The Man of Last Resort; Or, The Clients of Randolph Mason

by Melville Davisson Post

Carper arose and went over to a cabinet in the wall, unlocked the door and took out a big photograph, which he brought over to the fire. It was the picture of a woman, young, beautiful, quivering with the power of life; the mass of dark hair was caught back from her forehead; the eyes were wide, clear, transparent; the nose was straight as the edges of a die, and the throat round, full, marvellously moulded. In the set of the head there was pride of lineage, and the relentless rigor of purity. It was a fine face looking out from a blameless life, strong, innocent, exacting as a child.

The man placed the picture on the mantelshelf, and sat down by the fire. That day was now seven years gone,—seven years! Yesterday was no farther back. Every detail was clear. The shock had stamped them on the lining of his heart. He had loved this woman as a man loves just one time. He was trusting his very life to her keeping; he was going to her for everything that woman could give; all of sweet fellowship, all of tender sympathy, all of love. She was the only woman in the world. The expression is a platitude, but the fact was as real to Carper as the green trees and the sunlight. One could no more have convinced this man that other women held some of the charms of life, than one could have convinced him that light was a liquid. His love had gained the power of a religion; it had gone, farther—-it had gained the majesty of a law.

Then the blow came. Carper had gone to this woman with a case of jewels, the profit of a venture. He remembered how happy she had been: how the light of trustfulness danced in her eyes; how she had carried the jewels to the window in order to see the great rubies change to blood-drops, then she had turned with a playful smile and asked him how he had made so great a sum, and he, like a miserable fool, had blurted out that it was a part of his gains in a deal on the street,—a deal in which he had ruined a little banking house by seizing the vantage of its ignorant mistake. It was the master blunder.

Carper remembered how the blood faded from this woman's face, leaving it ashen gray; how the dull ache of pain gathered in her eyes; how she had come over to him and dropped the jewels slowly into their case, and, without a word, had gone back and sat down by the window. And he knew that the woman of his love was gone out beyond the reach of his fingers. The leash of his love had slipped off and snapped back in his hands.

He remembered the effect upon himself as something entirely foreign to that which writers attribute to men under similar conditions. There was no benumbing horror; no desire to make any violent demonstration of feeling. There was merely a vague loss of strength, as though the bottom of the fountain of vital force had dropped out, and then he grew sick—physically sick. The material man was hurt first, and collapsed, much as it would have done if shot through the stomach with a shell. He felt none of that exaggerated emotion affected by the play-actor.

It was the commonplace sickness of a frightful physical blow.

When the nausea had passed, he had gone over to her and begged to know what it all meant, although he knew quite as well as she. The woman had looked at him with her wide eyes deadened with pain, and said that she had believed him ah honorable man, and had loved him for it, but that now she knew the truth, and she would never be wife to a dishonest man.

He had made his argument then, and it was good. The venture was perfectly legitimate, so recognized and treated by the business men of the land,—nay, more, it was so regarded by the law. These were the standards; there was no other. The customs of business and the law were the rules of right in the marketplaces. Their wisdom was unquestioned. It was the result of all the experience of the race, the conclusion of wise men, laboring with conditions as they were. Had she a right to say that these standards were wrong? He appealed to her sense of fairness. Was she better able to pass upon the right of this transaction than all the merchants learned in the customs of trade,—than all the jurists learned in the wisdom of the law? Was she better able?

Carper pointed out that she lived in an atmosphere of purity high above the din of the fight for life; a land of refined right, refined justice, refined honor, magnificent, but not the world. The world had no perfect code; it was no perfect place; it was not intended to be so, else it would have been so made. It was an indifferent place, governed by the inexorable law of the survival of the fittest, wherein men struggled for footing and the comforts of life. One must conform to conditions as they were, or go to the wall. It was folly, it was idiocy, it was madness to do otherwise.

Trade was like nature—pitiless. There was no measure of consideration for the weakling or the fool. The fight was bitter, remorseless, subject to dangerous shifts. If one was caught and broken, the blame was with the sorry scheme of things, and this a Divine Intelligence maintained, and men could not question that Divine Intelligence. This condition of the world might not be purest or happiest, but it was the condition of the world. It was God's way. Was it wise to call it evil?