Light-Fingered Gentry

by David Graham Phillips

The busy days fled. He had the feeling of being caught in a revolving door that took him from bedtime to bedtime again without letting him out to accomplish anything; and he was soon so well accommodated to the atmosphere of high finance that he was breathing it with almost no sensation of strangeness. When old Shotwell died—of "heart failure"—Armstrong took out the undelivered speech.

The day after the "testimonial," he had decided that to read that speech would be dangerously near to the line between honor and dishonor; besides, it probably contained many things which, whether true or prejudiced, might affect his peace of mind, might inflict upon his conscience unnecessary discomforts. A wise man is careful not to admit to his valuable brain space matters which do not help him in the accomplishment of his purposes. Should he mail the manuscript to Shotwell? No. That might tempt the old man to a course of folly and disaster. Armstrong hid the "stick of dynamite" among his private papers. But now, Shotwell was dead; and—well, he still believed in the O.A.D.—in the main; but many things had happened in the months since he came on from the West, many and disquieting things. He felt that he owed it to himself, and to the O.A.D., to gather from any and every source information about the Fosdick ring. He unfolded the manuscript, spread it before him on the desk.

Eleven typewritten pages, setting forth in detail how Fosdick had slyly lured Shotwell into committing, apparently alone, certain "indiscretions" for which there happened to be legal penalties of one to ten years in the penitentiary at hard labor; how Shotwell, thus isolated, was trapped—though, as he proceeded to show, he had done nothing morally or legally worse than all the others had done, the Fosdick faction being careful to entangle in each misdeed enough of the Galloway faction to make itself secure. And all the offenses were those "mere technicalities" which high finance permits the law to condemn only because they, when committed in lower circles, cease to be justifiable exceptions to the rule and become those "grave infractions of social order and of property rights" which Chamber of Commerce dinners and bar associations of corporation lawyers so strenuously lecture the people about. And so, Shotwell had fallen.

Armstrong read the document four times—the first time, at a gallop; the second time, line by line; the third time, with a long, thoughtful pause after each paragraph; the fourth time, line by line again, with one hand supporting his brow while the index finger of the other traced under each separate word. Then he leaned back and gazed from peak to peak of the skyscrapers, stretching range on range toward harbor and river. He was not thinking now of the wrongs, the crimes against that mass of policy holders, so remote, so abstract. He was listening to a different, a more terrible sound than the vague wail of that vague mass; he was hearing the ticking of a death-watch. For he had discovered that Fosdick had him trapped in just the same way.

As a precaution? Or with the time of his downfall definitely fixed?

Armstrong began to pace the limits of his big private room. For a turn or so it surprised him to find that he could move freely about; for, with the thought that he was in another man's power, had come a physical sensation of actual chains and bolts and bars, of dungeon walls and dungeon air. In another man's power! In Fosdick's power! He, Horace Armstrong, proud, intensely alive and passionately fond of freedom, with inflexible ambition set upon being the master of men—he, a slave, dependent for his place, for his authority, for his very reputation. Dependent on the nod of a fellow man. He straightened himself, shook himself; he clenched his fists and his teeth until the powerful muscles of his arms and shoulders and jaws swelled to aching, until the blood beat in his skin like flame against furnace wall.

The door opened; he saw as he was turning that it was Josiah Fosdick; he wheeled back toward the window because he knew that if he should find himself full face to this master of his before he got self-control, he would spring at him and sink his fingers in his throat and wring the life out of him. The will to kill! To feel that creature under him, under his knees and fingers; to see eyes and tongue burst out; to know that the brain that dared conceive the thought of making a slave of him was dead for its insolence!

"Good morning, my boy!" Josiah was saying in that sonorous, cheery voice of his. He always wore his square-crowned hard hat or his top hat well back from his brow when he was under roof downtown; and he was always nervously chewing at a cigar, which sometimes was lighted and sometimes not. Just now it was not lighted and the odor of it was to Armstrong the sickening stench of the personality of his master.

"My master!" he muttered, and wiped the sweat from his forehead; with eyes down and the look of the lion cringing before the hot iron in its tamer's hand he muttered a response.

"I want you to put my son Hugo in as one of the fourth vice-presidents," continued the old man, seating himself and cocking his trim feet on a corner of the table. "He must be broken to the business, and I've told him he's got to start at the bottom of the ladder."