"The game man, the game!"
"Game? what game? To crush and kill for the mere sake of doing it, as a sheep-killing dog strangles fifty lambs in a night for the fun of hearing them bleat? Isn't there a bigger game? a game of mutual joys and hopes, of sunlight and laughter?"
"But, Jim," the little financier protested, "I don't make men as they are, nor did I make conditions."
"Still is that any reason why a man shouldn't take his place on the right side of the fight? The eternal struggle is always on between Life and Death. A man's in league with one or the other. Which is it? You are a wrecker and not a builder."
"But is that true?" Bivens interrupted eagerly. "I'm organizing the industries of the world. I have furthered the progress of humanity."
"Yes, in a way you have. And if the price of goods continues to rise for another ten years as it has during the past ten under your organizing the human race will be compelled to make still further progress. They will have to move to another planet. Nobody but a millionaire can live on this one. A day of reckoning is bound to come."
Bivens laughed, walked back to the window and gazed down on the narrow streets below.
"A day of reckoning!" he exclaimed. "Look at those crawling lines of men, Jim, and think for a moment of the millions like them on the surface of the earth, each one fighting tooth and nail for his own kennel and the bone that he claims. Think of the centuries of stupid history back of each generation of those crawling things—their selfish habits, as fixed as the colour of hair and eyes, their pride, their little prejudices of race and creed—and talk to me about days of reckoning and revolution! Hurl yourself against the mighty system of business that has slowly built itself through the centuries out of such material and you simply beat your brains out against a granite wall."
"Well, I see something entirely different," Stuart answered, "as I look on that slowly moving line of men down there. To me they symbolize the eternal, the endless stream that sweeps through time to whose life a century is but a moment. You think that you are one of the mighty. By the signs on that table you are. And yet, you could die to-night and that black stream of humanity would flow along that narrow street to-morrow as it does to-day and not one in all the crowd would pause to look up at the flag at half mast on your building. One by one the mighty fall and are forgotten and yet that crowd grows denser, its feet swifter, and the pressure of its united life becomes more and more resistless. A hundred years from now and your name will have vanished from human memory. A millionaire dies every day. Nobody knows. Nobody cares. Is such a life at its best worth living? And yours is never at its best. You can't eat much. You don't sleep well and you can't live beyond fifty-five."
Bivens's dark face grew suddenly pale and his slender fingers touched one of the piles of gold.