The Deluge Read online

  VII. BLACKLOCK GOES INTO TRAINING

  This brings me to the ugliest story my enemies have concocted against me.No one appreciates more thoroughly than I that, to rise high, a man musthave his own efforts seconded by the flood of vituperation that his enemiessend to overwhelm him, and which washes him far higher than he could hopeto lift himself. So I do not here refer to any attack on me in the publicprints; I think of them only with amusement and gratitude. The story thatrankles is the one these foes of mine set creeping, like a snake under thefallen leaves, everywhere, anywhere, unseen, without a trail. It has beenwhispered into every ear--and it is, no doubt, widely believed--that Ideliberately put old Bromwell Ellersly "in a hole," and there tortured himuntil he consented to try to compel his daughter to marry me.

  It is possible that, if I had thought of such a devilish device, I mighthave tried it--is not all fair in love? But there was no need for mycudgeling my brains to carry that particular fortification on my way towhat I had fixed my will upon. _Bromwell Ellersly came to me of his ownaccord_.

  I suppose the Ellerslys must have talked me over in the family circle.However this may be, my acquaintance with her father began with Sam'sasking me to lunch with him. "The governor has heard me talk of you somuch," said he, "that he is anxious to meet you."

  I found him a dried-up, conventional old gentleman, very proud of hisancestors, none of whom I had ever heard of, and very positive that a greatdeal of deference was due him--though on what grounds I could not then,and can not now, make out. I soon discovered that it was the scent of mystock-tip generosity, wafted to him by Sammy, that had put him hot upon mytrail. I hadn't gone far into his affairs before I learned that he had beenspeculating, mortgaging, kiting notes, doing what he called, and thought,"business" on a large scale. He regarded business as beneath the dignityand the intellect of a "gentleman"--how my gorge does rise at that word! Sohe put his great mind on it only for a few hours now and then; he reservedthe rest of his time for what he regarded as the proper concerns of agentleman--attending to social "duties," reading pretentious books, lookingat the pictures and listening to the music decreed fashionable.

  They charge that I put him "in a hole." In fact, I found him at the bottomof a deep pit he had dug for himself; and when he first met me he was,without having the sense to realize it, just about to go smash, with not apenny for his old age. As soon as I had got this fact clear of the tangle,I showed it to him.

  "My God, what is to become of _me_?" he said, That was his onlythought--not, what is to become of my wife and daughter; but, what is tobecome of "_me_!" I do not blame him for this. Naturally enough,people who have always been used to everything become, unconsciously,monsters of egotism and selfishness; it is natural, too, that they shouldimagine themselves liberal and generous if they give away occasionallysomething that costs them, at most, nothing more serious than the foregoingof some extravagant luxury or other. I recite his remark simply to showwhat manner of man he was, what sort of creature I had to deal with.

  I offered to help him, and I did help him. Is there any one, knowinganything of the facts of life, who will censure me when I admit thatI--with deliberation--simply tided him over, did not make for him andpresent to him a fortune? What chance should I have had, if I had been soabsurdly generous to a man who deserved nothing but punishment for hisselfish and bigoted mode of life? I took away his worst burdens; but I lefthim more than he could carry without my help. And it was not until he hadappealed, in vain to all his social friends to relieve him of the necessityof my aid, not until he realized that I was his only hope of escaping asharp comedown from luxury to very modest comfort in a flat somewhere--notuntil then did his wife send me an invitation to dinner. And I had not somuch as hinted that I wanted it.

  I shall never forget the smallest detail of that dinner--it was a purely"family" affair, only the Ellerslys and I. I can feel now the oppressiveatmosphere, the look as of impending sacrilege upon the faces of the oldservants; I can see Mrs. Ellersly trying to condescend to be "gracious,"and treating me as if I were some sort of museum freak or menagerieexhibit. I can see Anita. She was like a statue of snow; she spoke nota word; if she lifted her eyes, I failed to note it. And when I wasleaving--I with my collar wilted from the fierce, nervous strain I had beenenduring--Mrs. Ellersly, in that voice of hers into which I don't believeany shade of a real human emotion ever penetrated, said: "You must come tosee us, Mr. Blacklock. We are always at home after five."

  I looked at Miss Ellersly. She was white to the lips now, and the spangleson her white dress seemed bits of ice glittering there. She said nothing;but I knew she felt my look, and that it froze the ice the more closely inaround her heart. "Thank you," I muttered.

  I stumbled in the hall; I almost fell down the broad steps. I stopped atthe first bar and took three drinks in quick succession. I went on down theavenue, breathing like an exhausted swimmer. "I'll give her up!" I criedaloud, so upset was I.

  I am a man of impulse; but I have trained myself not to be a_creature_ of impulse, at least not in matters of importance. Withoutthat patient and painful schooling, I shouldn't have got where I now am;probably I'd still be blacking boots, or sheet-writing for some bookmaker,or clerking it for some broker. Before I got to my rooms, the night air andmy habit of the "sober second thought" had cooled me back to rationality.

  "I want her, I need her," I was saying to myself. "I am worthier of herthan are those mincing manikins she has been bred to regard as men. She isfor me--she belongs to me. I'll abandon her to no smirking puppet who'dwear her as a donkey would a diamond. Why should I do myself and her aninjury simply because she has been too badly brought up to know her owninterest?"

  And now I see all the smooth frauds, all the weak people who never havepurposes or passions worthy of the name, all the finicky, finger-dustinggentry with the "fine souls," who flatter themselves that their timidity isthe squeamishness of superior sensibilities--I see all these feeble folkfluttering their feeble fingers in horror of me. "The brute!" they cry;"the bounder!" Well, I accept the names quite cheerfully. Those are theepithets the wishy-washy always hurl at the strong; they put me in thesmall and truly aristocratic class of men who _do_. I proudly avowmyself no subscriber to the code that was made by the shearers to encouragethe sheep to keep on being nice docile animals, trotting meekly up tobe shorn or slaughtered as their masters may decide. I harm no man, andno woman; but neither do I pause to weep over any man or any woman whoflings himself or herself upon my steady spear. I try to be courteous andconsiderate to all; but I do not stop when some fellow who has somethingthat belongs to me shouts "Rude!" at me to sheer me off.

  At the same time, her delicate beauty, her quiet, distinctive, high-bredmanner, had thrust it home to me that in certain respects I was ignorantand crude--as who would not have been, brought up as was I? I knew therewas, somewhere between my roughness of the uncut individuality and thesmoothness of the planed and sand-papered nonentity of her "set," a mean,better than either, better because more efficient.

  When this was clear to me I sent for my trainer. He was one of those spare,wiry Englishmen, with skin like tanned and painted hide--brown exceptwhere the bones seem about to push their sharp angles through, and therea frosty, winter-apple red. He dressed like a Deadwood gambler, he talkedlike a stable boy; but for all that, you couldn't fail to see he was agentleman born and bred. Yes, he was a gentleman, though he mixed profanityinto his ordinary flow of conversation more liberally than did I when in arage.

  I stood up before him, threw my coat back, thrust my thumbs into mytrousers pockets and slowly turned about like a ready-made tailor's dummy."Monson," said I, "what do you think of me?"

  He looked me over as if I were a horse he was about to buy. "Sound, I'dsay," was his verdict. "Good wind--uncommon good wind. A goer, and astayer. Not a lump. Not a hair out of place." He laughed. "Action a bithigh perhaps--for the track. But a grand reach."

  "I know all that," said I. "You miss my point. Suppose you wanted to
enterme for--say, the Society Sweepstakes--what then?"

  "Um--um," he muttered reflectively. "That's different."

  "Don't I look--sort of--new--as if the varnish was still sticky and mightcome off on the ladies' dresses and on the fine furniture?"

  "Oh--that!" said he dubiously. "But all those kinds of things are mattersof taste."

  "Out with it!" I commanded. "Don't be afraid. I'm not one of those damnfools that ask for criticism when they want only flattery, as you oughtto know by this time. I'm aware of my good points, know how good they arebetter than anybody else in the world. And I suspect my weak points--alwaysdid. I've got on chiefly because I made people tell me to my face whatthey'd rather have grinned over behind my back."

  "What's your game?" asked Monson. "I'm in the dark."

  "I'll tell you, Monson. I hired you to train horses. Now I want to hire youto train me, too. As it's double work, it's double pay."

  "Say on," said he, "and say it slow."

  "I want to marry," I explained. "I want to inspect all the offerings beforeI decide. You are to train me so that I can go among the herds that'd shyoff from me if I wasn't on to their little ways."

  He looked suspiciously at me, doubtless thinking this some new developmentof "American humor."

  "I mean it," I assured him. "I'm going to train, and train hard. I've gotno time to lose. I must be on my way down the aisle inside of three months.I give you a free hand. I'll do just what you say."

  "The job's out of my line," he protested.

  "I know better," said I. "I've always seen the parlor under the stable inyou. We'll begin right away. What do you think of these clothes?"

  "Well--they're not exactly noisy," he said. "But--they're far from silent.That waistcoat--" He stopped and gave me another nervous, timid look. Hefound it hard to believe a man of my sort, so self-assured, would stand thetruth from a man of his second-fiddle sort.

  "Go on!" I commanded. "Speak out! Mowbray Langdon had on one twice as loudthe other day at the track."

  "But, perhaps you'll remember, it was only his waistcoat that was loud--nothe himself. Now, a man of your manner and voice and--you've got a look outof the eyes that'd wake the dead all by itself. People can feel you comingbefore they hear you. When they feel and hear and see all together--it'slike a brass band in scarlet uniform, with a seven-foot, sky-blue drummajor. If your hair wasn't so black and your eyes so steel-blue and sharp,and your teeth so big and strong and white, and your jaw such a--sucha--_jaw_--"

  "I see the point," said I. And I did. "You'll find you won't need to tellme many things twice. I've got a busy day before me here; so we'll haveto suspend this until you come to dine with me at eight--at my rooms.I want you to put in the time well. Go to my house in the country andthen up to my apartment; take my valet with you; look through all mybelongings--shirts, ties, socks, trousers, waistcoats, clothes of everykind. Throw out every rag you think doesn't fit in with what I want to be.How's my grammar?"

  I was proud of it; I had been taking more or less pains with my mode ofspeech for a dozen years. "Rather too good," said he. "But that's betterthan making the breaks that aren't regarded as good form."

  "Good form!" I exclaimed. "That's it! That's what I want! What does 'goodform' mean?"

  He laughed. "You can search me," said he. "I could easier tellyou--anything else. It's what everybody recognizes on sight, and nobodyknows how to describe. It's like the difference between a cultivated'jimson' weed and a wild one."

  "Like the difference between Mowbray Langdon and me," I suggestedgood-naturedly. "How about my manners?"

  "Not so bad," said he. "Not so rotten bad. But--when you're polite, you'rea little too polite; when you're not polite, you--"

  "Show where I came from too plainly?" said I. "Speak right out--hit goodand hard. Am I too frank for 'good form'?"

  "You needn't bother about that," he assured me. "Say whatever comes intoyour head--only, be sure the right sort of thing comes into your head.Don't talk too much about yourself, for instance. It's good form to thinkabout yourself all the time; it's bad form to let people see it--in yourtalk. Say as little as possible about your business and about what you'vegot. Don't be lavish with the I's and the my's."

  "That's harder," said I. "I'm a man who has always minded his own business,and cared for nothing else. What could I talk about, except myself?"

  "Blest if I know," replied he. "Where you want to go, the last thing peoplemind is their own business--in talk, at least. But you'll get on all rightif you don't worry too much about it. You've got natural independence, andan original way of putting things, and common sense. Don't be afraid."

  "Afraid!" said I. "I never knew what it was to be afraid."

  "Your nerve'll carry you through," he assured me. "Nerve'll take a mananywhere."

  "You never said a truer thing in your life," said I. "It'll take himwherever he wants, and, after he's there, it'll get him whatever he wants."

  And with that, I, thinking of my plans and of how sure I was of success,began to march up and down the office with my chest thrown out--until Icaught myself at it. That stopped me, set me off in a laugh at my ownexpense, he joining in with a kind of heartiness I did not like, though Idid not venture to check him.

  So ended the first lesson--the first of a long series. I soon saw thatMonson was being most useful to me--far more useful than if he were a"perfect gentleman" with nothing of the track and stable and back stairsabout him. Being a sort of betwixt and between, he could appreciate myneeds as they could not have been appreciated by a fellow who had neverlived in the rough-and-tumble I had fought my way up through. And beingat bottom a real gentleman, and not one of those nervous, snobbishmake-believes, he wasn't so busy trying to hide his own deficienciesfrom me that he couldn't teach me anything. He wasn't afraid of beingfound out, as Sam--or perhaps, even Langdon--would have been in the samecircumstances. I wonder if there is another country where so many gentlemenand ladies are born, or another where so many of them have their naturalgentility educated out of them.