CHAPTER XVIII
THE DUPLICITY OF ADDICKS
Addicks looked at me in a cool, aggravating way, as though my enthusiasm was a joke.
"Lawson, you have done a big thing, a big thing, but you put up too many bonds, altogether too many. It looks to me as though that old trickster had got the best of us at last."
By this time I had learned all the moods of this man and knew that when he assumed that air of cold, saturnine jocularity it was safe to look for the uncovering of some vaporized trickery. My enthusiasm oozed. I hastened to ask:
"What do you mean by 'too many bonds,' Addicks? I gave him all we had. Sorry it was not more. We are to pay him four and a half million dollars, and the sooner we do it the better. Now out with what you've got in your mind; I won't stand any trifling."
Addicks continued to look at me with the same insolent, critical air. He said slowly:
"The reason I say you've given too many bonds is that we haven't a million and a half to put up. Where in the world did you get the idea we had?"
In an instant I realized that this sharper had tricked me into apparently tricking Rogers. I was boiling with rage.
"You have told me over and over again that you retained the right to issue a million and a half bonds, that you had never parted with it, and relying on your assurances, I have done business with Rogers. Let's have the truth now at once."
Addicks is a master in the management of just such tangles as had developed here. I had expected him to give way before my indignation. He looked me square in the eye and turned the tables on me. He got mad first.
"You have taken too much on yourself," he began vehemently. "You had no right to go ahead without consulting me. Because I've given you full swing you think you are the whole thing, but you're not. And as for your rushing in on me without warning and expecting me to let you turn all the assets of this corporation over to your new 'Standard Oil' friend, I won't stand for it. You can't do this corporation's business that way."
He poured on for five minutes without giving me a chance to interpose a word. He seemed to be consumed with anger and paced up and down the office. Then suddenly he stopped:
"We cannot afford to have any trouble, you and I, Lawson. I'm sure you did only what you thought best, but the fact is, I pledged some of those bonds for our war supplies a few months ago, and though I'm not going to dispute it with you, I'd swear I told you at the time."
As Addicks talked I had been mentally reviewing the situation in which I found myself. I saw myself dropped out of Rogers' consideration as the same kind of a financial trickster that Addicks was. For the moment, I had no fight left; I was knocked out.
"Don't feel bad, Lawson. You got as far with Rogers as it is possible to get, and you are dead right when you say that once we get hold of his corporation so that every one knows we've licked him, we can easily sell stock enough to pay him in a few weeks." As he talked he was again the master financial trickster, full of device and strategy. Finally I answered:
"Don't say any more, Addicks. Words won't help us. I've got to face Rogers as soon as a train can take me back to New York, and after that—then I'll have something to say to you." I started to go.
"What are you going to say to him?" he asked.
"Say to him? What can I say to him? At my solicitation he gave me a hearing—at his own home—treated me best in the world. I told him certain things, and pledged my word they were truths, and I've got to go back and tell——"
"Tell what?"
"That I'm either as big a liar as he says you are or a fool—a doddering fool."
"You are going to do nothing of the kind," Addicks declared peremptorily. "You're going to tell him that you were not posted up to date, and that I, being pressed for money, had pledged some of the million and a half I had told you we had. That's all. He'll see it all right, and he'll trade for—for—what we have left."
I suddenly remembered that he had not told me how many bonds he had on hand. Just a ray of hope in the fog.
"How many free bonds have we to offer, Addicks, suppose he is willing to overlook this ugly piece of trickery?" I asked anxiously.
"I'm not quite sure," he answered, "but I can find out from the books." He rang for Miller, his right-hand man, the dummy treasurer of the Bay State Company, and said to him: "Harry, Mr. Lawson has got mixed up about the bonds. He thought we had a million and a half. You remember we've pledged some in the loans. Just how many have we now on hand?"
"Harry" looked it up and said: "Just $904,000 worth."
"There you are, Lawson," cried Addicks. "There's plenty to assure Rogers we'll do what we agree to."
Fool that I was, I did not see his game. No one ever does see Addicks' game till it is too late, for no one but a moral idiot would play the game Addicks plays, and, thank heaven, moral idiots are so rare in life that it is not worth while figuring out the formula from which they work.
By one o'clock I was at Mr. Rogers' office at 26 Broadway.
He greeted me warmly. "Well, Lawson, did you get things finished up all right?"
"Mr. Rogers, I have a most humiliating admission to——"
"Hold up right there. Cut out all explanations and excuses. Have you brought those bonds as you agreed to, or not?" His eyes were snapping and shifting from one color to another.
"No, I have not got them."
"Why not?"
Had I been a woman I should have clapped my hands to my ears and screamed, so sudden and bomb-like came those two words.
"He had used some of them and has only $904,000 on hand."
"Only $904,000!"
It is impossible to convey the concentrated scorn and sarcasm Mr. Rogers infused into these words, and he continued to glare at me for fully a minute, his eyes as searching as x-rays. When that glare shifted I had a presentiment it would leave me forever a stranger to him, and I made up my mind to turn on my heel and leave his office without a word. I felt that he was in the right, and that if I were in his place I'd glare, too.
Suddenly the expression changed. He said peremptorily: "Lawson, get on the first train for Philadelphia and bring back those agreements executed and the $904,000 instead of the $1,500,000."
"Mr. Rogers," I began, but he stopped me with an imperative gesture.
"Don't say a word, but do as I tell you. I warned you you were dealing with a dog, but you wouldn't have it. Now I'm going to put this trade through even if I make a fool of myself thereby. You've done your work and that whelp shall not keep you out of its results. I'm in this now, and we will see if Addicks can outplay me as well as you. Not another word. I understand the whole thing."
I returned to Philadelphia deciding once and for all certain things in regard to Mr. Rogers and others affecting the future of J. Edward O'Sullivan Addicks; and that night Addicks and I "had it out." I shall not attempt to reproduce our talk. Suffice it to state that when I called for the bonds Addicks began to hem and haw, and then I realized that he had a second time lied to me. We were in his Philadelphia office, and it was night and we were alone. I demanded the truth, and finally he told me he had no $904,000 of bonds. As a fact he had not a single bond. He had used them to the last one and had deceived me for months. In regard to this interview Addicks has always maintained that I laid hands upon him, and that he was on the verge of doing some awful thing, but this is false. What I did was to turn the key in the door and then, without undue regard to his sensibilities, draw a word-picture of the position he had placed me in. Also I said what I thought of him. That is all.
The vast profits which the stock operator makes apparently overnight are often subjects for the world's wonder and envy. But if the gains are great, the road is muddy. If those who covet the golden rewards will participate in a deal or two, wallow in the filthy double-dealing which is an inevitable part of the cost price of success, they will quickly realize the dark side of the glittering game, and that the sacrifices are in proportion to the winnings. If I had been asked that night what price would recompense me for the hell Addicks' shabby deceit had stirred up in me, I should have said—that night—that no number of millions would pay for the bitterness of the experience.
It was after midnight when I left Addicks' office, and as I walked to my hotel I was steeped in gloom and bitterness. Before me was the most humiliating ordeal with which Fate had ever saddled me. I had to confess failure a second time, and under such circumstances that Rogers would be justified in believing me either a swindler or a dupe unworthy of respect or consideration.
I was at 26 Broadway by ten o'clock the same morning. Mr. Rogers was in his main private office. His secretary was with him. He was full of business, and, I thought, preoccupied. As I entered, and before a word of greeting passed, he gave me one of his keen, appraising glances.
"Well?" was all he said.
"Your estimate of Addicks was correct. He has no bonds," I said, giving him the worst of it at once. I was desperate and certainly in no mood for apology. Rogers looked at me. I thought he gasped. He rushed—whether he pushed or pulled me, or we both slid, or how we got there I don't know—but in an instant after I had said "He has no bonds" we were in one of the number of 8 x 12 glass-sided pens he calls waiting-rooms, but which the clerks have dubbed "visitors' sweatboxes." He put both hands on my shoulders and he yelled—fairly yelled: "Say that again! I did not get it."
In after-years I became on rather playful terms with the extraordinary bursts of wrath to which Henry H. Rogers occasionally gives way, and which sweep through the "System's" shrine like a tornado; but this was my first experience, and it was a shock and a revelation. Just what was going to happen next I could not imagine. I remembered afterward that the most definite of the impressions that chased each other through my mind was that Henry H. Rogers would surely have a stroke of apoplexy. Then that he would "bust." However, I pulled myself together and began:
"Mr. Rogers, what's the use of getting excited?"
I got no further. He jumped backward. The next second I was in the storm-centre. The room was small. Suddenly it became full of arms and legs and hands waving and gesticulating, and fists banging and brandishing; gnashing teeth and a convulsed face in which the eyes actually burned and rained fire; and the language—such a torrent of vilification and denunciation I have never heard, mingled with oaths so intense, so picturesque, so varied that the assortment would have driven an old-time East Indiaman skipper green with jealousy. I was horrified for an instant, then surprised, and after that, if it had not been for my position as the cause of it all, I should have been interested in the exhibition as a performance.
I could hear a stirring and a movement outside. The clerks were evidently aware of the scene. Forms passed rapidly across the ground-glass walls. After a time Rogers controlled himself. Then he said to me in a voice still vibrant with passion:
"Lawson, tell me—put it in short, plain language—do you mean to say that after coming to me of your own accord and agreeing to do certain things, and then returning here to this very office, admitting that you had tricked me; after my overlooking that breach of faith and agreeing to take half the collateral simply because it was all you could raise, and because I desired to assist you—do you mean to say you have the audacity to tell me to my face that the whole thing is a lie and you have imposed on me?"
"I mean, Mr. Rogers, to tell you that Mr. Addicks has just proved to me that he has no bonds; that he is a liar and worse."
"Oh, he is, is he? But does that justify you in coming?—oh!—--"
Again he was off. When he stopped for breath I raised my voice and made it loud and emphatic enough to convince even a man temporarily insane that my part as audience and victim had ended. I said:
"Mr. Rogers, I can't say more than that I apologize for the part I've been made to play in this transaction, and I'll leave your office prepared to take any kind of medicine, however harsh it may be, that you will deal out on account of all this. Not only will I take it, but I'll think you are right in administering it."
Rogers once more got himself under control. I stepped toward the door.
"One minute, Lawson—one minute. What are you going to do? Go back to your associate, that gentlemanly, square-dealing fellow in Philadelphia?"
"Mr. Rogers," I replied, "I ask no mercy at your hands, but there's a limit to the things a man will stand under the mess I'm laboring with. I'm going to do the best I can. What it will be I don't know. There's a deal of money at stake—my friends', the public's, my own—I'm responsible for it. I've made a terrible blunder. I am paying for it, but nothing that has happened has altered my idea of the duty I owe myself and others."
He was about to say something sarcastic. Then he choked back the words. His manlier nature rose to the surface.
"Lawson," he said, "I'm sorry for you. Upon my soul I am."
"You needn't be, Mr. Rogers. It's all right; it's part of the game, but I'm awfully sorry I came near you." I opened the door.
"One second more, Lawson," he said, stopping me and putting out his hand. "I'm not only sorry, but I give you my word I have not a doubt—no, not a suspicion of your good faith throughout this business—and if at any time you see your way to open up negotiations, you're welcome. Do you understand? You're welcome to come in here or to my house at any time you think you see your way out."
I said "good-by" and bolted before my feelings overcame me.