Kitabı oku: «Windy McPherson's Son», sayfa 15
“Let us see Edwards this evening,” said Webster dryly.
Sam nodded, and late that night made the deal that gave him control of the two important western companies and put him in position to move on the eastern companies with every prospect of complete success. To Edwards he went with an exaggerated report of the support he had already got for his project, and having frightened him offered him the presidency of the new company and promised that it should be incorporated under the name of The Edwards Consolidated Firearms Company of America.
The eastern companies fell quickly. With Webster Sam tried on them the old dodge of telling each that the other two had agreed to come in, and it worked.
With the coming in of Edwards and the options given by the eastern companies Sam began to get also the support of the LaSalle Street bankers. The firearms trust was one of the few big consolidations managed wholly in the west, and after two or three of the bankers had agreed to help finance Sam’s plan the others began asking to be taken into the underwriting syndicate he and Webster had formed. Within thirty days after the closing of the deal with Tom Edwards Sam felt that he was ready to act.
For several months Colonel Tom had known something of the plans Sam had on foot, and had made no protest. He had in fact given Sam to understand that his stock would be voted with Sue’s, controlled by Sam, and with the stock of the other directors who knew of and hoped to share in the profits of Sam’s deal. The old gunmaker had all of his life believed that the other American firearms companies were but shadows destined to disappear before the rising sun of the Rainey Company, and thought of Sam’s project as an act of providence to further this desirable end.
At the moment of his acquiescence in Webster’s plan, for landing Tom Edwards, Sam had a moment of doubt, and now, with the success of his project in sight, he began to wonder how the blustering old man would look upon Edwards as the titular head of the big company and upon the name of Edwards in the title of the company.
For two years Sam had seen little of the colonel, who had given up all pretence to an active part in the management of the business and who, finding Sue’s new friends disconcerting, seldom appeared at the house, living at the clubs, playing billiards all day long, or sitting in the club windows boasting to chance listeners of his part in the building of the Rainey Arms Company.
With a mind filled with doubt Sam went home and put the matter before Sue. She was dressed and ready for an evening at the theatre with a party of friends and the talk was brief.
“He will not mind,” she said indifferently. “Go ahead and do what you want to do.”
Sam rode back to the office and called his lieutenants about him. He felt that the thing might as well be done and over, and with the options in his hands, and the ability he thought he had to control his own company, he was ready to come out into the open and get the deal cleaned up.
The morning papers that carried the story of the proposed big new consolidation of firearms companies carried also an almost life-size halftone of Colonel Tom Rainey, a slightly smaller one of Tom Edwards, and grouped about these, small pictures of Sam, Lewis, Prince, Webster, and several of the eastern men. By the size of the half-tone, Sam, Prince, and Morrison had tried to reconcile Colonel Tom to Edwards’ name in the title of the new company and to Edwards’ coming election as president. The story also played up the past glories of the Rainey Company and its directing genius, Colonel Tom. One phrase, written by Morrison, brought a smile to Sam’s lips.
“This grand old patriarch of American business, retired now from active service, is like a tired giant, who, having raised a brood of young giants, goes into his castle to rest and reflect and to count the scars won in many a hard-fought battle.”
Morrison laughed as he read it aloud.
“It ought to get the colonel,” he said, “but the newspaper man who prints it should be hung.”
“They will print it all right,” said Jack Prince.
And they did print it; going from newspaper office to newspaper office Prince and Morrison saw to that, using their influence as big buyers of advertising space and even insisting upon reading proof on their own masterpiece.
But it did not work. Early the next morning Colonel Tom appeared at the offices of the arms company with blood in his eye, and swore that the consolidation should not be put through. For an hour he stormed up and down in Sam’s office, his outbursts of wrath varied by periods of childlike pleading for the retention of the name and glory of the Raineys. When Sam shook his head and went with the old man to the meeting that was to pass upon his action and sell the Rainey Company, he knew that he had a fight on his hands.
The meeting was a stormy one. Sam made a talk telling what had been done and Webster, voting some of Sam’s proxies, made a motion that Sam’s offer for the old company be accepted.
And then Colonel Tom fired his guns. Walking up and down in the room before the men, sitting at a long table or in chairs tilted against the walls, he began talking with all of his old flamboyant pomposity of the past glories of the Rainey Company. Sam watched him quietly thinking of the exhibition as something detached and apart from the business of the meeting. He remembered a question that had come into his head when he was a schoolboy and had got his first peep into a school history. There had been a picture of Indians at the war dance and he had wondered why they danced before rather than after battle. Now his mind answered the question.
“If they had not danced before they might never have got the chance,” he thought, and smiled to himself.
“I call upon you men here to stick to the old colours,” roared the colonel, turning and making a direct attack upon Sam. “Do not let this ungrateful upstart, this son of a drunken village housepainter, that I picked up from among the cabbages of South Water Street, win you away from your loyalty to the old leader. Do not let him steal by trickery what we have won only by years of effort.”
The colonel, leaning on the table, glared about the room. Sam felt relieved and glad of the direct attack.
“It justifies what I am going to do,” he thought.
When Colonel Tom had finished Sam gave a careless glance at the old man’s red face and trembling fingers. He had no doubt that the outburst of eloquence had fallen upon deaf ears and without comment put Webster’s motion to the vote.
To his surprise two of the new employé directors voted their stock with Colonel Tom’s, and a third man, voting his own stock as well as that of a wealthy southside real estate man, did not vote. On a count the stock represented stood deadlocked and Sam, looking down the table, raised his eyebrows to Webster.
“Move we adjourn for twenty-four hours,” snapped Webster, and the motion carried.
Sam looked at a paper lying before him on the table. During the count of the vote he had been writing over and over on the sheet of paper this sentence.
“The best men spend their lives seeking truth.”
Colonel Tom walked out of the room like a conqueror, declining to speak to Sam as he passed, and Sam looked down the table at Webster and made a motion with his head toward the man who had not voted.
Within an hour Sam’s fight was won. Pouncing upon the man representing the stock of the south-side investor, he and Webster did not go out of the room until they had secured absolute control of the Rainey Company and the man who had refused to vote had put twenty-five thousand dollars into his pocket. The two employeé directors Sam marked for slaughter. Then after spending the afternoon and early evening with the representatives of the eastern companies and their attorneys he drove home to Sue.
It was past nine o’clock when his car stopped before the house and, going at once to his room, he found Sue sitting before his fire, her arms thrown above her head and her eyes staring at the burning coals.
As Sam stood in the doorway looking at her a wave of resentment swept over him.
“The old coward,” he thought, “he has brought our fight here to her.”
Hanging up his coat he filled his pipe and drawing up a chair sat beside her. For five minutes Sue sat staring into the fire. When she spoke there was a touch of hardness in her voice.
“When everything is said, Sam, you do owe a lot to father,” she observed, refusing to look at him.
Sam said nothing and she went on.
“Not that I think we made you, father and I. You are not the kind of man that people make or unmake. But, Sam, Sam, think what you are doing. He has always been a fool in your hands. He used to come home here when you were new with the company and talk of what he was doing. He had a whole new set of ideas and phrases; all that about waste and efficiency and orderly working toward a definite end. It did not fool me. I knew the ideas, and even the phrases he used to express them, were not his and I was not long finding out they were yours, that it was simply you expressing yourself through him. He is a big helpless child, Sam, and he is old. He hasn’t much longer to live. Do not be hard, Sam. Be merciful.”
Her voice did not tremble but tears ran down her rigid face and her expressive hands clutched at her dress.
“Can nothing change you? Must you always have your own way?” she added, still refusing to look at him.
“It is not true, Sue, that I always want my own way, and people do change me; you have changed me,” he said.
She shook her head.
“No, I have not changed you. I found you hungry for something and you thought I could feed it. I gave you an idea that you took hold of and made your own. I do not know where I got it, from some book or hearing some one talk, I suppose. But it belonged to you. You built it and fostered it in me and coloured it with your own personality. It is your idea to-day. It means more to you than all this firearms trust that the papers are full of.”
She turned to look at him, and put out her hand and laid it in his.
“I have not been brave,” she said. “I am standing in your way. I have had a hope that we would get back to each other. I should have freed you but I hadn’t the courage, I hadn’t the courage. I could not give up the dream that some day you would really take me back to you.”
Getting out of her chair she dropped to her knees and putting her head in his lap, shook with sobs. Sam sat stroking her hair. Her agitation was so great that her muscular little back shook with it.
Sam looked past her at the fire and tried to think clearly. He was not greatly moved by her agitation, but with all his heart he wanted to think things out and get at the right and the honest thing to do.
“It is a time of big things,” he said slowly and with an air of one explaining to a child. “As your socialists say, vast changes are going on. I do not believe that your socialists really sense what these changes mean, and I am not sure that I do or that any man does, but I know they mean something big and I want to be in them and a part of them; all big men do; they are struggling like chicks in the shell. Why, look here! What I am doing has to be done and if I do not do it another man will. The colonel has to go. He will be swept aside. He belongs to something old and outworn. Your socialists, I believe, call it the age of competition.”
“But not by us, not by you, Sam,” she plead. “After all, he is my father.”
A stern look came into Sam’s eyes.
“It does not ring right, Sue,” he said coldly; “fathers do not mean much to me. I choked my own father and threw him into the street when I was only a boy. You knew about that. You heard of it when you went to find out about me that time in Caxton. Mary Underwood told you. I did it because he lied and believed in lies. Do not your friends say that the individual who stands in the way should be crushed?”
She sprang to her feet and stood before him.
“Do not quote that crowd,” she burst out. “They are not the real thing. Do you suppose I do not know that? Do I not know that they come here because they hope to get hold of you? Haven’t I watched them and seen the look on their faces when you have not come or have not listened to their talk? They are afraid of you, all of them. That’s why they talk so bitterly. They are afraid and ashamed that they are afraid.”
“Like the workers in the shop?” he asked, musingly.
“Yes, like that, and like me since I failed in my part of our lives and had not the courage to get out of the way. You are worth all of us and for all our talk we shall never succeed or begin to succeed until we make men like you want what we want. They know that and I know it.”
“And what do you want?”
“I want you to be big and generous. You can be. Failure cannot hurt you. You and men like you can do anything. You can even fail. I cannot. None of us can. I cannot put my father to that shame. I want you to accept failure.”
Sam got up and taking her by the arm led her to the door. At the door he turned her about and kissed her on the lips like a lover.
“All right, Sue girl, I will do it,” he said, and pushed her through the door. “Now let me sit down by myself and think things out.”
It was a night in September and a whisper of the coming frost was in the air. He threw up the window and took long breaths of the sharp air and listened to the rumble of the elevated road in the distance. Looking up the boulevard he saw the lights of the cyclists making a glistening stream that flowed past the house. A thought of his new motor car and of all of the wonder of the mechanical progress of the world ran through his mind.
“The men who make machines do not hesitate,” he said to himself; “even though a thousand fat-hearted men stood in their way they would go on.”
A line of Tennyson’s came into his mind.
“And the nation’s airy navies grappling in the central blue,” he quoted, thinking of an article he had read predicting the coming of airships.
He thought of the lives of the workers in steel and iron and of the things they had done and would do.
“They have,” he thought, “freedom. Steel and iron do not run home to carry the struggle to women sitting by the fire.”
He walked up and down the room.
“Fat old coward. Damned fat old coward,” he muttered over and over to himself.
It was past midnight when he got into bed and began trying to quiet himself for sleep. In his dreams he saw a fat man with a chorus girl hanging to his arm kicking his head about a bridge above a swiftly flowing stream.
When he got down to the breakfast room the next morning Sue had gone. By his plate he found a note saying that she had gone for Colonel Tom and would take him to the country for the day. He walked to the office thinking of the incapable old man who, in the name of sentiment, had beaten him in what he thought the big enterprise of his life.
At his desk he found a message from Webster. “The old turkey cock has fled,” it said; “we should have saved the twenty-five thousand.”
On the phone Webster told Sam of an early visit to the club to see Colonel Tom and that the old man had left the city, going to the country for the day. It was on Sam’s lips to tell of his changed plans but he hesitated.
“I will see you at your office in an hour,” he said.
Outside again in the open air Sam walked and thought of his promise. Down by the lake he went to where the railroad with the lake beyond stopped him. Upon the old wooden bridge looking over the track and down to the water he stood as he had stood at other crises in his life and thought over the struggle of the night before. In the clear morning air, with the roar of the city behind him and the still waters of the lake in front, the tears, and the talk with Sue seemed but a part of the ridiculous and sentimental attitude of her father, and the promise given her insignificant and unfairly won. He reviewed the scene carefully, the talk and the tears and the promise given as he led her to the door. It all seemed far away and unreal like some promise made to a girl in his boyhood.
“It was never a part of all this,” he said, turning and looking at the towering city before him.
For an hour he stood on the wooden bridge. He thought of Windy McPherson putting the bugle to his lips in the streets of Caxton and again there sounded in his ears the roaring laugh of the crowd; again he lay in the bed beside Colonel Tom in that northern city and saw the moon rising over the round paunch and heard the empty chattering talk of love.
“Love,” he said, still looking toward the city, “is a matter of truth, not lies and pretence.”
Suddenly it seemed to him that if he went forward truthfully he should get even Sue back again some time. His mind lingered over the thoughts of the loves that come to a man in the world, of Sue in the wind-swept northern woods and of Janet in her wheel-chair in the little room where the cable cars ran rumbling under the window. And he thought of other things, of Sue reading papers culled out of books before the fallen women in the little State Street hall, of Tom Edwards with his new wife and his little watery eyes, of Morrison and the long-fingered socialist fighting over words at his table. And then pulling on his gloves he lighted a cigar and went back through the crowded streets to his office to do the thing he had determined on.
At the meeting that afternoon the project went through without a dissenting voice. Colonel Tom being absent, the two employé directors voted with Sam with almost panicky haste as Sam looking across at the well-dressed, cool-headed Webster, laughed and lighted a fresh cigar. And then he voted the stock Sue had intrusted to him for the project, feeling that in doing so he was cutting, perhaps for all time, the knot that bound them.
With the completion of the deal Sam stood to win five million dollars, more money than Colonel Tom or any of the Raineys had ever controlled, and had placed himself in the eyes of the business men of Chicago and New York where before he had placed himself in the eyes of Caxton and South Water Street. Instead of another Windy McPherson failing to blow his bugle before the waiting crowd, he was still the man who made good, the man who achieved, the kind of man of whom America boasts before the world.
He did not see Sue again. When the news of his betrayal reached her she went off east taking Colonel Tom with her, and Sam closed the house, even sending a man there for his clothes. To her eastern address, got from her attorney, he wrote a brief note offering to make over to her or to Colonel Tom his entire winnings from the deal and closed it with the brutal declaration, “At the end I could not be an ass, even for you.”
To this note Sam got a cold, brief reply telling him to dispose of her stock in the company and of that belonging to Colonel Tom, and naming an eastern trust company to receive the money. With Colonel Tom’s help she had made a careful estimate of the values of their holdings at the time of consolidation and refused flatly to accept a penny beyond that amount.
Sam felt that another chapter of his life was closed. Webster, Edwards, Prince, and the eastern men met and elected him chairman of the board of directors of the new company and the public bought eagerly the river of common stock he turned upon the market, Prince and Morrison doing masterful work in the moulding of public opinion through the press. The first board meeting ended with a dinner at which wine flowed in rivulets and Edwards, getting drunk, stood up at his place and boasted of the beauty of his young wife. And Sam, at his desk in his new offices in the Rookery, settled down grimly to the playing of his role as one of the new kings of American business.
CHAPTER IX
The story of Sam’s life there in Chicago for the next several years ceases to be the story of a man and becomes the story of a type, a crowd, a gang. What he and the group of men surrounding him and making money with him did in Chicago, other men and other groups of men have done in New York, in Paris, in London. Coming into power with the great expansive wave of prosperity that attended the first McKinley administration, these men went mad of money making. They played with great industrial institutions and railroad systems like excited children, and a man of Chicago won the notice and something of the admiration of the world by his willingness to bet a million dollars on the turn of the weather. In the years of criticism and readjustment that followed this period of sporadic growth, writers have told with great clearness how the thing was done, and some of the participants, captains of industry turned penmen, Caesars become ink-slingers, have bruited the story to an admiring world.
Given the time, the inclination, the power of the press, and the unscrupulousness, the thing that Sam McPherson and his followers did in Chicago in not difficult. Advised by Webster and the talented Prince and Morrison to handle his publicity work, he rapidly unloaded his huge holdings of common stock upon an eager public, keeping for himself the bonds which he hypothecated at the banks to increase his working capital while continuing to control the company. When the common stock was unloaded, he, with a group of fellow spirits, began an attack upon it through the stock market and in the press, and bought it again at a low figure, holding it ready to unload when the public should have forgotten.
The annual advertising expenditure of the firearms trust ran into millions and Sam’s hold upon the press of the country was almost unbelievably strong. Morrison rapidly developed unusual daring and audacity in using this instrument and making it serve Sam’s ends. He suppressed facts, created illusions, and used the newspapers as a whip to crack at the heels of congressmen, senators, and legislators, of the various states, when such matters as appropriation for firearms came before them.
And Sam, who had undertaken the consolidation of the firearms companies, having a dream of himself as a great master in that field, a sort of American Krupp, rapidly awoke from the dream to take the bigger chances for gain in the world of speculation. Within a year he dropped Edwards as head of the firearms trust and in his place put Lewis, with Morrison as secretary and manager of sales. Guided by Sam these two, like the little drygoods merchant of the old Rainey Company, went from capital to capital and from city to city making contracts, influencing news, placing advertising contracts where they would do the most good, fixing men.
And in the meantime Sam, with Webster, a banker named Crofts who had profited largely in the firearms merger, and sometimes Morrison or Prince, began a series of stock raids, speculations, and manipulations that attracted country-wide attention, and became known to the newspaper reading world as the McPherson Chicago crowd. They were in oil, railroads, coal, western land, mining, timber, and street railways. One summer Sam, with Prince, built, ran to a profit, and sold to advantage a huge amusement park. Through his head day after day marched columns of figures, ideas, schemes, more and more spectacular opportunities for gain. Some of the enterprises in which he engaged, while because of their size they seemed more dignified, were of reality of a type with the game smuggling of his South Water Street days, and in all of his operations it was his old instinct for bargains and for the finding of buyers together with Webster’s ability for carrying through questionable deals that made him and his followers almost constantly successful in the face of opposition from the more conservative business and financial men of the city.
Again Sam led a new life, owning running horses at the tracks, memberships in many clubs, a country house in Wisconsin, and shooting preserves in Texas. He drank steadily, played poker for big stakes, kept in the public prints, and day after day led his crew upon the high seas of finance. He did not dare think and in his heart he was sick of it. Sick to the soul, so that when thought came to him he got out of his bed to seek roistering companions or, getting pen and paper, sat for hours figuring out new and more daring schemes for money making. The great forward movement in modern industry of which he had dreamed of being a part had for him turned out to be a huge meaningless gamble with loaded dice against a credulous public. With his followers he went on day after day doing deeds without thought. Industries were organised and launched, men employed and thrown out of employment, towns wrecked by the destruction of an industry and other towns made by the building of other industries. At a whim of his a thousand men began building a city on an Indiana sand hill, and at a wave of his hand another thousand men of an Indiana town sold their homes, with the chicken houses in the back-yards and vines trained by the kitchen doors, and rushed to buy sections of the hill plotted off for them. He did not stop to discuss with his followers the meaning of the things he did. He told them of the profits to be made and then, having done the thing, he went with them to drink in bar rooms and to spend the evening or afternoon singing songs, visiting his stable of runners or, more often, sitting silently about the card table playing for high stakes. Making millions through the manipulation of the public during the day, he sometimes sat half the night struggling with his companions for the possession of thousands.
Lewis, the Jew, the only one of Sam’s companions who had not followed him in his spectacular money making, stayed in the office of the firearms company and ran it like the scientific able man of business he was. While Sam remained chairman of the board of the company and had an office, a desk, and the name of leadership there, he let Lewis run the place, and spent his own time upon the stock exchange or in some corner with Webster and Crofts planning some new money making raid.
“You have the better of it, Lewis,” he said one day in a reflective mood; “you thought I had cut the ground from under you when I got Tom Edwards, but I only set you more firmly in a larger place.”
He made a movement with his hand toward the large general offices with the rows of busy clerks and the substantial look of work being done.
“I might have had the work you are doing. I planned and schemed with that end in view,” he added, lighting a cigar and going out at the door.
“And the money hunger got you,” laughed Lewis, looking after him, “the hunger that gets Jews and Gentiles and all who feed it.”
One might have come upon the McPherson Chicago crowd about the old Chicago stock exchange on any day during those years, Crofts, tall, abrupt, and dogmatic; Morrison, slender, dandified, and gracious; Webster, well-dressed, suave, gentlemanly, and Sam, silent, restless, and often morose and ugly. Sometimes it seemed to Sam that they were all unreal, himself and the men with him. He watched his companions cunningly. They were constantly posing before the passing crowd of brokers and small speculators. Webster, coming up to him on the floor of the exchange, would tell him of a snowstorm raging outside with the air of a man parting with a long-cherished secret. His companions went from one to the other vowing eternal friendships, and then, keeping spies upon each other, they hurried to Sam with tales of secret betrayals. Into any deal proposed by him they went eagerly, although sometimes fearfully, and almost always they won. And with Sam they made millions through the manipulation of the firearms company, and the Chicago and Northern Lake Railroad which he controlled.
In later years Sam looked back upon it all as a kind of nightmare. It seemed to him that never during that period had he lived or thought sanely. The great financial leaders that he saw were not, he thought, great men. Some of them, like Webster, were masters of craft, or, like Morrison, of words, but for the most part they were but shrewd, greedy vultures feeding upon the public or upon each other.
In the meantime Sam was rapidly degenerating. His paunch became distended, and his hands trembled in the morning. Being a man of strong appetites, and having a determination to avoid women, he almost constantly overdrank and overate, and in the leisure hours that came to him he hurried eagerly from place to place, avoiding thought, avoiding sane quiet talk, avoiding himself.
All of his companions did not suffer equally. Webster seemed made for the life, thriving and expanding under it, putting his winnings steadily aside, going on Sunday to a suburban church, avoiding the publicity connecting his name with race horses and big sporting events that Crofts sought and to which Sam submitted. One day Sam and Crofts caught him in an effort to sell them out to a group of New York bankers in a mining deal and turned the trick on him instead, whereupon he went off to New York to become a respectable big business man and the friend of senators and philanthropists.
Crofts was a man with chronic domestic troubles, one of those men who begin each day by cursing their wives before their associates and yet continue living with them year after year. There was a kind of rough squareness in the man, and after the completion of a successful deal he would be as happy as a boy, pounding men on the back, shaking with laughter, throwing money about, making crude jokes. After Sam left Chicago he finally divorced his wife and married an actress from the vaudeville stage and after losing two-thirds of his fortune in an effort to capture control of a southern railroad, went to England and, coached by the actress wife, developed into an English country gentleman.
And Sam was a man sick. Day after day he went on drinking more and more heavily, playing for bigger and bigger stakes, allowing himself less and less thought of himself. One day he received a long letter from John Telfer telling of the sudden death of Mary Underwood and berating him for his neglect of her.
