Edmund Cowperwood

“ Cut the thread, separate a man from that which is rightfully his own, characteristic of him, and you have a peculiar figure, half success, half failure, much as a spider without its web, which will never be its whole self again until all its dignities and emoluments are restored.
The sight of his new house going up made Cowperwood feel of more weight in the world, and the possession of his suddenly achieved connection with the city treasurer was as though a wide door had been thrown open to the Elysian fields of opportunity. ”

“ When Cowperwood, after failing in his overtures to the three city gas companies, confided to Addison his plan of organizing rival companies in the suburbs, the banker glared at him appreciatively. “You’re a smart one!” he finally exclaimed. “You’ll do! I back you to win!” He went on to advise Cowperwood that he would need the assistance of some of the strong men on the various village councils. “They’re all as crooked as eels’ teeth,” he went on. “But there are one or two that are more crooked than others and safer—bell-wethers. ”

“ Those who by any pleasing courtesy of fortune, accident of birth, inheritance, or the wisdom of parents or friends, have succeeded in avoiding making that anathema of the prosperous and comfortable, “a mess of their lives,” will scarcely understand the mood of Cowperwood, sitting rather gloomily in his cell these first days, wondering what, in spite of his great ingenuity, was to become of him. The strongest have their hours of depression. There are times when life to those endowed with the greatest intelligence—perhaps mostly to those—takes on a somber hue. ”

“ Desmas had never seen Cowperwood before, but in spite of the shabby uniform, the clog shoes, the cheap shirt, and the wretched cell, he was impressed. Instead of the weak, anaemic body and the shifty eyes of the average prisoner, he saw a man whose face and form blazed energy and power, and whose vigorous erectness no wretched clothes or conditions could demean. ”

“ The growth of a passion is a very peculiar thing. In highly organized intellectual and artistic types it is so often apt to begin with keen appreciation of certain qualities, modified by many, many mental reservations. The egoist, the intellectual, gives but little of himself and asks much. Nevertheless, the lover of life, male or female, finding himself or herself in sympathetic accord with such a nature, is apt to gain much.
Cowperwood was innately and primarily an egoist and intellectual, though blended strongly therewith, was a humane and democratic spirit. ”

“ As is so often the case in life, he frequently liked or disliked people on sight, and he prided himself on his judgment of men. Almost foolishly, for one so conservative, he was taken with Cowperwood—a man immensely his superior—not because of the Drexel letter, which spoke of the latter’s “undoubted financial genius” and the advantage it would be to Chicago to have him settle there, but because of the swimming wonder of his eyes. Cowperwood’s personality, while maintaining an unbroken outward reserve, breathed a tremendous humanness which touched his fellow-banker. ”

“ Now keep ’em all clean and use ’em right.” (You would have thought he was making Cowperwood a present of a fortune.) “You’re the one’s got to make up your bed every mornin’ and keep your floor swept and your toilet flushed and your cell clean. There hain’t anybody here’ll do that for yuh. You want to do all them things the first thing in the mornin’ when you get up, and afterward you’ll get sumpin’ to eat, about six-thirty. You’re supposed to get up at five-thirty.”
“Yes, Mr. Chapin,” Cowperwood said, politely. ”

“ You have seen, perhaps, a man whose heart was weighted by a great woe. You have seen the eye darken, the soul fag, and the spirit congeal under the breath of an icy disaster. At ten-thirty of this particular evening Cowperwood, sitting alone in the library of his Michigan Avenue house, was brought face to face with the fact that he had lost. He had built so much on the cast of this single die. It was useless to say to himself that he could go into the council a week later with a modified ordinance or could wait until the storm had died out. ”

“ The warden was quite pleased to think that Cowperwood should finally be going out—he admired him so much—and decided to come along to the cell, to see how he would take his liberation. On the way Desmas commented on the fact that he had always been a model prisoner. “He kept a little garden out there in that yard of his,” he confided to Walter Leigh. “He had violets and pansies and geraniums out there, and they did very well, too.”
Leigh smiled. It was like Cowperwood to be industrious and tasteful, even in prison. Such a man could not be conquered. ”

“ Cowperwood did not delude himself with any noble theories of conduct in regard to her. She was beautiful, with a mental and physical lure for him that was irresistible, and that was all he desired to know. No other woman was holding him like that. It never occurred to him that he could not or should not like other women at the same time. There was a great deal of palaver about the sanctity of the home. ”

“ He should be strong, handsome, direct, successful, with clear eyes, a ruddy glow of health, and a certain native understanding and sympathy—a love of life which matched her own. Many young men had approached her. Perhaps the nearest realization of her ideal was Father David, of St. Timothy’s, and he was, of course, a priest and sworn to celibacy. No word had ever passed between them but he had been as conscious of her as she of him. Then came Frank Cowperwood, and by degrees, because of his presence and contact, he had been slowly built up in her mind as the ideal person. ”

“ The “holier than thou” attitude, intentional or otherwise, is quite the last and most deadly offense within prison walls. This particular “trusty” could no more understand Cowperwood than could a fly the motions of a fly-wheel; but with the cocky superiority of the underling of the world he did not hesitate to think that he could. A crook was a crook to him—Cowperwood no less than the shabbiest pickpocket. His one feeling was that he would like to demean him, to pull him down to his own level.
“You will have to take everything you have out of your pockets,” Kendall now informed Cowperwood. ”

“ Our pants and shoes and coat and hat get too small for us every six months, and so we don’t look very fashionable, but there are big, strong, hard muscles and bones underneath, Mr. Cowperwood, as you’ll discover when you get to looking around. Then you won’t mind the clothes so much.”
Mr. Addison’s round, frank eyes narrowed and hardened for a moment. A kind of metallic hardness came into his voice. Cowperwood could see that he was honestly enamoured of his adopted city. Chicago was his most beloved mistress. ”

“ Her allowance thus far in life had been a pitiful six dollars a week outside of her clothing. As she surveyed these pretty things in the privacy of her room she wondered oddly whether Cowperwood was growing to like her. Would such a strong, hard business man be interested in her? She had heard her father say he was becoming very rich. Was she a great actress, as some said she was, and would strong, able types of men like Cowperwood take to her—eventually? ”

“ One thing that helped in providing a nice harmonious working atmosphere was the obvious warm affection of Cowperwood for his wife. While many might consider Aileen a little brash or crude, still in the hands of so strong and capable a man as Cowperwood she might prove available. So thought Mrs. Addison, for instance, and Mrs. Rambaud. McKibben and Lord felt the same way. If Cowperwood loved her, as he seemed to do, he would probably “put her through” successfully. And he really did love her, after his fashion. ”

“ In the face of this, however, Cowperwood was not disturbed. He did not believe in either the strength of the masses or their ultimate rights, though he sympathized with the condition of individuals, and did believe that men like himself were sent into the world to better perfect its mechanism and habitable order. Often now, in these preliminary days, he looked at the large companies of men with their horses gathered in and about the several carbarns of the company, and wondered at their state. ”

“ One could easily go too far! But if a European prince should have strayed to Chicago (which he never did) or if an Eastern social magnate chanced to stay over a train or two, then the topmost circle of local wealth was prepared to strain itself to the breaking-point. Cowperwood had sensed all this on his arrival, but he fancied that if he became rich and powerful enough he and Aileen, with their fine house to help them, might well be the leaven which would lighten the whole lump. ”

“ He was a pleasant, smiling, bland, affable person, not unlike Cowperwood in magnetism and subtlety, but different by a degree of animal coarseness (not visible on the surface) which Cowperwood would scarcely have understood, and in a kind of temperamental pull drawing to him that vast pathetic life of the underworld in which his soul found its solution. There is a kind of nature, not artistic, not spiritual, in no way emotional, nor yet unduly philosophical, that is nevertheless a sphered content of life ”

“ Studying Berenice in blue-silk bathing costume and shoes, Cowperwood had been stung by the wonder of passing life—how youth comes in, ever fresh and fresh, and age goes out. Here he was, long crowded years of conflict and experience behind him, and yet this twenty-year-old girl, with her incisive mind and keen tastes, was apparently as wise in matters of general import as himself. ”

“ If society was so finicky, if men were so dull—well, there was one thing she could do. She must have life, life—and money would help some to that end.
Besides, Cowperwood by degrees was becoming attractive to her ”

“ Cowperwood almost smiled, concerned as he was over avoiding publicity; he had no fear of Sohlberg physically.
“See here,” he exclaimed, suddenly, looking sharply at the musician and deciding to take the bull by the horns, “you are in quite as delicate a situation as I am, if you only stop to think. This affair, if it gets out, will involve not only me and Mrs. Cowperwood, but yourself and your wife, and if I am not mistaken, I think your own affairs are not in any too good shape. You cannot blacken your wife without blackening yourself—that is inevitable. None of us is exactly perfect. ”

“ All I have to say is that you look to me like sane, intelligent men—just the sort of men that I meet everywhere in the ordinary walks of life, doing an honorable American business in an honorable American way. Now, gentlemen of the jury [he was very soft-spoken now] , all I have to say is that if, after all you have heard and seen here to-day, you still think that Mr. Frank A. Cowperwood is an honest, honorable man—that he didn’t steal, willfully and knowingly, sixty thousand dollars from the Philadelphia city treasury ”

“ It’s a good rule. My boys don’t touch anything, and I’m glad of it. As I say, I’m interested in pickin’ up a few stocks on ’change; but, to tell you the truth, I’m more interested in findin’ some clever young felly like yourself through whom I can work. One thing leads to another, you know, in this world.” And he looked at his visitor non-committally, and yet with a genial show of interest.
“Quite so,” replied Cowperwood, with a friendly gleam in return. ”

“ Adam Davis was present and secured the secretaire of buhl which the elder Cowperwood prized so highly. To Fletcher Norton went the four Greek vases—a kylix, a water-jar, and two amphorae—which he had sold to Cowperwood and which he valued highly. Various objects of art, including a Sevres dinner set, a Gobelin tapestry, Barye bronzes and pictures by Detaille, Fortuny, and George Inness, went to Walter Leigh, Arthur Rivers, Joseph Zimmerman, Judge Kitchen, Harper Steger, Terrence Relihan, Trenor Drake, Mr. and Mrs. Simeon Jones, W. C. Davison, Frewen Kasson, Fletcher Norton, and Judge Rafalsky. ”

“ This house at Pocono, or Forest Edge, as Mrs. Carter had named it, was conducted after a peculiar fashion. From June to October only it was open, Mrs. Carter, in the past, having returned to Louisville at that time, while Berenice and Rolfe went back to their respective schools. Rolfe was a cheerful, pleasant-mannered youth, well bred, genial, and courteous, but not very brilliant intellectually. Cowperwood’s judgment of him the first time he saw him was that under ordinary circumstances he would make a good confidential clerk, possibly in a bank. ”

“ It is curious how that first and most potent tendency of the human mind, ambition, becomes finally dominating. Here was Cowperwood at fifty-seven, rich beyond the wildest dream of the average man, celebrated in a local and in some respects in a national way, who was nevertheless feeling that by no means had his true aims been achieved. ”

“ Hand, Schryhart, Merrill, and Arneel went still further into their pockets to protect their interests, and Cowperwood, triumphant, was roundly denounced by the smaller fry as a “bucaneer,” a “pirate,” a “wolf”—indeed, any opprobrious term that came into their minds. The larger men faced squarely the fact that here was an enemy worthy of their steel. Would he master them? Was he already the dominant money power in Chicago? Could he thus flaunt their helplessness and his superiority in their eyes and before their underlings and go unwhipped? ”