Light-Fingered Gentry

by David Graham Phillips

Fosdick shot a quick, sharp glance at him. "Let me see it."

Waller took the paper out of the basket, as if he were handling something vile to sight, touch and smell. "These sensational sheets are very impudent and untruthful," he said, as he gave it to his master.

Fosdick spread the paper. He sprang back as if he had been struck. "God!" he cried. "God in heaven!"

In the committee room, after the first unpleasantness, all had been smooth, and there was not to his self-complacent security of the divine right monarch the remotest suggestion of impending disgrace. Now—from the front page of this newspaper, flying broadcast through the city, through the country, shrieked, "Fosdick Perjures Himself! The eminent financier and churchman caught on the witness stand. Denies knowledge of political bribery funds and is trapped! Evades accusations of gigantic swindles and thefts."

Disgrace, like all the other strong tragic words, conveys little of its real meaning to anyone until it becomes personal. Fosdick would have said beforehand that the publication of an attack on him in the low newspapers would not trouble him so much as the buzzing of a fly about his bald spot. He would have said that there was in him—in his conscience, in his confidence in the approval of his God—a tower of righteous strength that would stand against any attack, as unimperiled as a skyscraper by a summer breeze. But, with these huge, coarse voices of the all-pervading press shrieking and screaming "Perjurer. Swindler! Thief!" he shook as with the ague and turned gray and groaned. He sat down that he might not fall.

"God! God in heaven!" he muttered.

"It's infamous," cried Waller, tears in his eyes and anger in his voice. "No man, no matter how upright or high, is safe from those wretches."

Fosdick gripped his head between his hands. "It hurts, Waller—it hurts," he moaned.

"Nobody will pay the slightest attention to it," said Waller. "We all know you."

But Fosdick was not listening. He was wondering how he had been able to delude himself, how he had failed to realize the construction that could, and by the public would, be put upon his testimony. Many's the thing that sounds and looks and seems right and proper in privacy and before a few sympathetic witnesses, and that shudders in the full livery of shame when exposed before the world. Here was an instance—and he, the shrewd, the lifelong dealer in public opinion, had been tricked at his own trade as he had never been able to trick anyone else in half a century of chicane.