!” exclaimed I. “It'd turn her head. She'd go clean crazy. She'd plunge in up to her neck—and not being used to these waters, she'd make a show of herself, and probably drown, dragging me down with her, if possible.”
Sam laughed. “Keep out of marriage, Matt,” he advised, not so obtuse to my real point as he wanted me to believe. “I know the kind of girl you've got in mind. She'd marry you for your money, and she'd never appreciate you. She'd see in you only the lack of the things she's been taught to lay stress on.”
“For instance?”
“I couldn't tell you any more than I could enable you to recognize a person you'd never seen by describing him.”
“Ain't I a gentleman?” I inquired.
He laughed, as if the idea tickled him. “Of course,” he said. “Of course.”
“Ain't I got as proper a country place as there is a-going? Ain't my apartment in the Willoughby a peach? Don't I give as elegant dinners as you ever sat down to? Don't I dress right up to the Piccadilly latest? Don't I act all right—know enough to keep my feet off the table and my knife out of my mouth?” All true enough; and I so crude then that I hadn't a suspicion what a flat contradiction of my pretensions and beliefs about myself the very words and phrases were.
“You're right in it, Matt,” said Sam. “But—well—you haven't traveled with our crowd, and they're shy of strangers, especially as—as energetic a sort of stranger as you are. You're too sudden, Matt—too dazzling—too—”
“Too shiny and new?” said I, beginning to catch his drift. “That'll be looked after. What I want is you to take me round a bit.”
“I can't ask you to people's houses,” protested he, knowing I'd not realize what a flimsy pretense that was.
While we were talking I had been thinking—working out the proposition along lines he had indicated to me without knowing it. “Look here, Sam,” I said. “You imagine I'm trying to butt in with a lot of people that don't know me and don't want to know me. But that ain't my point of view. Those people can be useful to me. I need 'em. What do I care whether they want to be useful to me or not? The machine'd have run down and rusted out long ago if you and your friends' idea of a gentleman had been taken seriously by anybody who had anything to do and knew how to do it. In this world you've got to make people do what's for your good and their own. Your idea of a gentleman was put forward by lazy fakirs who were living off of what their ungentlemanly ancestors had annexed, and who didn't want to be disturbed. So they 'fixed' the game by passing these rules you and your kind are fools enough to abide by—that is, you are fools, unless you haven't got brains enough to get on in a free-and-fair-for-all.”
Sam laughed.. “There's a lot of truth in what you say,” he admitted.
“However,” I ended, “my plans don't call for hurry just there. When I get ready to go round, I'll let you know.”
VII. BLACKLOCK GOES INTO TRAINING
This brings me to the ugliest story my enemies have concocted against me. No one appreciates more thoroughly than I that, to rise high, a man must have his own efforts seconded by the flood of vituperation that his enemies send to overwhelm him, and which washes him far higher than he could hope to lift himself. So I do not here refer to any attack on me in the public prints; I think of them only with amusement and gratitude. The story that rankles is the one these foes of mine set creeping, like a snake under the fallen leaves, everywhere, anywhere, unseen, without a trail. It has been whispered into every ear—and it is, no doubt, widely believed—that I deliberately put old Bromwell Ellersly “in a hole,” and there tortured him until he consented to try to compel his daughter to marry me.
It is possible that, if I had thought of such a devilish device, I might have tried it—is not all fair in love? But there was no need for my cudgeling my brains to carry that particular fortification on my way to what I had fixed my will upon. Bromwell Ellersly came to me of his own accord.
I suppose the Ellerslys must have talked me over in the family circle. However this may be, my acquaintance with her father began with Sam's asking me to lunch with him. “The governor has heard me talk of you so much,” said he, “that he is anxious to meet you.”
I found him a dried-up, conventional old gentleman, very proud of his ancestors, none of whom I had ever heard of, and very positive that a great deal of deference was due him—though on what grounds I could not then, and can not now, make out. I soon discovered that it was the scent of my stock-tip generosity, wafted to him by Sammy, that had put him hot upon my trail. I hadn't gone far into his affairs before I learned that he had been speculating, mortgaging, kiting notes, doing what he called, and thought, “business” on a large scale. He regarded business as beneath the dignity and the intellect of a “gentleman”—how my gorge does rise at that word! So he put his great mind on it only for a few hours now and then; he reserved the rest of his time for what he regarded as the proper concerns of a gentleman—attending to social “duties,” reading pretentious books, looking at the pictures and listening to the music