CHAPTER XVII
A MEMORABLE CONFERENCE
If the years of my life are protracted beyond the Psalmist's threescore and ten, even though the events that chance in the comparatively long future seethe and struggle as strenuously as those that befell in the eager, vivid procession of yesterdays which makes up my past, my memory's picture of this meeting will always hang where the lights cast their kindest reflections.
I had left Boston on the noon train, and got down to my hotel, the Brunswick, on Fifth Avenue, by six o'clock. In those kind days of good memory when New Yorkers really lived instead of looping-the-loop through life, the Brunswick was head-quarters for Southerners and Bostonians of the old school. To-day its bricks and mortar and the picturesque iron balconies, from which two generations of America's celebrities reviewed the marching armies of peace and war, are heaps of refuse; for the old Brunswick has had to give place to yet one more of the twenty-storied, emblazoned hostelries, whose alabaster halls, frescoed walls, mosaic floors, and onyx and silver bathtubs are designed to minister to the comfort of our great and free people when they needs must wander from the luxury of their homes. When I had dressed I crossed over to the old Delmonico's opposite, and, in a secluded corner beside an open window which gave full view of the passing show on Gotham's great boulevard, I sat and listened to old "Philip," who, time out of mind, had been high-priest of the famous Frenchman's temple of appetite, as he posted me on the latest doings of the town where no one remembers further back than yesterday, and to-morrow doesn't count. Ordinarily I should have lingered for hours with "Philip" and his tidbits, but that night my mind was a mad steeplechase of memories and hopes, all starting and finishing at 26 East 57th Street, and I fear he must have thought he had failed in the plump little duck which I left unpicked, and in the bottle of Chianti which I hardly sipped.
At 7.30 I lit my cigar and started for what I felt was to be the tomb or the forcing-house of all the air-castles I had cherished from boyhood. At last I was to meet the real champion; I was to tussle hand-to-hand with the head of the financial clan, the man of all men best fitted to test to the utmost the skill and quickness which I had picked up in the rough and tumble of a hundred fights on State and Wall streets—Rogers, wary, intrepid, implacable, the survivor of bloody battles in comparison with which mine were but pink skirmishes.
I had carefully put aside that half-hour between dinner and the moment for my appointment to run up and down my mental keyboard under what to me are the most favorable conditions possible—an evening walk through the streets of a great city. Some men can invite their souls only in sylvan solitudes, but the flare of light, the clash of traffic, the kaleidoscopic procession of humanity, with its challenging contrasts shifting and seething on great metropolitan highways, breed in my mind a sense of calm, cool remoteness in which all the glitter and excitement of the spectacle suggests only its appalling transiency.
From the gay carnival of Broadway I cut across through the brownstone gloom of 27th Street into Sixth Avenue, where the tired men and women of the toiling millions sat in their doorways or at their windows over the shops resting after the heat and travail of the day. Some watched the sidewalk antics of their children—perhaps speculating on the possibility that this or the other among that merry throng of urchins might rise to be an alderman or even a city boss—perhaps President of the greatest republic on earth—or—transcendent bliss—a Rogers or a Rockefeller.
From 42d Street I turned up Fifth Avenue, lifting my hat and exchanging a word with Mr. and Mrs. Russell Sage, and for an instant, as I left them, my wandering thoughts took a new twist, for Mrs. Sage had informed me that "Father and I are on the way to prayer-meeting"—early evening prayer-meeting in New York! For an instant I was in one of those tiny New Hampshire villages, a forgotten haven of rest and simplicity, innocent as yet of steam, machinery, or trolleys, for the sweet lady and the angular man with the pained gait which spoke in loud tones of the unbroken store-shoe could belong in no other than a rural place. But the image of the New Hampshire village only flitted across my mind's film, for my truant senses seized on a message over memory's telephone: "Russell Sage has $100,000,000." One hundred millions, and I was back on earth again, but as I walked the thought was buzzing in my brain: "Is it possible that that countryman has made one hundred million dollars, when the expert carpenter who started at the birth of Christ to trudge the world until from his honest labors he had accumulated $1,000,000 by laying aside each day all the wage he was entitled to, one dollar, had at the end of 1,900 years only a little more than half that sum?"