“We never talked of that,” replied Allan, putting his arm about her. He spoke with surprise. “I wonder why?”
“Because we always talked only of us,” she answered, and she was smiling again. “Well?”
He hesitated. “I thought—Dolores, if it is a girl. And—Timothy, if a boy.”
She reflected. “Suppose your choice should stand, if a girl; and mine, if a son.” She went back to her chair. “I think I’ll make a dreadful mother. I don’t care for children. But it doesn’t matter. If I don’t dote on mine, they will be the better for it. One has only to look at my little brothers. I do hope Estelle has the sense not to bring them back from Newport today.” She glanced at her clock again. “They’re late. There was a time when everything was cleared for our private car, but Papa has become meticulous these past few years.”
Her maid and nurses returned with the news that the family had arrived.
Rufus informed Allan that they had all decided to dine not in their car but to keep him company at dinner. Estelle, the boys, their nurses, and their governess were with him, to Allan’s vexation. On this special occasion they would dine with “everybody.” Allan, sitting at the candlelit table beside Estelle, was forced to listen to the shrill clamorings of the little boys. He wondered if only he knew that Jon and Norman hated each other jealously, and were in constant competition for their mother’s sole attention. Norman, the younger, had a loathsome habit of leaping on Estelle’s lap when she was talking in her bubbling tones to Jon, and fastening his mouth over hers to prevent further conversation. Then he would snuggle babyishly in her arms, his head on her breast, and listen smugly to her endearments, watching Jon the while. His brother was little better. In Allan’s opinion, there was something secretly obscene in the rivalry of the boys.
Estelle, who always managed to listen in spite of the uproar of her own children, gave Rufus a vindictive peep. “Jon is talking to you, my dear,” she said. Rufus, forced out of a joyous brooding over his daughter, turned in irritation to his son. “Yes?” he said impatiently. Jon’s light brown eyes narrowed on his father, and he said petulantly, “I want to go back to Newport tonight. Eddie Glynn’s having a birthday party tomorrow. Why can’t we go back? Why did we come?”
“Because something more important than you, or your brother, is happening here now,” said Rufus coldly. “I think I’ll go up to see my daughter, if you’ll excuse me.”
Allan smiled to himself, and seriously ate his dessert. Estelle was silent; he could feel her hating eyes upon him. “You seem less concerned about Cornelia than her father, Allan,” said Estelle at last, in a venomous voice.
Allan shrugged. Then he regarded Estelle curiously. “I think this child means much to him,” he answered. “Perhaps more than any of us realize.”
He knew that Estelle had never ceased to detest him, and that in the past two years and three months she had come to fear him. It was very seldom that she permitted her thoughts to reveal themselves, except by the flash of her warm brown eyes or a curl of her pretty red mouth. But now, disturbed and frightened by what her husband had said to her sons, and enraged by Allan’s half-smile, she glared at him with open hatred. “More important” than her boys, her lovely aristocratic boys—that rowdy and vulgar hoyden with her red hair and execrable manners and rough voice! “More important,” too, perhaps, this intruder, this nobody, this “foreigner,” this Irishman, and his child, who would probably be a monster! Jon and Norman turned their attention upon her suddenly, and what they saw excited them, as all wild things are excited by primeval emotions.
“Shut up, shut up!” screamed Jon, and kicked out his leg at Allan. But Allan deftly caught it, twisted it enough to make the boy howl, then stood up. He and Estelle exchanged one violent look, and then he left the room without a word of apology. He went into the candlelit hall just as the Purcells and the Peales arrived. They thought him extremely pale and agitated, and this made Lydia smile at him with affection. She gave him her cool cheek to kiss, and her enigmatic eyes were concerned under the rose velvet bonnet with its gray plumes.
Laura Peale, her niece, resembled her so closely that she might have been her daughter. Her dark blue taffeta frock had been contrived so cunningly that one was hardly aware that she was about six months pregnant. Like Lydia, all her movements were unconsciously perfect. Her forehead, under her blue bonnet, had a peculiar glow of its own, like an inner light of intelligence and purity. Allan was always fascinated and humbled at this, for he was, innately, a superstitious man.
Jim Purcell never changed, except to grow more monolithic in appearance. But Patrick, nearly thirty-five, was already gray at the temples, and his face had acquired stern and unbending lines. He hated Allan with a zealot’s hatred, and he never saw him without saying to himself: I have never wanted to kill anyone, except this man.
Jim Purcell said, “What’s the matter, Allan? Things going all right?” He shook Allan’s hand and grinned at him knowingly. He had a profound respect for this young man, who let nothing stand in his way. Pat could rave about his “lack of ethics,” and smolder silently when Allan’s name was mentioned. But Jim Purcell was only roughly amused. He did not know exactly what had happened a year ago between Allan and Patrick, but, as he told Lydia, “I’ll bet it was considerable, and murderous.”
Allan was recovering himself. He was angry that he had permitted an insignificant, false woman to annoy him, especially today. However, Estelle was perhaps the one person in the world who could enrage him, childishly, with her bubbles, her smirks, her sweetness which was so cloying, her “ideals” which were greedy lies, and her artificial effervescence. He knew that Estelle disliked and resented all the family except Patrick Peale, whom she had succeeded in convincing, at long last, that she possessed a humanitarian soul, full of selflessness and enthusiasm for the “common man.”
Allan informed the newcomers that Cornelia was doing well, that her father was with her, and that nothing seemed imminent. Lydia went upstairs with the nervous Laura to see her daughter, and the three men remained alone in the hall below. Jim Purcell lit Allan’s cigarette, and put his pipe in his mouth. “Let’s go into the library, or somewhere, until you’re called,” he said. He took Allan’s arm, and the two, followed by Patrick, went into the library where the lamps had already been lighted. Jim surveyed the lamps and said, “I’m putting in electricity, myself. That feller, Edison. He’ll light up the whole world in a few years. You’ll see. And his electric cars are better for our streets than our old horsecars. Progress.” He sat down and winked at Allan. “Anything for your guests to drink, eh?”
“None for me,” said Patrick curtly. He stood by the window and looked at the featureless darkness. Allan brought out a bottle and two glasses, and filled them to overflowing. Jim Purcell lifted his glass and said, “To the mother and babe, and may it be a boy.” He watched Allan gulp the liquor. Allan spoke grittily in the voice of a man who has drunk too much. “She says it will be twins.”
“Cornelia’s never wrong,” replied Jim emphatically. “Always a girl for good judgment.” He grinned. “Didn’t she marry you? Hear you’re goin’ to bring your hell-fire to the board of directors soon. And Red Rufe told me you’ve invested in the new oils near Titusville, and Idaho’s gold mines. Got right in on the ground floor, when everybody else, includin’ me, was laughin’ their fool heads off.”
Patrick always avoided speaking to Allan whenever possible, but now he turned with a jerk from the window and his muted face was greatly disturbed. “The board of directors?” he said. Allan refilled his glass. “Yes,” he said coolly. “Any objection—from another member of the board?” Patrick did not reply. He went to a distant red leather chair and sat down. His hands clenched on the arms, and the fanatic’s gleam was flashing in his eyes. Jim Purcell had once remarked, “No wonder you’re so het up all the time, and so full of nerves. No vices. A good vice or two’re necessary for a man to keep his perspective.”
Jim was intensely cu
rious about what exactly had happened between the two young men a year ago, but no one, not even Allan who trusted him, had enlightened him in spite of wide hints. However, Jim Purcell derived considerable amusement from the savage tension between the two, which seemed to crackle openly. He said, “D’ja hear Pat and Laura have just bought a fine piece on the mountain, about half a mile from here? For a new house? Tired of living with us old folks.” He chuckled.
Allan knew that Patrick and his father, the former Secretary of State, were on bad terms, in spite of the pathetic attempts of the older Peale to conciliate his son. Mr. Peale lived alone in his great house, to which he had returned after he had had a stroke in Washington. Patrick rarely visited him, and never took his young wife on those infrequent visits. And he, Allan Marshall, was responsible for this. Sometimes he felt compassion for the old man in that empty mansion on the river, who could no longer go even to his law offices or accept dinner invitations. What he, Allan, had done, had had to be done. If an “anarchist” like Pat Peale made his own father the victim of his virtues, it was no fault of Allan Marshall’s. He began to think of what had happened a year ago.
After months of long debate, consideration, and weighing, large carriers such as the Interstate Railroad Company had come to the conclusion that government regulation of railroads might have its advantages, provided that the regulation did not go beyond construction, inspection of equipment, and the maintenance of the roads. The railroad industry was one of the mightiest industries in America, and no longer operated in the sort of lighthearted, catch-as-catch-can, and haphazard methods which had distinguished them twenty-five or thirty years ago. As the frontiers shrank, and the railroads ran like vital veins through the body of the nation, the industry gained not only in incalculable wealth but in prestige and importance. In 1887, however, there were still some “privateer” little railroads scattered through the communities, with which the great carriers were forced to connect if they wished to serve those communities.
“There is no longer a place in America for small business to compete with large,” Rufus had said to his officers. “There must be the sound uniformity which only the large industries can afford.”
There were irreconcilable individualists who insisted that the devouring of the small businesses by the large was a threat to liberty. Rufus had smiled urbanely at this. “Liberty? What has progress got to do with liberty?”
Allan, who had the Celt’s innate horror of any sort of regimentation or control by government, disagreed with Rufus. Once let government into anything, he would think gloomily, no matter how apparently unimportant, and it will soon find a way to occupy the whole premises. He attended conferences between the presidents of the great carriers, and while he openly acquiesced, he frowned inwardly. He was not sentimental about the “small” man. He was only concerned with the dangerous principle involved. “Let a beggar be oppressed, and the man with the diamonds on his fingers will not escape,” he thought.
In his prophetic alarm he had even suggested that the great carriers assist the little ones to bring up their standards. Rufus had stared at him, astounded and full of incredulity. “My dear boy,” he had remarked, embarrassed before his associates, “we want those small roads ourselves, and if the government is inadvertently willing to assist us in this, why should we object?” He had added, “Not having the money to meet government standards, they’ll have to sell out to us. Yes, this proposed regulation, I see, has its tremendous advantages for us, and for the public, who deserve to be safe in their persons and in their goods on any line.”
Then the carriers and the investors and the manipulators quietly informed their representatives in Washington that they were withdrawing their objections to the proposed law. They were exceedingly unhappy however, when some independent enthusiasts in Congress, taking advantage of the “capitulation” of the great carriers, rapidly introduced an amendment to the law governing rates of passenger and freight traffic. But the “sound” politicians took advantage even of this menacing amendment. It would be impossible for the small carriers to meet these new rates if they were high enough. They became high enough. The large carriers acquired the small roads.
Patrick Peale, the young idealist, having missed the directors’ meeting at which the decision had been made, had not in his single-minded blindness understood that the “capitulation” by the Interstate and the other great carriers had been voluntary, for their own reasons. He believed a “victory” had been obtained by the “forces of democracy” in government. He believed that the time had come for a tremendous “revolution” in “behalf of the common man.” He was convinced that in a nation, still young and expanding and individualistic, it was possible to pass laws, in the name of “human rights,” to destroy individualism. He did not fear government, believing that if it contained only men like himself (and he believed it could) it would bring a new heaven upon earth. He was never aware that all men are intrinsically tyrannous and dangerous, no matter what their position in the world. And only Allan Marshall knew that men like Patrick, who honestly believed in their transcendental theories, were the sinister and ancient threat of the ages.
He, Allan, had talked this over with Rufus and with Guy Gunther and the others, and they had gazed at the young man with mighty respect. They agreed with him that Patrick and his friends in the Senate should be “watched.” While Allan wished him watched for any ominous signs of incipient tyranny, the others wished him watched for any indications which would affect their pockets.
To Patrick, the undeniable misery of most workers in America in the eighties, the oppression of labor unions, could all be swept away in one government edict. He did not know that sound progress in human affairs was a matter of the slow awakening of the public conscience, and the painful application of the religious principle that every man is spiritually responsible for the well-being of his brother. Patrick, the believer in the rights of man, had a subconscious contempt for mankind, a trait he shared with all reformers and fanatics.
It was Allan’s ability to see “bogeymen” that made him the unsleeping enemy of Patrick Peale. Let Rufus and his friends “watch” Patrick and his friends, for the preservation of their wealth and power. He, Allan, would watch him for more terrible reasons. Many years later he was to think to himself: My metamorphosis began with my comprehension of Pat Peale. I thought I was driven by self-interest. But it was much deeper than that, unknown even to myself. I think I began to see when I found out that he possessed all the works of Nietzsche, and read them constantly. Every fanatic is a disciple of that insane philosopher, whether he knows it or not.
Mingled with all this was an ingrained personal hatred for Patrick Peale, which he would not acknowledge too often. Patrick had married Laura deWitt.
Carried away by the delusion that they had “forced” capitulation on the great carriers, Patrick and his colleagues believed the time had come to strike for even larger concessions. Patrick proposed to introduce another amendment to the bill regulating railroads: it demanded that the government include in the act a section giving to the government means to supervise working conditions on the roads, enforce minimum wages, control working hours, compel all carriers to recognize unions to be set up by an arbitrary and to-be-formed governmental agency, force the carriers to build homes for their workers at their own expense, provide free medical attention to the workers, build schools for the workers’ children, divide profits with the workers, limit dividends paid to stockholders, erect hospitals, at the carriers’ expense, for all railroad employees, subsidize food in special railroad shops so that the workers would not need to buy expensive goods in the open market, and “enlarge the horizons of all workers and their families so that no longer should they absorb the opium of the people—religion.”
“If we can win on this, over the railroads—and we can win if we are dedicated—we can impose this law on all other industries, too,” Patrick told his colleagues, who shouted their enthusiasm at him.
When
this proposed amendment came to the knowledge of the carriers, there was great hilarity among them. The young feller was insane. Let him talk and “get it out of his system.” No one would take him and his friends seriously. After all, he was the son of a rich man, and a director, himself, on the board of the Interstate Railroad Company, and owner, through his wife, of sixteen per cent of the stock. When Allan, appalled, declared that it was precisely because of all this that he would be taken seriously in Washington, they patted Allan’s shoulder and spoke again of bogeymen. Only Rufus, after long arguments with Allan, ceased to smile, and began to listen.
“That Allan of yours is right on every count,” Jim Purcell had said to Rufus. “But all the rest of you are muttonheads.”
“The amendment must not even be introduced,” said Allan. “Pat must withdraw it at once, and be forced never to mention it again. Of course, it would be thrown out anyway. But news of it would get into the papers, and the poisonous idea would spread slowly but surely among the people, to the eventual destruction of the Constitution in some later decade.”
Greatly alarmed now, Rufus asked what Allan could do. Allan said, with a dark smile, “There is a skeleton in the closet of every man, even men like Pat Peale. It’s only necessary to find it, and rattle it in his face. And I’ll find it. It will cost a lot of money.”
Rufus had considered this, and then he had laughed soundlessly, his eyes sparkling and rounded. Then he had said severely, “We must move fast. There has been too much delay as it is.” And he had given Allan a glance of paternal reproach, which had made Allan burst into bitter mirth. Allan had then gone to New York and had engaged the services of the entire staff of a private investigation agency and had told them that money was no object. Important information would be rewarded with incredible sums, especially if it were prompt.