Part 43

Half an hour later the sounds of an angry tumult in the clerks' room made him fling his door open. "What the--" he began, his heavy face purple, then stopped amazed.

The outside doorkeeper, the watchman and several clerks were engaged in a struggle with Fanshaw. His hat was off, his hair wild, his necktie, shirt and coat awry.

"There you are now--I knew you were in," he shouted, as he caught sight of Dumont. "Call these curs off, Jack!"

"Let him alone," snarled Dumont.

Fanshaw was released. He advanced into Dumont's office, straightening his clothing and panting with exertion, excitement and anger. Dumont closed the door. "Well," he said surlily. "What d' you want?"

"I'll have to go to the wall at half-past ten if you don't help me out," said Fanshaw. "The Montana election went against my crowd--I'm in the copper deal. There's a slump, but the stock's dead sure to go up within a week."

"In trouble again?" sneered Dumont. "It's been only three months since I pulled you through."

"You didn't lose anything by it, did you?" retorted Fanshaw--he had recovered himself and was eying Dumont with the cool, steady, significant stare of one rascal at another whom he thinks he has in his power.

Before that look Dumont flushed an angrier red. "I won't do it again!" and he brought his fist down with a bang.

"All I want is five hundred thousand to carry my copper for a week at the outside. If I get it I'll clear a million. If I don't"--Fanshaw shrugged his shoulders--"I'll be cleaned out." He looked with narrowed, shifting eyes at Dumont. "My wife has all she's got in this," he went on, "even her jewels."

Dumont's look shot straight into Fanshaw's.

"Not a cent!" he said with vicious emphasis. "Not a red!"

Fanshaw paled and pinched in his lips. "I'm a desperate man. I'm ruined. Leonora--"

Dumont shook his head, the veins swelling in his forehead and neck. The last strand of his self-restraint snapped. "Leave her out of this! She has no claim on me NOW--and YOU never had."

Fanshaw stared at him, then sprang to his feet, all in a blaze. "You scoundrel!" he shouted, shaking his fist under Dumont's nose.

"If you don't clear out instantly I'll have you thrown out," said Dumont. He was cool and watchful now.

Fanshaw folded his arms and looked down at him with the dignified fury of the betrayed and outraged. "So!" he exclaimed. "I see it all!"

Dumont pressed an electric button, then leaned back in his revolving chair and surveyed Fanshaw tranquilly. "Not a cent!" he repeated, a cruel smile in his eyes and round his mouth. The boy came and Dumont said to him: "Send the watchman."

Fanshaw drew himself up. "I shall punish you," he said. "Your wealth will not save you." And he stalked past the gaping office boy.

He stood in front of the Edison Building, looking aimlessly up and down the street as he pulled his long, narrow, brown-gray mustache. Gloom was in his face and hate in his heart--not hate for Dumont alone but hate for all who were what he longed to be, all rich and "successful" men. And the towering steel and stone palaces of prosperity sneered down on him with crushing mockery.

"Damn them all!" he muttered. "The cold-hearted thieves!"

From his entry into that district he had played a gambling game, had played it dishonestly in a small way. Again and again he had sneakingly violated Wall Street's code of morality--that curious code with its quaint, unexpected incorporations of parts of the decalogue and its quainter, though not so unexpected, infringements thereof and amendments thereto. Now by "pull," now by trickery, he had evaded punishment. But apparently at last he was to be brought to bar, branded and banished.

"Damn them all!" he repeated. "They're a pack of wolves. They've got me down and they're going to eat me."

He blamed Dumont and he blamed his wife for his plight--and there was some justice in both accusations. Twenty years before, he had come down to "the Street" a frank-looking boy, of an old and distinguished New York family that had become too aristocratic for business and had therefore lost its hold upon its once great fortune. He was neither a good boy nor a bad. But he was weak, and had the extravagant tastes and cynical morals to which he had been bred; and his intelligent brain was of the kind that goes with weakness--shrewd and sly, preferring to slink along the byways of craft even when the highway of courage lies straight and easy. But he had physical bravery and the self-confidence that is based upon an assured social position in a community where social position is worshiped; so, he passed for manly and proud when he was in reality neither. Family vanity he had; personal pride he had not.

In many environments his weakness would have remained hidden even from himself, and he would have lived and died in the odor and complacence of respectability. But not in the strain and stress of Wall Street. There he had naturally developed not into a lion, not even into a wolf, but into a coyote.

Wall Street found him out in ten years--about one year after it began to take note of him and his skulking ways and his habit of prowling in the wake of the pack. Only his adroit use of his family connections and social position saved him from being trampled to death by the wolves and eaten by his brother coyotes. Thereafter he lived precariously, but on the whole sumptuously, upon carcasses of one kind and another. He participated in "strike" suits against big corporations--he would set on a pack of coyotes to dog the lions and to raise discordant howls that inopportunely centered public attention upon leonine, lawless doings; the lions would pay him well to call off the pack. He assisted sometimes wolves and sometimes coyotes in flotations of worthless, or almost worthless, stocks and bonds from gold and mahogany offices and upon a sea of glittering prospectuses. He had a hand in all manner of small, shady transactions of lawful, or almost lawful, swindling that were tolerated by lions and wolves, because at bottom there is a feeling of fellowship among creatures of prey as against creatures preyed upon.

There were days when he came home haggard and blue in the lips to tell Leonora that he must fly. There were days when he returned from the chase, or rather from the skulk, elated, youthful, his pockets full of money and his imagination afire with hopes of substantial wealth. But his course was steadily downward, his methods steadily farther and farther from the line of the law. Dumont came just in time to save him, came to build him up from the most shunned of coyotes into a deceptive imitation of a wolf with aspirations toward the lion class.

Leonora knew that he was small, but she thought all men small--she had supreme contempt for her own sex; and it seemed to her that men must be even less worthy of respect since they were under the influence of women and lavished time and money on them. Thus she was deceived into cherishing the hope that her husband, small and timid though he was, would expand into a multi-millionaire and would help her to possess the splendors she now enjoyed at the expense of her associates whom she despised. She was always thinking how far more impressive than their splendor her magnificence would be, if their money were added to her brains and beauty.