Читать книгу The Sixty-First Second - Owen Johnson - Страница 3
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"'I shall have the detectives here—a man and a woman—within half an hour. There's nothing to do but wait'" . . . . . . Frontispiece
"'Look here, Rita. Can't I help out some way?'"
"'Come outside—in the garden. I want to speak to you. Come quietly'"
"'I have not hesitated to trust in you—you must in me'"
"'Aha! I made them sit up, didn't I—your cold women!'"
The Sixty-First Second
CHAPTER I
In the year 19—, toward the end of the month of October, the country was on the eve of a stupendous panic. A period of swollen prosperity had just ended in which Titans had striven in a frenzy for the millions that opportunity had spilled before them.
For months the stock market had steadily lowered, owing to the flight of the small investor, affrighted by the succession of investigations, the fear of readjustments, and the distrust of the great manipulators. The public, which understands nothing of the secret wars and hidden alliances of finance, had begun tremulously to be aware of the threatening approach of a stupendous catastrophe. So in the ominous, grumbling days of October, when the air was full of confusing rumors and violent alarms, the public, with its necessity for humanizing all sensations, perceived distinctly only two figures, each dramatically in peril, about whose safety or ruin the whole comprehensible drama of the financial cataclysm seemed to center.
These two figures, both presidents of great trust companies, giants in their own sphere, represented two opposite elements of that great mass of society which seeks its level in Wall Street. Bernard L. Majendie, president of the Atlantic Trust Company, member of every exclusive club, patron of the arts, representative of one of the oldest American families, accustomed to leadership and wealth from colonial times, was linked in a common danger with John G. Slade, president of the Associated Trust Company, promoter, manipulator, owner of a chain of Western newspapers, a man who had hauled himself out of the lowest depths of society. Many believed that both, in the relentless readjustment which the banks were forcing on the trust companies, were destined to be blotted out in the general catastrophe. Many others, perceiving the strange oppositeness of the two individuals, speculated on which would survive the other, if indeed either were to persist.
About three o'clock of a certain afternoon, when each extra brought a new alarm, John G. Slade came abruptly from the great library, down the sounding marble descent that was a replica of the famous rampe of the Château of Gerny, into the tapestry-hung vestibule of his palace on upper Fifth Avenue.
He stood a moment in blank meditation, while the third man held his overcoat open and ready, watching anxiously the frown on the face of the master, who stood before him, a massive six-foot-four. Already in the great marble home itself was that feeling of alarm from the outer world which had communicated itself to the servants. Suddenly Slade, returning to himself, detected the furtive scrutiny of the footman and the butler, who had so far departed from their correctly petrified attitudes as to exchange wondering glances. He frowned, pointed to his loose black felt hat and his favorite cane, and tore so rapidly through the heavily ironed doors and down the steps to the waiting automobile that the second footman stumbled twice in his haste to be before him. Two or three reporters, who had been lurking behind the great marble bastions, sprang forward as Slade, disappearing in the motor, was whirled away.
"Up river," he said briefly, and sank back in his seat.
He was in the middle forties, a man noticeable anywhere for the overmastering vitality of his carriage and the defiant poise of his head. Nature had admirably designed him for what he was intended to be—a being always at war with men and surrounding circumstances. His face was devoid of any fine indications of sensibility, of reflection, or humorous perception of life. The upper and lower maxillary bones were in such gaunt relief they seemed rather steel girders hung to support a granite will. The head was square, sunk rather than placed upon his shoulders, and the line of the head at the back was straight and full of crude power. He had, at the same time, a suggestion in the shoulders of the obstinacy of the buffalo, the most distinctive of American beasts, and in the eye-pits of the fatalism of the Indian, which as a type often seems not so much the physical tenacity of an unexplained race as it does the peculiar impress of a continent and an atmosphere surcharged with vitality.
The eyes were a clear blue, the eyes of a boy in mischief who is still sublimely defiant of the tripping obstacles of an ethical code. This quality of the boy, characteristic too of the American, was the secret of all his seeming inconstancy of unrelenting cruelty and sudden sentimental impulsiveness. Life was to him a huge dare, and all the perils of finance the hazards of a monstrous gamble, which alone were able to supply him with that overwhelming quality of sensation that such men covet in life.
A waif at six; a wharf rat at twelve, endowed with the strength of a man; leader of a gang at sixteen, hated, feared, always fighting; gaining his first start in politics, and then, by making a lucky strike in the silver mines of Colorado, educating himself with primitive necessary knowledge, always acquiring, never relaxing what his fingers touched, a terrible antagonist, risking his all a dozen times in the hunger for a greater stake—he had emerged at last from the churning vortex of a brutal struggle, possessor of a fortune that fifty times had hung on the events of a day. For five years he had been involved in countless lawsuits, accused of chicanery, extortion, conspiracy, and even murder. At the end of which period he came forth victorious, without losing a single suit, surrounded, it is true, by every calumny that could be invented, accused of manipulating legislatures, corrupting judges, and removing witnesses.
Through it all he had remained unshattered, boyishly delighted, his body unyielding to the strain of sleepless nights and months of unrelenting vigilance. He had lived hard, ready to gamble for a thousand or a hundred thousand, cynically announcing his motto:
"No friends. So long as every man is my enemy, I am safe."
And this theory of life he had carried out to the minutest detail. Men represented to him simply the male of the species, to be met head on, to strive with and overthrow. So completely did this obsess him that no one, not even his secretaries (whom he changed constantly), had the slightest inkling of his plans. Two of his subordinates, hoping to profit by their intimacy, had foolishly invested on his deliberately given tips—and had been ruined. Afterward he cited their cases as a warning to other applicants.
From the start, always counting on the year ahead, he had outrun his income. When he had ten thousand, he was spending fifteen; at fifty thousand, seventy-five. Every one who came in contact with him was paid twice over, and robbed him in the bargain—a fact on which he counted and to which he was quite indifferent.
Coming to Wall Street in that period of fevered speculation, he had been among the first to perceive the enormous instruments at hand in the development of a chain of trust companies which would supply a conveniently masked agency for the enormous capital that he needed to compete on equal terms with the leaders of the Street.
That now, for the first time, he was confronted with a situation of absolute and impending ruin, brought him not the slightest depression, but rather that exhilaration and sudden clearness of mind which is characteristic of the gambler face to face with the supreme hour which means absolute bankruptcy or a fortune.
At every block some one on the crowded sidewalk, or a group in a passing carriage, turned with a hasty exclamation at the sight of his bulky figure under the black sombrero, fleeing in the red automobile that was itself at this period a rarity. At one point where a blockade compelled him to halt, a newsboy, jumping on the sideboard, thrust a newspaper in his face. He flung a dime and glanced at the headlines:
MARKET STILL GOING DOWN
RUMORED SUSPENSIONS
Then he tossed it aside and returned to his own calculations. All at once he roused himself and addressed the chauffeur:
"Harkness, Mrs. Braddon's. Take the park."
But as the automobile, turning from the river, descended by way of green woods, he began restlessly to repent of his choice. His hatred of men had made him strangely dependent on women. It was not that they were able to establish any empire over his senses, but that they supplied a curious outlet to his vanity. At times, especially as in the present, when he felt the necessity of assembling every resource to meet a crisis, it became absolutely necessary for him to find, in the tribute he exacted from them, that self-confidence which he needed to override other obstacles. Often he would take in his automobile three or four women of that class which is half professional, half of the world, and, running slowly through the pleasant country, recount stories of his early struggles, of how he had railroaded an enemy to prison, or caught an adversary in a turn of the market and broken him. And when these tales of unrelenting enmity made his audience shudder, he keenly perceived it, and enjoyed almost a physical delight.
But this afternoon, as the car came to a stop before one of the great apartment-houses that front the park, he remained seated, unsatisfied and defrauded. It was not a woman of the superficial wit of Mrs. Braddon who could occupy and stimulate his mind in this crisis.
"Drive on," he said sharply. "Turn the corner and stop at the hotel."
There he descended, and entering went to the telephone.
"Mrs. Kildair?" he said eagerly, a moment later.
"Who is it, please?"
"This is Slade—John Slade. I'm coming over."
"I can't see you now," said a voice with a curious musical quality of self-possession. "I told you five o'clock."
"What difference does half an hour make?" he said impatiently.
"I have other company. You will have to be patient. At five."
The connection was shut off. He rose angrily, unaccustomed to any check to his immediate impulses. At the steps a boy came skipping down for the toll he had forgotten. He paid the exact amount, contrary to his custom, and drove his body back into the cushioned seat.
"Where to, sir?" said Harkness, turning.
"Anywhere," he answered gruffly, and, thwarted in his desire, he said to himself furiously: "That woman always opposes me! I must teach her a lesson. I won't go at all."
But at the end of a moment he pulled out his watch impatiently and calculated the time.
"Home," he said suddenly.
At the house, he ran rapidly through the opening doors and up the stairs to his bedroom, where he unlocked a little safe fixed in the wall behind a tapestry that hid it, and took out a tray of rings. Sorting them quickly, with a low, cynical chuckle, he selected a magnificent ruby, slipped it into his pocket, closed the safe, and passed out of the house with the same rapidity with which he had entered.
"Mrs. Kildair's, Harkness," he said. "Drive so as to get me there at five-fifteen."
"Now we shall see," he said to himself, with a smile, gazing at the ring in the palm of his hand with a man's contemptuous contemplation of the stone which could hold such fascination over a woman's soul. For him it was absolutely necessary, as a first step toward his conquest of all his enemies, to feel his power over this one present resistance.
The idea that had come into his head restored his good humor and aroused in him a certain joy of energy. He had forgot momentarily his errand, absorbed in his own battle for existence.
"Today is Thursday," he said, with renewed energy. "Next Wednesday will be the crisis. I must find out what Majendie is going to do. Snelling's the man to know—or Garraboy."
The car stopped. He sprang out and, without giving his name, entered the elevator. At the apartment a Japanese servant took his things and ushered him into the low-lit greens of the studio, which ran the height of the two floors that formed the duplex apartment.
Mrs. Rita Kildair was stretched on a low Récamier sofa, watching him with amused eyes as he entered with that atmosphere of strife and fury that seemed always to play about him. She waited until he had come to her side before she raised her hand to his, in a gesture that had no animation, saying:
"How do you do?"
Something in the tranquil, amused self-possession of her pose made him stupidly repeat the question. Then, forgetting his resolve to show no impatience, he said impetuously:
"Why did you keep me waiting?"
"Because I did not wish to see your highness then."
"Not dressed?"
"No, I was simply amusing myself with a very nice boy."
"Who?"
She smiled, and, without heed to his question, motioned him to a chair with a little gesture, not of her arm, but of her fingers, on which she wore several rings of unusual luster. She had, as a woman, that same magnetic self-consciousness that distinguishes the great actress, aware that every eye is focused on her and that the slightest change of her hand or shift of her head has an instantaneous importance.
Slade obeyed her with a sudden sense of warm content.
"Smoke?" he said, taking out a cigar. "Permission?"
He helped himself to a match, sunk himself in the great chair, crossed his legs, and looked at her.
Rita Kildair gave that complex appearance of a woman much younger than she seemed, or of a woman much older. She was at that mental phase in her life when she exhaled to the fullest that perfume of mystery which is the most feminine and irresistible of all the powers that a woman exerts over the masculine imagination, if indeed it is not the sum of all seductions. The inexplicable in her own life and individuality was heightened in every way by the subservience of outward things, whether by calculation or by an instinctive sense of interpretation.
The great studio, to the neglect of the electric chandelier, was lit by half a dozen candles, which flung about conflicting eddies of wavering lights and shadows. In farther corners were a divan, a piano, a portrait on an easel, lounges, waiting like so many shadows to be called forth. A standing lamp, not too near, bathed the couch on which she lay with a softened luster. Her tea-gown of liberty silk, with tones that changed and mingled with each other, was of the purple of the grape, an effect produced, too, by the superimposition of one filmy garment on the other. A slippered foot and ankle came forth from the fragrant disorder of the skirt, either by studied arrangement or by the impulse of a woman who is confident of all her poses. Her nose, quite the most individual feature, was aquiline, yet not such as is associated with a masculine character. Rather, it was vitally sensitive, and gave, in conjunction with the intent and instantaneous aspect of her grayish eyes, the instinctive, almost savage appetite for possession and sensation that is characteristic of her sex. No one looked at her without asking himself a question. Those who believed her under thirty wondered at the experiences that must have crowded in upon her. Those who believed her nearer forty still marveled at her mastery over youth. Those of an analytical mind left her always with a feeling of speculation framed in two questions—whence had she come and where would she end?
It was this latter speculation more than any other that absorbed Slade, irresistibly intrigued by the elusiveness of a fascination which he could not analyze. She endured his fixed glance without annoyance, absorbed, too, in the thoughts which his entrance had brought her. Finally, adapting her manner to his, she said with his own abruptness:
"Well, what do you want to say to me?"
"I'm wondering what you are after in this life, pretty lady?" he said directly.
"What do you want?"
"Power."
"Not to be bored."
They smiled by common consent.
"And now we know no more than we did before," he said.
She stretched out her slender hand against the purple folds of her gown, and her eyes lingered on the jewels that she held caressingly before them—a look that did not escape the man.
"By thunder, you're the strangest thing I've run into," he said, shifting his legs.
"On each of the eight times we have been alone," she said, smiling, "you have made precisely that same discovery. Did you forget?"
"I'd like to know something about you," he said.
"How old I am—about my husband—what I am doing here—am I rich—what's my past—and so on. Consider all these questions asked and refused—for the ninth time. And now, what—why did you come here?"
He put aside his cigar impatiently, propelled himself to his feet, and came forward until his knee touched the couch. She looked up, pleasantly aware of so much brute strength held in leash above her.
"Sit down."
And, as he remained standing, she took a little electric button attached to a coil that was on the couch, and pressed it. In the hall outside a buzz was heard, and then the soft, sliding step of Kiki.
"Tea?" she said, turning to him with an amused look, the little button pressed against her thin, sharp row of teeth, that were clear and tiny as a child's.
"No, of course not," he said furiously.
"No tea, Kiki," she said, in that same round, musical tone from which she seldom varied. She held the button in her long fingers, caressing her cheek with it, and, looking at him with half-closed eyes, repeated:
"Sit down."
Though the forward movement of Slade had been unconscious and quite devoid of any personal object, he was angrily aware that she had availed herself of his action to introduce a tantalizing defiance which awakened all the savage in him, as he realized the helplessness of his crude strength before the raillery that shone from her eyes.
He drew his chair closer to her, sat down on its edge, one knee forward, his chin in his hand half concealing his face, looking at her with the shrewd cruelty of a prosecuting attorney.
"What's your game?" he said.
"The game itself," she answered, with a little animation in her eyes and a scarcely perceptible, gradual turning of her whole body toward him.
"What's your game?" he repeated.
She looked at him a moment as she might have looked at a child, and then, imitating the gesture with which he had sunk his chin in his palm, said:
"What a convenient formula! And is that the way you always begin?"
"Perhaps."
"Do you know," she continued, "it is extraordinary how simple you big men—you trust kings—are. You have the vision of an eagle on one side, and the groping glance of a baby when you deal with us. Sometimes I think that it's all instinct, that all you understand is to throw down what resists you—that you haven't great minds at all, and that that is all that interests you in business and in us. That is why a big man will always end up by meeting some little woman who will lead him around by the nose. Any little fool of a woman who knows enough never to cease resisting you can do it."
"Do you like me?" he said brutally.
"Yes."
"Much?"
"Quite a good deal."
"Are you planning to marry me?"
She smiled her languid, amused smile without shifting her glance from his.
"Why don't you come to the point?" she said.
"What do you mean?"
"I don't have to ask your game; I know it."
"What do you know?"
"Shall I tell you why you came here at a moment when you are at bay, attacked everywhere?"
"Why?"
"To find out what I know about Majendie."
"Do you know anything?"
"He is coming here tonight," she said.
"No, that is not it," he said scornfully, rising and again approaching her. "You know better. You exhilarate me—you wake me up; and I need to be stimulated. So you've got it back in your little brain to marry me," he said, looking down with amused contemplation at the reclining figure, that was not so much human as a perfumed bed of flowers; "that is, if I pull through and keep my head above water."
He hesitated a moment, and then said:
"Why did you keep me waiting? Just to annoy me?"
"I wonder," she said, looking up from under her eyelashes at his towering figure. "Perhaps it was to teach you some things are difficult."
"That's it, eh?"
"Perhaps—and I'm afraid I shall irritate you many more times."
He took a step nearer and said abruptly:
"Look out! I don't play fair."
"Neither do I," she said.
She took the button up again, frowning in a nonchalant way, and held it a moment while she waited for his decision. He shrugged his shoulders and stood back, taking several steps toward the center of the room.
"Listen, John G. Slade," she said, her tone changing from the felinely feminine to the matter-of-fact, "don't let's continue as children. You are no match for me at this game. I warn you. Come. Be direct. Will you have me as an ally?"
He turned and looked at her, considering.
"In what way?"
"Is it of importance to you to know the probable fate of Majendie and the Atlantic Trust?"
"Yes—in a way."
"I may have means of learning just that information tonight."
"What do you want in return?"
"Full confidence. I want two questions answered."
"What?"
She had raised herself to a sitting position out of the languor which was not the indolence of the Oriental, but rather the volcanic slumbering of the Slav, always ready to break forth into sudden tremendous exertion.
"Can the Associated Trust meet its Wednesday obligations without assistance?"
"And second?" he said, amazed at the detailed knowledge that her question implied.
"Second, if it can't, will the Clearing-house help it through?"
"What difference to you would it make to know?"
"It would."
"How long have you known Bernard Majendie?" he said slowly.
She accepted the question as a rebuff.
"There are my terms," she said, sinking back on the couch. "You don't wish an ally, then?"
"No."
"You don't trust me?"
"No."
"I knew you wouldn't," she said indolently; "and yet, I could help you more than you think."
"I trusted a man once," he said scornfully. "I have never made that mistake with a woman."
"As you wish."
"Are you trying a flyer?" he said, smiling. "That's the game, is it—a tip?"
"I have told you," she said coldly and in a tone that carried conviction, "that what interests me is to win the game itself, the excitement and the perils. And I have been behind the scenes many times."
"I believe it," he said abruptly. "I should like to hear—"
"I am a woman who keeps the secrets of others and her own," she answered, interrupting his question.
"And if you marry?" he said curiously.
"Even then." She dismissed the return to the personal with the first quick movement of her hand and continued: "I should say, you are the best hated man in Wall Street."
"That's not exactly inside information."
"No one is going to come to your help out of friendship."
"True."
"If Majendie and the Atlantic Trust Company fail, nothing in this world can pull you through," she said, seeking in some uncontrolled movement of his an answer to the statement that was in reality a question.
From the moment she had begun to question him, he experienced a sudden change. He was no longer dealing with a woman, but with an element he had outguessed a hundred times.
All at once an odd idea came to him which struck him as stupendously ridiculous, and yet made him glower in covert admiration at the woman who watched him while seemingly engaged with the rearrangement of her draperies.
"Is it possible, after all," he thought, "that that ambitious little head is playing with both Majendie and me, and that she is setting her cap for the survivor?"
He came back, reseated himself, and said, with an appearance of candor which would have deceived most people:
"You say Majendie is coming here tonight?"
"Yes."
"Do you know where he is this afternoon?"
"Yes."
"And the object of his visit?"
"The object is easy to guess," she said indifferently. "You know perfectly well that he is in conference with Fontaine, Marx, and Gunther, and what you wish to know is whether they are going to stand aside and let him sink. Are you ready to answer my two questions?"
"And when will you know if he has failed or succeeded?"
"Tonight."
"He will tell you?"
"I shall know tonight," she said, with an evasive smile.
"What's your private opinion?"
"They will come to his assistance," she said carefully.
"Because they are his personal friends," he said, with an accent of raillery.
"Naturally."
"You believe Majendie will pull through?"
"I do." She looked at him a moment, and asked the question, not so much to receive an answer as to judge from his manner: "Can the Associated Trust meet its obligations on Wednesday without assistance?"
"I can," he said quietly, and to himself he added: "There—if Majendie has set her to pump me, little good that'll do him."
"But if the Atlantic Trust Company shuts its doors," she persisted, "you are caught?"
"That is the general opinion."
"Will you fail?"
"No."
She was quiet a moment, dissatisfied, looked away from him and then said:
"So you don't care to know what I shall learn to-night?"
"My dear lady, I won't tell you a thing," he said, with a laugh, "so stop trying. Leave us to fight our own battles. Plot all you want in your cunning head your little feminine plans, but don't get beyond your depth."
"I see you believe I'm interested in Majendie," she said, with a shrug of her shoulders. "You are not very well informed."
"No," he said bluntly; "you are interested in no one but Rita Kildair. I know that much." He rose, took several strides back and forth, and, returning, stood by her. "I hate allies," he said; "I prefer to consider you as a woman."
His remark brought a sharp gleam of curiosity to her eyes, a spark of instinctive sex antagonism that flashed and disappeared.
"Remember, I have warned you," she said, retiring as abruptly into the feline languor of her pose.
He stood, swayed by two emotions, the purely gentle, almost caressing effect her indolence brought him, and the desire to establish some sudden empire over her—to feel his strength above hers.
"What's the weak point in your armor?" he said savagely.
"I wouldn't tell you."
"I think I know one."
"Really?"
He drew his chair still closer, and, leaning over, touched with his stubby forefinger the rings on her outstretched hand.
"Jewels?" she said, smiling.
"Yes."
"Any woman is the same."
"Why?"
"I don't know—it is so," she said, and, raising the deep lusters, she allowed her glance to rest on them as in a dream of opium.
He drew from his pocket the ring with the ruby, and held it out.
"Try this on."
She took it between her finger-tips slowly, looking at him with a glance that was a puzzled frown, and slipped it on her finger. Then she extended her hand gradually to the full length of her white arm against the purple, and half closed her eyes. There was no outward sign; only a deep breath went through her, as though an immense change had taken place in the inner woman.
"Now I know what I want to know," he said, watching her closely with almost an animal joy in this sudden revelation of an appetite in her.
"It's a wonderful stone," she said in a whisper; then she drew it off slowly, as though the flesh rebelled, and held it out to him, turning away her eyes.
"Keep it."
She raised her eyes and looked at him steadily.
"You are cleverer than I thought," she said.
"Keep it."
"Is this for information about Majendie?" she said slowly.
"Not for that."
"For what, then?" she said steadily.
"For a whim."
"Thanks; I don't trust your whims."
For all reply, he took her hand and again placed the ring on it.
"Wear it," he said.
She turned the stone quickly inside her palm as though unable to endure its lure, and looked at him profoundly.
"Are you going to pull through?" she said angrily.
"Will it make a difference?" he asked, rising, with a quick glance at his watch.
She rose in her turn, facing him with a sudden energy.
"Do you know the one great mistake you have made?"
"What?"
"You have condemned yourself to success."
"What do you mean by that?" he said.
"You must always succeed, and that is terrible! At the first defeat every one will be up in arms against you—because every one wants to see you ruined."
"Every one?" he said, looking in her eyes.
A second time she took off the ring and gave it to him, and as he protested she said coldly:
"Don't make me angry. The comedy has been amusing. Enough. Also, don't trouble yourself about my motives. I haven't the slightest intention of marrying you or any one else."
And she accompanied the words with a gesture so imperative that, amazed at the change, he no longer insisted. As he put out his hand, she said suddenly, as if obeying an intuition:
"I will tell you what you want to know. Gunther is almost sure to come to Majendie's aid. I know it by a woman. Take care of yourself."
"And I will tell you exactly the opposite," he said, bluffing. "Gunther will not lend a cent; Majendie will go under, and I'll pull through."
"You'll pull through even if the Atlantic Trust closes?"
"Exactly."
"Good-by," she said, with a shrug.
"Remember what I said," he repeated, and went out.
Five minutes later the bell rang, and Kiki brought her a little box and an envelope. She recognized Slade's writing, and read:
