Owen Johnson

“ Do you want to kill me? I suppose that's what you want. Go on. Put me down, make me ill. Oh, my God, my God, I can't stand it, I can't stand it. I can't. Ring for the doctor, the doctor or some one."
"Come away," said Bojo, taking Patsie by the arm as Mrs. Drake went into the paroxysm which she knew was perfectly assumed. "It's useless trying to say anything more to her. To-morrow perhaps Doris and her husband may have more effect." ”

“ Besides, if you have any spunk you'll do it," she added artfully.
"What do you mean?"
"Just let Doris get her fill of that old fossil of a Boskirk. Show your independence. Bojo, please do it for me!"
She clung to him, coquetting with her eyes and smile with the dangerous inconscient coquetry of a child, and this radiance and rosy youth, so close to him, so intimately offered, brought him a disturbing emotion. He turned away so as not to meet the sparkling, pleading glance.
"Young lady," he said with assumed gruffness, "I see you are learning entirely too fast. ”

“ He had left a group, with a beginning of critical amusement, when a hand spun him around and he heard a well-known voice cry:
"Bojo—you old sinner—you come right home!"
It was Roscoe Marsh, chum of chums, rather slight, negligently dressed among these young men of rather precise elegance, but dominating them all by the shock of an aggressive personality that stood out against their factoried types. Just as the generality of men incline to the fashions of conduct, philosophy, and politics of the day, there are certain individualities constituted by nature to be instinctively of the opposition. ”

“ I have been thinking over so many things that I ought to say."
"You can say anything," he said gently.
"Bojo, you must marry Doris!" she said brokenly, joining her hands.
"Why?" he said, too startled to notice the absurdity of the question.
"She needs you. She loves you. If you could have seen her all Sunday night when we—when she was afraid you had been ruined. You don't know how she cares. I didn't. I was terribly mistaken—unjust. You mustn't let her go off and marry some one she doesn't care about, like Boskirk, the way Dolly did." ”

“ He had a moment's thrill at the sight of her, radiant and dazzling with every art of dressmaker and hairdresser, revealed in a sinuous arrangement of black chiffon with mysterious sudden sheens of gold. She came to him at once, expectancy in her eyes; and the thought that this prize was his, that hundreds would watch them as they stood together, acknowledging his right, gave him a sudden swift sense of power and conquest.
"I was with your father," he said, in explanation, "to witness some papers. Say, Doris, how every woman here must hate you to-night!" ”

“ All other ideals had yielded before a new ideal—force. To impose one's self, making one's own laws, brushing aside weak scruples, planning above ridiculously simple and obvious schemes of legal conduct for the ordering of the multitude, silencing criticism by the magnitude of the operation—a master where a weak man ended a criminal:—this was the new scheme of life which he was gradually absorbing.
He had become worldly with the confidence of succeeding. Whatever compunctions he had formerly felt about a marriage with Doris he had dismissed as pure sentimentality. ”

“ I was completely in the dark myself; but I won't touch a cent of it until your losses are squared, every dollar of them!"
"So that's the game, eh?" said Marsh, laughing. "Well you go plump to the devil!
"Roscy!" said Bojo, jumping up and seizing his arm. "At least let me square up what you lost. Hold up. Wait a second, don t go off half-cocked! Fred's got to be hauled out of this; it's not only bankruptcy, it's a darned sight worse—it's his word, his honor—a woman's money, too. You know him—he's weak, he won't stand up under it. Good God, you don't want me to have his life on my conscience?" ”

“ Toward the close of a pleasant September afternoon, in one of the years when the big stick of President Roosevelt was cudgeling the shoulders of malefactors of great wealth, the feverish home-bound masses which poured into upper Fifth Avenue with the awakening of the electric night were greeted by the strangest of all spectacles which can astound a metropolitan crowd harassed by the din of sounds, the fret and fury of the daily struggle which is the tyranny of New York. ”

“ He stood looking up at the incessantly vigilant windows of the great newspaper office now in the charge of the night watch. "Wonder what's filtering in there? I always feel guilty when I cut a night. I suppose it's like the fascination of the tape. It always gets me—the click of the telegraph."
"How are things working out on the paper?" said Bojo.
"Thanks, I'm getting into all sorts of trouble," said Marsh, rather gloomily, he thought. "I'm finding out a lot of things I don't know—sort of measles and mumps period. I had no right to be out to-night. ”

“ His features were irregular, the nose powerful and aquiline, the eyebrows arched with a suggestion of eloquence and imagination, the eyes gray and domineering, the mouth wide and expressive of every changing thought, while the outstanding ears on the thin, curved head completed an accent of oddity and obstinacy which he himself had characterized good-humoredly when he had described himself as looking like a poetical calf. Roscoe Marsh, the father—editor, politician, and capitalist, one of the figures of the last generation—had died, leaving him a fortune. ”

“ Yet Bojo was not convinced. He knew that he had not been able to meet the partners openly; that despite all the injustice of their attitude, he had withheld the knowledge of his ultimate winnings, and that he had withheld it because he would have been at a loss to explain it. More potent than the stoic indifference [Pg 189] of Wall Street was the memory of the chance acquaintance, wrecked by the accident of this meeting; of Forshay, calmly matching quarters with him before the opening of the market, calculating the fatal point beyond which a rise meant to him the end. ”

“ He worked hard, following Drake's advice, seeking information from men rather than from books, checking up what each told him by what the next man had to say of his last informant, mystified often by the glib psychology of finance, slowly rating men at their just value, no longer lending credulous ear to the frayed prophets of New Street or thrilling with the excitement of a thrice confidential tip. ”

“ Look out, though, Doris—she'll begin on you."
"'Just you wait; you're going to be one of the big men some day!'"
"Don't worry, Bojo," she said in a whisper, with a little pressure of his arm. She was quite excited by the brilliance of the throng, at her own personal triumph and the good looks of her partner. "I want something I can make myself, and we'll do it too. Just you wait, you're going to be one of the big men one of these days, and we'll have our house and our parties—finer than this, too!" ”

“ Patsie came back, her emotion in a measure controlled. She placed her hand upon the shoulder of Mr. Swift, who continued to gaze at her without comprehension.
"I know you don't understand; you will later. Mr. Swift, I want you to sell every one of my securities, now, immediately. I want everything in cash."
Mr. Swift looked at her as though he had seen a ghost and then rapidly at Bojo. ”

“ Patsie heard him first. She sprang up with a sharp intaking of her breath. He rose less precipitately, hearing at last the sound of returning footsteps. The next moment Drake came into the room and stood gazing at the two erect figures of the young man and the young girl. Then he tried to smile and couldn't. Her instinct guessed on the instant what had happened. She went to him swiftly and put her arms about his shoulders as though to support him.
"Never mind, Dad," she said bravely. "Don't you care, money isn't everything in this world. Whatever happens, you've got me." ”

“ Now quit thinking too much—let things work out. Doris is the kind that belongs at the top; she's bound to be a leader, and we're going to put her there, you and I. Now what do you want to do?"
"I want to stand on my own feet," said Tom, with a last resistance. "I want to see what I'm worth by myself."
"Wall Street, of course," said Drake, grinning again. "Well, why not? You'll learn quicker the things you've got to learn, even if it costs you more."
He flung down in a great armchair, and stared out at the raw recruit as though for an instant rolling back the years to his own beginnings. ”

“ Bojo attempted to burst in on the stream of meaninglessness and repeated phrases. He, too, saw through the assumption of hysteria, shielding behind a cloak of weakness a cold and covetous woman.
"My dear Mrs. Drake," he said icily, "you are proud of your position in society. Let me put this to you. Don't you realize that if your husband fails for a million and a half and you continue living as you have lived that it will be a public scandal? Don't you realize what people will say?" ”

“ You want what you want, Roscy, by the time you're thirty-five. Bojo and Fred want a million by the time they're thirty. You're looking for the easy way—the quick way. You may get it and then you may not. You've got friends, opportunities—perhaps you will."
"That's where you'll never learn, you old fossil," said Marsh. "If you'd get out and meet people, why, some time you'd strike a man with a nice fat contract in his pocket looking for just the reliable—" he stopped, not wishing to add, "old plodder that you are." ”

“ I am up against a decision, the greatest decision in my life, which means whether I am to have the right to my own self-respect and yours and others. One way means money, an easy way to everything people want in this world, and no blame attached except what I myself might feel. The other means standing on my own feet, no favors, taking a loss of thousands of dollars, and a fight of perhaps five, ten years to get where I am now. ”

“ It was well after seven when they stepped out on the icy station amid the gay crowd of week-enders. Patsie, at the reins, halloed to them from a rakish cutter, and the next moment they were off over the [Pg 136] crackling snow with long, luminous, purple shadows at their sides, racing past other sleighs with jingling bells and shrieks of recognition.
"Heavens, Patsie, you're worse than Fred with his car! I say, look out—you missed that cutter by a foot," said Bojo, who had taken the seat beside the young Eskimo at an imperious command. ”

“ A big man with a curious atmosphere of amused calm in the midst of the flurry and turmoil he aroused, he enjoyed the turns and twists of [Pg 60] fate with the zest of a boy gray-eyed, imperturbable, and magnetic, winning even those who saw in him an ethical and economical danger.
Such was the man who was bending over a great oaken table engrossed in the piecing together of an intricate picture puzzle, as Bojo came through the heavy tapestry portières. Patsie, perched on a corner, was looking on with approving interest at the happy solving of a perplexing group. ”

“ Now look here, my boy, I'm not going to take hold of you because I expect you to marry Doris, but because I want you to marry her! Get that down. I can control lots of things, but I can't control the women. They beat me every time. I'm pulp. I've given in once, though Lord knows I hope my little girl won't regret it. I've got one decayed foreign title dangling to the totem-pole, and that's enough; that's got to satisfy the missus. I don't want another and I don't want any high-stepping Fifth Avenue dude. I want a man, one of my own kind who can talk my language. ”

“ Bojo wandered through long mathematical rooms with mathematical young men perched high on desk stools all with the same mathematical curve of the back, past squadrons of clicking typewriters, clicking endlessly as though each human unit had been surrendered into the cogs of a universal machine. ”

“ Try!"
"Daddy," said Patsie quietly, "I have $500,000 you gave me. Bojo and I tried our best to sell them and raise money for you. If you had only let me know sooner perhaps we could have. Every cent of that will go to you. Doris, too, I know, will give her third. We will only ask my mother for what we are giving ourselves. That she will not refuse, she cannot, she won't dare. Daddy, there is one thing you must not worry about. We won't let any one say a single word against you. Every cent you owe shall be paid. ”

“ The daughters of great fortunes marry foreign titles as fast as they get the chance in order to get the opportunity to enjoy their wealth to the fullest, because here there is no class so limited and circumscribed without national significance as our so-called Four Hundred; the sons either become dissipated loafers, professional amateurs of sport, or are condemned to piling more dollars on dollars, which is an absurdity."
"I grieve for the millionaire," interjected DeLancy flippantly.
"And yet you want to triple what you've got," said Bojo with a smile. ”

“ Between the Tom Crocker of those breathless days and the ordered self which he had built up during these last months of discipline there seemed to intervene unreal worlds.
The group gathered in the hotel branch of Pitt & Sanderson were indolently interested rather than excited. They were of the flitting and superficial gambling type, youngsters still new to the excitement of the game and old men who could not tear themselves away from their established habit. ”

“ Bojo nodded.
"I say, I've got that bond for a thousand tucked away," said Granning slowly. "Use it if it'll help any."
"Bless your heart," said Bojo, really touched. "It's not a thousand, Granny, that'll help now. You were right—gambler's luck!" ”

“ There's some bigger things in this world than you think, and the biggest is to create something, something useful to the community; to make a monument of it and to pass it down for your son to carry on—family pride. You think there's only drudgery in it. Did you ever think there were thousands and thousands of people depending on how you run your business? Do you realize that every great business to-day means the protection of those thousands; that you've got to study out how to protect them at every point in order to make them efficient ”

“ Do you know the circulation of papers in New York? There are only three over a hundred thousand and the greatest has hardly a quarter of a million. However, I won't go on. You see my ideas make an institution—the modern institution, replacing and absorbing all past institutions."
"And what else do you want?" said Bojo, laughing.
"I want that by the time I'm thirty-five. I want ten millions and I want to be at forty either senator or ambassador to Paris or London. I want to build a yacht that will defend the American cup and to own a horse that will win the derby. ”

“ But a new exhilaration effectively drove away all other emotions—the delirious appetite for gain which had come irresistibly and tyrannically into his life with the dramatic intensity of his first speculation. In the interim in Daniel Drake's library, with Doris perched excitedly on the arm of his chair, several things had been decided. ”