In his extremity he goes to Roebuck, to ascertain, if he can, if he too is in the plot to ruin him.
THE DELUGE
By David Graham Phillips
[[FOR SYNOPSIS OF PREVIOUS INSTALLMENTS SEE PRECEDING PAGE]]
XV—(Continued).
When Roebuck lived near Chicago, he had a huge house, a sort of crude palace such as so many of our millionaires built for themselves in the first excitement of their new wealth—a house with porches and balconies and towers and minarets and all sorts of gingerbread effects to compel the eye of the passer-by. But when he became enormously rich, so rich that his name was one of the synonyms for wealth, so rich that people said “rich as Roebuck” where they used to say “rich as Crœsus,” he cut away every kind of ostentation, and avoided attention more eagerly than he had once sought it. He took advantage of his having to remove to New York, where his vast interests centered; he bought a small and commonplace and, for a rich man, even mean house in East Fifty-second Street—one of a row and an almost dingy looking row at that. There he had an establishment a man with one-fiftieth of his fortune would have felt like apologizing for. The dishes on his table, for example, were cheap and almost coarse, and the pictures on his walls were photographs or atrocious bargain-counter paintings. To his few intimates who were intimate enough to question him about his come-down from his Chicago splendors, he explained that with advancing years he was seeing with clearer eyes his responsibilities as a steward of the Lord, that luxury was sinful, and no man had the right to waste the Lord’s gifts that way. The general theory about him was that advancing years had developed his natural closeness into the stingiest avariciousness. But my notion is he was impelled by the fear of exciting envy, by the fear of assassination—the fear that made his eyes roam restlessly whenever strangers were near him, and so dried up the inside of his body that his dry tongue was constantly sliding along his dry lips. I have seen a convict stand in the door of his cell and, though it was impossible that anyone could be behind him, look nervously over his shoulder every moment or so. Roebuck had the same trick—only his dread, I suspect, was not the officers of the law, even of the divine law, but the many, many victims of his merciless execution of “the Lord’s will.” This state of mind is more common than is generally supposed, among the very rich men, especially those who have come up from poverty. Those who have inherited great wealth, and have always been used to it, get into the habit of looking upon the mass of mankind as inferiors, and move about with no greater sense of peril than a man has in venturing among a lot of dogs with tails wagging. But those who were born poor and have risen under the stimulus of a furious envy of the comfortable and the rich, fancy that everybody who isn’t rich has the same savage hunger which they themselves had, and is ready to use the same desperate methods in gratifying it. Thus, where the rich of the Langdon sort are supercilious, the rich of the Roebuck sort are nervous and often become morbid on the subject of assassination as they grow richer and richer.
The door of Roebuck’s house was opened for me by a maid—a manservant would have been a “sinful” luxury, a manservant might be an assassin or might be hired by plotters against his life. I may add that she looked the cheap maid-of-all-work, and her manners were of the free and fresh sort which indicates that a servant feels he or she should get as high, or higher, wages, and less to do, elsewhere. “I don’t think you can see Mr. Roebuck,” she said.
“Take my card to him,” I ordered, “and I’ll wait in the parlor.”