CHAPTER XXIX
GAIL FIRST!
Allison, springing forward with a jerk as he left Jim Sargent’s house, headed his long, low runabout up the Avenue. He raced into the Park, and glanced up at the lookout house as he sped on past; but it was only a fleeting look. He needed no reminder of Gail, and he scarcely noticed that he was following the same road which they had so often taken together. His only impulse had been to drive somewhere at top speed, and he had automatically chosen this path. The night was damp and chill, but his evening top coat was open, revealing the white glint of his shirt front. He did not seem to mind. As he passed Roseleaf Inn, he slowed down. The roadhouse may have given him, and probably did, another reminder of Gail, in such a manner as to concrete him into logical thought; for he slowed down the terrific speed which had been the accompaniment of his unreasoning emotion. The driving required too much concentration for specific thought.
With this turning of his mental attitude, even the slow running of the car seemed to disturb him, and, about half a mile past Roseleaf Inn, he came slowly to a stop, sitting at the wheel, with his head bent slightly forward, and staring at the spot where the roadway had ceased to roll beneath his machine. Presently he became aware of the cold, and running his car to the side of the road, he stepped out, and, buttoning his coat around him, crossed a fence and walked through the narrow strip of trees to the river bank, where he stood for a moment looking out upon the misty Hudson, sparkling under the moonlight. He began to walk up and down the bank presently, the turf sinking spongily under his feet, and it was noticeable that his pace grew more and more rapid, until he was striding at a furious rate of speed.
The man was in a torment of passion. He had spent a lifetime in the deliberate acquisition of everything upon which he had set his will; and it was one of the things upon which he had built his success, that, once he had fixed his desire deliberately upon anything, he had held unwaveringly to that object, employing all the forces of which strong men are capable; patient waiting, dogged persistence, or vicious grappling, whichever was best adapted to gain his ends.
Gail! If there had been tender thoughts of her, they were gone now. He saw her in a thousand enchantments; sitting beside him, clad in the white furs which added such piquancy to her rosy cheeks and sparkling eyes; lounging in the library, in some filmy, clinging robe which defined her grace, half concealing and half suggesting the long, delicately curving lines which had so appealed to his ruthlessness; sitting at the piano, her beautiful small head slightly bent forward, displaying the requisite line at the nape of her neck, her brown hair waving backward to a simple knot, her rounded white arms free from the elbows, and her slender fingers flashing over the keys; coming down the stairway, in the filmy cream lace gown which had made her seem so girlishly fragile, her daintily blue slippered feet and her beautifully turned ankles giving a hint of the grace and suppleness of her whole self; in her black beaded ball costume, its sparkling deadness displaying the exquisite ivory tints and beautiful colouring of her neck and shoulders and bosom with startling effectiveness. In these and a thousand other glowing pictures he saw her, and with every added picture there came a new pain in his thought of her.
He felt the warmth of her hand upon his arm, the brush of her shoulder against his own, the mere elbow touch as she sat beside him in the car, the many little careless contacts of daily life, unconscious to her, but to him fraught always with flame; and, finally, that maddening moment when he had crushed her in his arms, and so had made, for all time to come, the possession of her a necessity almost maniacal in the violence of its determination! He heard the sound of her voice, in all its enchanting cadences, from the sweetness of her murmured asides to the ring of her laugh; and the delicate fragrance which was a part of her overwhelmed him now, in remembrance, like an unnerving faintness!
It was so that he had centred his mind upon her, and himself and his will, until, in all creation, there was nothing else but that was trivial; ambition, power, wealth, fame, the command of empires and of men, were nothing, except as they might lead to her!
As a boy Allison had been endowed with extraordinary strength. From a mother who had married beneath her socially he had inherited a certain redeeming refinement of taste, a richness of imagination, a turn of extravagance, a certain daring and confidence. Had his heredity been left to the father alone, he would have developed into a mere brute, fighting for the love of inflicting pain, his ambitions confined to physical supremacy alone. As it was, the combination had made of him a brute more dangerous by the addition of intelligence. In spite of gentle surroundings, he had persistently ran away to play in a rough and tumble neighbourhood, where he had been the terror of boys a head taller than himself, and had established an unquestioned tyranny among them. He had a passion at that time for killing cats, and a devilish ingenuity in devising new modes of torture for them, saturating them with gasolene and burning them alive, and other such ghastly amusements. The cruelty of this he had from the father, the ingenuity from the mother. In a fleeting introspection, a review which could have occupied but a few seconds of time, he saw back through the years of his passion, for every year had been a passion of supremacy, as if the cinematograph of his life had flashed swiftly before him, pausing for illumination at certain points which had marked the attainment of hard-won goals.
The days of his schooling, when the mother in him had made him crave knowledge in spite of the physical instincts which drove him out doors. He accomplished both. He went at his lessons viciously, perhaps because they were something which had a tendency to baffle him, and he had made no braver fights in life than on those lonely nights when, angry and determined, he had grappled with his books and conquered them. He had won football honours at the same time. It was said that half the victories of his team came through the fear of Allison on the opposing elevens. He had the reputation of being a demon on the gridiron. His eyes became slightly bloodshot in every contest, and he went into every battle with a smile on his lips which was more like a snarl. His rise to football supremacy was well remembered all through life by a dozen cripples. He had been extremely fond of football, even after one of his strongest opponents had been carried from the field with a broken neck.
Then business. A different sort of cruelty entered there. He had a method of advancement which was far more effective than adroitness. With the same vicious fever of achievement which had marked the conquering of his books, he had made himself flawlessly efficient, and had contrasted himself deliberately with whatever weakness he could find in his superiors. On the day when the superintendent drank, Allison took especial pains to create an emergency, a break-down in the power plant, and showed himself side by side with the temporarily stupid superintendent, clear-eyed, firm-jawed, glowing cheeked, ready to grapple with his own emergency. He became superintendent. Trickery, now. A block of stock here, a block of stock there, a combination of small holdings by which an unsuspected group of outsiders swept in with control of that first little street car company. Allison’s was the smallest block of shares in that combination, infinitesimal as compared with the total capitalisation of the company, the investment of his small savings combined with all the borrowing he could manage. Yet, since he had organised the rebellion, he was left in its control by the same personal dominance with which he had brought together the warring elements. Less than two years after his accession to management, he had frozen out the associates who had put him in power. They none of them knew how it was done, but they did know that he had taken advantage of every tricky opportunity his position gave him, and they were bitter about it. He laughed at them, and he thrashed the man who complained loudest, a man who had lost every cent of his money through Allison’s manipulations. Well, that was the way of business. The old rule of conquest that might makes right had only gone out of favour as applied to physical oppression. In everything else, it still prevailed; and Allison was its chief exponent.