“Ruined?” I said to Joe, easily enough. “Not at all. We're back in the road, going smoothly ahead—only, at a bit less stiff a pace. Think, Joe, of all those poor devils down in the mining districts. They're out—clear out—and thousands of 'em don't know where their families will get bread. And though they haven't found it out yet, they've got to leave the place where they've lived all their lives, and their fathers before them—have got to go wandering about in a world that's as strange to them as the surface of the moon, and as bare for them as the Sahara desert.”
“That's so,” said Joe. “It's hard luck.” But I saw he was thinking only of himself and his narrow escape from having to give up his big house and all the rest of it; that, soft-hearted and generous though he was, to those poor chaps and their wives and children he wasn't giving a thought.
Wall Street never does—they're too remote, too vague. It deals with columns of figures and slips of paper. It never thinks of those abstractions as standing for so many hearts and so many mouths, just as the bank clerk never thinks of the bits of metal he counts so swiftly as money with which things and men could be bought. I read somewhere once that Voltaire—I think it was Voltaire—asked a man what he would do if, by pressing a button on his table, he would be enormously rich and at the same time would cause the death of a person away off at the other side of the earth, unknown to him, and probably no more worthy to live, and with no greater expectation of life or of happiness than the average sinful, short-lived human being. I've often thought of that as I've watched our great “captains of industry.” Voltaire's dilemma is theirs. And they don't hesitate; they press the button. I leave the morality of the performance to moralists; to me, its chief feature is its cowardice, its sneaking, slimy cowardice.
“You've done a grand two hours' work,” said Joe.
“Grander than you think,” replied I. “I've set the tiger on to fight the bull.”
“Galloway and Roebuck?”
“Just that,” said I. And I laughed, started up, sat down again. “No, I'll put off the pleasure,” said I. “I'll let Roebuck find out, when the claws catch in that tough old hide of his.”
XXVII. A CONSPIRACY AGAINST ANITA
On about the hottest afternoon of that summer I had the yacht take me down the Sound to a point on the Connecticut shore within sight of Dawn Hill, but seven miles farther from New York. I landed at the private pier of Howard Forrester, the only brother of Anita's mother. As I stepped upon the pier I saw a fine-looking old man in the pavilion overhanging the water. He was dressed all in white except a sky-blue tie that harmonized with the color of his eyes. He was neither fat nor lean, and his smooth skin was protesting ruddily against the age proclaimed by his wool-white hair. He rose as I came toward him, and, while I was still several yards away, showed unmistakably that he knew who I was and that he was anything but glad to see me.