Whatever his momentary satisfaction in her friendly acceptance of his confession, the uncertain attitude of Berenice left Cowperwood about where he was before. By a strange stroke of fate Braxmar, his young rival, had been eliminated, and Berenice had been made to see him, Cowperwood, in his true colors of love and of service for her. Yet plainly she did not accept them at his own valuation.
More than ever was he conscious of the fact that he had fallen in tow of an amazing individual, one who saw life from a distinct and peculiar point of view and who was not to be bent to his will.
That fact more than anything else--for her grace and beauty merely emblazoned it--caused him to fall into a hopeless infatuation.
He said to himself over and over, "Well, I can live without her if I must," but at this stage the mere thought was an actual stab in his vitals. What, after all, was life, wealth, fame, if you couldn't have the woman you wanted--love, that indefinable, unnamable coddling of the spirit which the strongest almost more than the weakest crave? At last he saw clearly, as within a chalice-like nimbus, that the ultimate end of fame, power, vigor was beauty, and that beauty was a compound of the taste, the emotion, the innate culture, passion, and dreams of a woman like Berenice Fleming. That was it: that was it. And beyond was nothing save crumbling age, darkness, silence.
In the mean time, owing to the preliminary activity and tact of his agents and advisers, the Sunday newspapers were vying with one another in describing the wonders of his new house in New York--its cost, the value of its ground, the wealthy citizens with whom the Cowperwoods would now be neighbors. There were double-column pictures of Aileen and Cowperwood, with articles indicating them as prospective entertainers on a grand scale who would unquestionably be received because of their tremendous wealth. As a matter of fact, this was purely newspaper gossip and speculation. While the general columns made news and capital of his wealth, special society columns, which dealt with the ultra-fashionable, ignored him entirely. Already the machination of certain Chicago social figures in distributing information as to his past was discernible in the attitude of those clubs, organizations, and even churches, membership in which constitutes a form of social passport to better and higher earthly, if not spiritual, realms. His emissaries were active enough, but soon found that their end was not to be gained in a day. Many were waiting locally, anxious enough to get in, and with social equipments which the Cowperwoods could scarcely boast.
After being blackballed by one or two exclusive clubs, seeing his application for a pew at St. Thomas's quietly pigeon-holed for the present, and his invitations declined by several multimillionaires whom he met in the course of commercial transactions, he began to feel that his splendid home, aside from its final purpose as an art-museum, could be of little value.
At the same time Cowperwood's financial genius was constantly being rewarded by many new phases of materiality chiefly by an offensive and defensive alliance he was now able to engineer between himself and the house of Haeckelheimer, Gotloeb & Co. Seeing the iron manner in which he had managed to wrest victory out of defeat after the first seriously contested election, these gentlemen had experienced a change of heart and announced that they would now gladly help finance any new enterprise which Cowperwood might undertake. Among many other financiers, they had heard of his triumph in connection with the failure of American Match.
"Dot must be a right cleffer man, dot Cowperwood," Mr. Gotloeb told several of his partners, rubbing his hands and smiling. "I shouldt like to meet him."
And so Cowperwood was manoeuvered into the giant banking office, where Mr. Gotloeb extended a genial hand.
"I hear much of Chicawkgo," he explained, in his semi-German, semi-Hebraic dialect, "but almozd more uff you. Are you goink to swallow up all de street-railwaiss unt elefated roats out dere?"
Cowperwood smiled his most ingenuous smile.
"Why? Would you like me to leave a few for you?"
"Not dot exzagly, but I might not mint sharink in some uff dem wit you."
"You can join with me at any time, Mr. Gotloeb, as you must know.
The door is always very, very wide open for you."
"I musd look into dot some more. It loogs very promising to me.
I am gladt to meet you."
The great external element in Cowperwood's financial success--and one which he himself had foreseen from the very beginning--was the fact that Chicago was developing constantly. What had been when he arrived a soggy, messy plain strewn with shanties, ragged sidewalks, a higgledy-piggledy business heart, was now truly an astounding metropolis which had passed the million mark in population and which stretched proud and strong over the greater part of Cook County. Where once had been a meager, makeshift financial section, with here and there only a splendid business building or hotel or a public office of some kind, there were now canon-like streets lined with fifteen and even eighteen story office buildings, from the upper stories of which, as from watch-towers, might be surveyed the vast expanding regions of simple home life below. Farther out were districts of mansions, parks, pleasure resorts, great worlds of train-yards and manufacturing areas. In the commercial heart of this world Frank Algernon Cowperwood had truly become a figure of giant significance. How wonderful it is that men grow until, like colossi, they bestride the world, or, like banyan-trees, they drop roots from every branch and are themselves a forest--a forest of intricate commercial life, of which a thousand material aspects are the evidence. His street-railway properties were like a net--the parasite Gold Thread--linked together as they were, and draining two of the three important "sides" of the city.
