At last I turned the corner of 57th Street, and when I looked down Mr. Rogers' home-like hall and grasped his outstretched hand and heard his "Lawson, I'm glad to see you!" I would have sworn it was hours and hours since I left the little table in the corner of Delmonico's.
The chief impression I recall of my experience that night is gratitude for Henry H. Rogers' unexpected kindness, and admiration for his manliness, ability, and firmness. When this memory rises in my mind I regret "Frenzied Finance" and all the consequences with which it is fraught for him and his connections. When the American people are aroused, as they surely will be, to demand restitution and are in the act of brushing, with a mighty sweep of indignation, back into the laps of the plundered the billions of which they have been robbed, and "Standard Oil" and the "System" break and fall like trees before the gale, I doubt, even if Henry H. Rogers be brought face to face with ruin, that he will feel half the pain I shall, for I know that the picture of that memorable night will surely come back to me with all the vividness of reality.
But as my mind harks back, there clashes with this another, a hellish picture, which the same Henry H. Rogers painted with the brush of Amalgamated, and a procession of convicts and suicides trail slowly toward me out of the canvas. Then I realize that my pen is but the instrument of a righteous retribution and that no personal feelings, however tender, must be allowed to interfere.
"Come this way," said my host, striding ahead of me along the hall. "In here we can have our talk and our smoke undisturbed." He led me into the big, empty dining-room and closed the door.
"Mr. Rogers," I began, "it is kind of you to be so friendly after the mean things we have said of each other. Am I to understand you don't lay any of all that has passed up against me?"
"Lay it up against you, my boy? Drop that all out of your mind. You probably know I talk to the point and mean what I say. If you had hit below the belt as that—Addicks has, I would lay it up against you and a hundred years would not make me forget it. I know what you've done and why you've done it, and it was as much your right to do it as mine to do what I have done. I have nothing against you, and if events place me in a position where I can do anything to make your job easier without hurting my own interests—mind that, without hurting my own interests—I will do it. You have my word for it."
We sat within a few feet of each other, and I looked squarely into his eyes as he said, "You have my word for it," and they were honest eyes—honest as the ten-year-old boy's who with legs apart and hands in pockets throws his head back and says: "Wait until I am a man, and I will do it if I die for it!" I looked into them and I knew "My word for it" was all gold and a hundred cents to the dollar. For a minute we gazed steadily into—through each other, and I knew he was reading away into the back of my head. Inwardly I said: "If I do business with this man for a day or for a lifetime, I will never face him and give him my word for one thing and mean another," and in the years after when we did millions upon millions of business, with only each other's word for a bond of fair treatment, not once did I depart from the letter of my resolution. Up to the recent famous "Gas Trial," where our roads suddenly shot off at right angles, owing to a foul act of perjury, Henry H. Rogers never tired of meeting all his associates' attacks upon me with: "Lawson's word is gospel truth for me."
When we dropped our eyes, both evidently satisfied, he said: "Now, what have you to say to me?"
I spoke my piece rapidly and without interruption: "There are four things possible, as I wrote you—only four. I will take up the fourth first. I have absolute power to speak for all our local companies. If we, you and I, come to no settlement by to-morrow night, I will, without warning to any one, confess a default to the notes of our different companies and have a receiver appointed. As our stocks and bonds are held by our best investors all over New England, and as no such move is suspected, there will be a terrific rumpus. In the crash I shall go down with Addicks and the rest, for we have all put our personal resources behind the enterprise. I will see that the howl following the crash shall be such as all must hear, and I will call attention to the illegal acts of every one—your companies, Addicks' companies, and the city and State officials that have made such conditions possible. I don't think you will be able to stand against the cyclone this crash will raise; but even if you do, the receiver, having no interest to pay on bonds, will be in a position to smash the price of gas to seventy or seventy-five cents, and make it impossible for you to get possession of our companies for so long a time that the consumers will never allow you to get the price back to a profitable one. Have I made it clear that you cannot, as you were counting on doing, continue this fight till you have us tired out and crushed?"