“Now where do men keep their accumulations of wealth?”
“In safes.”
“Exactly. So, in safes, lies the greatest danger to the individual and to society. Consequently, what else does he do, who removes the contents of the safe and dissipates it, than protect the accumulator and society from the increasing menace of that wealth which, left in the accumulator’s hands, would grow and grow till it destroyed all? Who is the friend of society, Steve—he who confesses to increasing the staggering sum of degenerative diseases brought on by overeating which he encourages for his own profit, or he who, at tremendous risk to himself, and with no hope of public favor when he succeeds, yet sets himself to strike and strike again and again at the very source of danger and decay?”
Jerry caught his breath. “Let us remain for a moment, Steve, not in the school of Astor Street but in that of my brother, Keeban.
“I’ve often wondered, particularly during these last days, what went through his head when he first discovered me. He got a hint of my existence, you know, when we were at Princeton. He could have guessed where I was; and maybe he came out a time or two, to look me over. I wonder what he thought of me. I was to him a ‘toff,’ I suppose; to him, I was running with those whom he despised. For hate and contempt comes into all this, Steve. You’ve got to work up your feelings to carry on any kind of war, and particularly the most personal war of all; you’ve got to talk atrocities and have your hymn of hate. So probably he started hating me.
“But he was curious about me, too, I bet. Of course he saw a big chance to make a great clean-up by suddenly becoming me some day—or night. There I was, identical with him; I bet, while he was watching and waiting, he wondered a lot about me.
“He even had a girl like mine; you saw that Christina looked like Dot. He came on here with Christina about six months ago and Win Scofield met her at a cabaret and went crazy over her. We know what happened from the Scofield point of view. From Christina’s and my friend’s—well, he told her to go to it, pick up a million or so and get out. Or maybe she’d do it nicely and legally, assert cruelty and get a divorce with whopping alimony in the most proper way.
“Then Fred and Kenyon thought they’d stop anything like that; they whipsawed the old man out of his control of the company when he was away and had him on an allowance when he got home. They thought they were awfully smart. All they did was sentence their father; that’s all. Meanwhile my friend turned some of his attention back to me, letting the well-known mill of the gods do its bit of grinding on the Scofield affair.
“Harrison Crewe was arriving in dear old Chicago with a nice necklace for daughter Dorothy. The newspapers not only appraised it but advertised its first appearance with all details. I was to escort daughter and necklace first to the Sparlings’ where there would be a wedding, after which the line of march would be down the Boulevard to the Drake. Probably my friend was still in Chicago; if he’d been called to New York on business, he must have jumped the Century and come back again with opportunity pounding on his door like that.
“Well, he arrived and we know what he did.”