The Titan quotes

It would be useless to repeat how a second panic following upon a tremendous failure—that of Jay Cooke & Co.—had placed a second fortune in his hands. This restored wealth softened him in some degree.

Fate seemed to have his personal welfare in charge.

He was sick of the stock-exchange, anyhow, as a means of livelihood, and now decided that he would leave it once and for all. He would get in something else—street-railways, land deals, some of the boundless opportunities of the far West.

“That’s her—that’s that Butler girl,” observed one railroad clerk to another. “Gee! a man wouldn’t want anything better than that, would he?”

It was the spontaneous tribute that passion and envy invariably pay to health and beauty. On that pivot swings the world.

Never in all his life until this trip had Cowperwood been farther west than Pittsburg.

Why were they so appealing, he asked himself. This raw, dirty town seemed naturally to compose itself into stirring artistic pictures.

Why, it fairly sang! The world was young here. Life was doing something new.

Perhaps he had better not go on to the Northwest at all; he would decide that question later.

The city of Chicago, with whose development the personality of Frank Algernon Cowperwood was soon to be definitely linked! To whom may the laurels as laureate of this Florence of the West yet fall?

This singing flame of a city, this all America, this poet in chaps and buckskin, this rude, raw Titan, this Burns of a city!

By its shimmering lake it lay, a king of shreds and patches, a maundering yokel with an epic in its mouth, a tramp, a hobo among cities, with the grip of Caesar in its mind, the dramatic force of Euripides in its soul.

He looked strangely replete for a man of thirty-six—suave, steady, incisive, with eyes as fine as those of a Newfoundland or a Collie and as innocent and winsome.

They were wonderful eyes, soft and springlike at times, glowing with a rich, human understanding which on the instant could harden and flash lightning.

Deceptive eyes, unreadable, but alluring alike to men and to women in all walks and conditions of life.

Finally he left the club to keep his other appointments, but something of his personality remained behind him. Mr. Addison and Mr. Rambaud, among others, were sincerely convinced that he was one of the most interesting men they had met in years.

And he scarcely had said anything at all⁠—just listened.

“There you go! Certainly! Pretty clothes first of all in a miner’s shack. That’s the way.”

“You wouldn’t love me long if I didn’t put pretty clothes first,” she replied, spiritedly.

“Oh, I’m so glad to get you back!”

“Oh, dear!” she sighed to herself, mentally. “If only it were all true—now.”

It is thus that life at its topmost toss irks and pains. Beyond is ever the unattainable, the lure of the infinite with its infinite ache.

“Oh, life! oh, youth! oh, hope! oh, years! Oh pain-winged fancy, beating forth with fears.”

He wanted no more dangerous combinations such as he had had with Stener, the man through whom he had lost so much in Philadelphia, and others. By right of financial intellect and courage he was first, and would so prove it.

Men must swing around him as planets around the sun.

Moreover, since his fall from grace in Philadelphia he had come to think that never again, perhaps, could he hope to become socially acceptable in the sense in which the so-called best society of a city interprets the phrase;

Another man, less leonine, and with all his shifting thoughts, might have had to contend with the handicap of a shifty gaze; he fronted the queries and suspicions of the world with a seeming candor that was as disarming as that of a child.

The truth was he believed in himself, and himself only, and thence sprang his courage to think as he pleased.

Aileen wondered, but could get no answer.

He wanted the intellectual servants. He was willing to pay them handsomely, to keep them busy, to treat them with almost princely courtesy, but he must have the utmost loyalty. Stimson, while maintaining his calm and reserve, could have kissed the arch-episcopal hand.

Such is the subtlety of contact.

Behold then at once on the North Side, the South Side, the West Side—dark goings to and fro and walkings up and down in the earth.

Because of all this Cowperwood was rather proud of her. She had such a capacity for life. His first wife had been pale and rather anemic, while Aileen was fairly bursting with sheer physical vitality. She hummed and jested and primped and posed.

There are some souls that just are, without previous revision or introspection.

The earth with all its long past was a mere suggestion to Aileen, dimly visualized if at all. She may have heard that there were once dinosaurs and flying reptiles, but if so it made no deep impression on her.

“Never fear. I’ll make millions here, whether they want me to or not, and after that—well, after that, we’ll see what we’ll see. Don’t worry.

I haven’t seen many troubles in this world that money wouldn’t cure.

”

Horton Biggers direct. Subsequently certain not very significant personages noticed that when the Cowperwoods dined at their boards the function received comment by the Saturday Review, not otherwise. It looked as though the Cowperwoods must be favored; but who were they, anyhow?

The danger of publicity, and even moderate social success, is that scandal loves a shining mark.

When you begin to stand out the least way in life, as separate from the mass, the cognoscenti wish to know who, what, and why.

She tried amethyst earrings and changed to topaz; she stockinged her legs in brown silk, and her feet were shod in brown slippers with red enamel buttons.

The trouble with Aileen was that she never did these things with that ease which is a sure sign of the socially efficient.

She never quite so much dominated a situation as she permitted it to dominate her. Only the superior ease and graciousness of Cowperwood carried her through at times; but that always did.

Simms was envious already of the financial showing Cowperwood was making in Chicago. Besides,

Cowperwood’s manner bespoke supreme intelligence and courage, and that is always resented by all save the suppliants or the triumphant masters of other walks in life.

Simms was really interested at last to know something more about Cowperwood, something definite.

Even as a stripling what things had he not learned—robbery, ballot-box stuffing, the sale of votes, the appointive power of leaders, graft, nepotism, vice exploitation—all the things that go to make up (or did) the American world of politics and financial and social strife.

There is a strong assumption in the upper walks of life that there is nothing to be learned at the bottom.

If you could have looked into the capacious but balanced temperament of John J.

A delicious haze was in the air, and some early mosquitoes were reconnoitering the screens which protected the windows and doors. Cowperwood, in spite of his various troubles, was in a complacent state of mind himself.

He liked life⁠—even its very difficult complications⁠—perhaps its complications best of all.

Nature was beautiful, tender at times, but difficulties, plans, plots, schemes to unravel and make smooth—these things were what made existence worthwhile.

McKenty took it, surprised and yet pleased at this evidence of business proficiency.

He liked a strong manipulator of this kind⁠—the more since he was not one himself, and most of those that he did know were thin-blooded and squeamish.

“Let me take this,” he said. “I’ll see you next Monday again if you wish. Come Monday.”

Personal confidences between people so closely united are really the most trying of all.

Human souls are constantly trying to find each other, and rarely succeeding.

“You know,” he finally said to her once, when he came in rather unexpectedly and found her sick in bed, her eyes wet, and her maid dismissed for the day, “I understand what this is all about.

“Oh, Frank,” she exclaimed, finally, “you’re always so wonderful. You’re such a darling.”

“Never mind,” he said, cheerfully. “If we don’t win this game here in Chicago, we will somewhere.”

He was thinking of the brilliant manner in which he had adjusted his affairs with the old gas companies and Mr. Schryhart, and how thoroughly he would handle some other matters when the time came.

She was the wife of Harold Sohlberg, a Danish violinist who was then living in Chicago, a very young man; but she was not a Dane, and he was by no means a remarkable violinist, though he had unquestionably the musical temperament.

You have perhaps seen the would-be’s, the nearly’s, the pretenders in every field⁠—interesting people all⁠—devoted with a kind of mad enthusiasm to the thing they wish to do.

They manifest in some ways all the externals or earmarks of their professional traditions, and yet are as sounding brass and tinkling cymbals. You would have had to know Harold Sohlberg only a little while to appreciate that he belonged to this order of artists.

At times he was not sure whether he was cut out to be a great violinist or a great composer, or merely a great teacher, which last he was never willing really to admit.

“I am an arteest,” he was fond of saying. “Ho, how I suffer from my temperament!”

And again: “These dogs! These cows! These pigs!” This of other people. The quality of his playing was exceedingly erratic, even though at times it attained to a kind of subtlety, tenderness, awareness, and charm which brought him some attention.

“Oh, Harold!” Rita used to exclaim at first, ecstatically. Later she was not so sure.

Life and character must really get somewhere to be admirable, and Harold, really and truly, did not seem to be getting anywhere.

He taught, stormed, dreamed, wept; but he ate his three meals a day, Rita noticed, and he took an excited interest at times in other women.

He suggested that she invite them to dinner, that they give a musical at which Sohlberg could play and be paid. There were boxes at the theaters, tickets for concerts sent, invitations to drive Sundays or other days.

The very chemistry of life seems to play into the hands of a situation of this kind.

Once Cowperwood was thinking vividly, forcefully, of her, Rita began to think in like manner of him. Hourly he grew more attractive, a strange, gripping man. Beset by his mood, she was having the devil’s own time with her conscience.

“Oh, wouldn’t it?” exclaimed Aileen, resentfully, and with some disturbance of spirit.

“Well, you can keep your spiritual faithfulness. I’m not going to be content with any sweet thoughts.”

Cowperwood laughed even as she laughed, for he knew she was right and he felt sorry for her. At the same time her biting humor pleased him. He knew that she did not really suspect him of actual infidelity;

… Frank” finding a woman suitable to his needs, tastes, abilities, but now that the possibility of another woman equally or possibly better suited to him was looming in the offing—although she had no idea who it might be—she could not reason in the same way.

Her ox, God wot, was the one that was being gored.

What if he should find someone whom he could want more than he did her? Dear heaven, how terrible that would be! What would she do? she asked herself, thoughtfully. She lapsed into the blues one afternoon—almost cried—she could scarcely say why.

The significance of Rita Sohlberg to her in this hour was greater than that of any woman before or after.

Of all living things, women dread women most of all, and of all women the clever and beautiful.

Rita Sohlberg had been growing on Aileen as a personage, for she had obviously been prospering during this past year, and her beauty had been amazingly enhanced thereby.

William Johnson, the constructing engineer of the company—yet such other men as Onias C. Skinner, the president, and Walter Parker, the vice-president, were reactionaries of an elderly character, conservative, meditative, stingy, and, worst of all, fearful or without courage for great adventure.

It is a sad commentary that age almost invariably takes away the incentive to new achievement and makes “Let well enough alone” the most appealing motto.

Mindful of this, Cowperwood, with a now splendid scheme in his mind, one day invited John J. McKenty over to his house to dinner on a social pretext.

“Aren’t you going to try and be happy with me? This is as much for you as for me. You will be able to pay up old scores even better than I will.”

“Yes,” she replied, reproachfully but tenderly at that, a little sorrowfully, “a lot of good money does me. It was your love I wanted.”

“But you have that,” he insisted. “I’ve told you that over and over. I never ceased to care for you really. You know I didn’t.”

“Well, I’ll be damned!” Cowperwood said, looking at the floor reflectively. A smile spread over his face. “I’m not going to be held up like that. I don’t need to be. It isn’t worth it. Not at present, anyhow.” His teeth set.

He was underestimating Mr. Truman Leslie MacDonald, principally because he did not like him.

He thought his father might return and oust him. It was one of the most vital mistakes he ever made in his life.

It is a grim thing to a woman, however fortunately placed, to realize that age is creeping on, and that love, that singing will-o’-the-wisp, is fading into the ultimate dark.

Aileen, within the hour of her greatest triumph, had seen love die.

It was useless to tell herself, as she did sometimes, that it might come back, revive. Her ultimately realistic temperament told her this could never be. Though she had routed Rita Sohlberg, she was fully aware that Cowperwood’s original constancy was gone.

It was a pathetic mess at times, but so are all defiant variations from the accustomed drift of things.

In the hardy language of Napoleon, one cannot make an omelette without cracking a number of eggs.

The coming of Stephanie Platow, Russian Jewess on one side of her family, Southwestern American on the other, was an event in Cowperwood’s life.

From one point of view it might have been said of him that he was seeking the realization of an ideal, yet to one’s amazement our very ideals change at times and leave us floundering in the dark.

What is an ideal, anyhow? A wraith, a mist, a perfume in the wind, a dream of fair water.

The soul-yearning of a girl like Antoinette Nowak was a little too strained for him. It was too ardent, too clinging, and he had gradually extricated himself, not without difficulty, from that particular entanglement.

He liked Stephanie particularly in this part, and thought her beautiful. One evening not long afterward he noticed her in his own home looking at his jades, particularly a row of bracelets and earrings.

He liked the rhythmic outline of her body, which reminded him of a letter S in motion.

Quite suddenly it came over him that she was a remarkable girl—very—destined, perhaps, to some significant future. At the same time Stephanie was thinking of him.

Who could resist?

Starve and beat a dog on the one hand; wheedle, pet, and hold meat in front of it on the other, and it can soon be brought to perform.

Cowperwood knew this. His emissaries for good and evil were tireless. In the end—and it was not long in coming—the directors and chief stockholders of the Chicago West Division Company succumbed; and then, ho!

Out he went through the dark hall and down the stairs. For once the lure of a beautiful, enigmatic, immoral, and promiscuous woman—poison flower though she was—was haunting him. “D⸺ her!” he exclaimed. “D⸺ the little beast, anyhow! The ⸻! The ⸻!”

He used terms so hard, so vile, so sad, all because he knew for once what it was to love and lose⁠—to want ardently in his way and not to have⁠—now or ever after.

He was determined that his path and that of Stephanie Platow should never be allowed to cross again.

He would have to go on, and she would have to leave him, if needs be; but he could not cease or go back.

He was too passionate, too radiant, too individual and complex to belong to any one single individual alone.

Divine will? Not necessarily. There is no understanding of it. Guardian spirits? There are many who so believe, to their utter undoing. (Witness Macbeth). An unconscious drift in the direction of right, virtue, duty? These are banners of mortal manufacture.

Nothing is proved; all is permitted.

Not long after Cowperwood’s accession to control on the West Side, for instance, a contest took place between his corporation and a citizen by the name of Redmond Purdy—real-estate investor, property-trader, and moneylender—which set Chicago by the ears.

He kept the conversation within conventional lines; but all the while he was exchanging secret, unobserved smiles with Mrs. Hand, whom he realized at once had married Hand for his money, and was bent, under a somewhat jealous espionage, to have a good time anyhow.

There is a kind of eagerness that goes with those who are watched and wish to escape that gives them a gay, electric awareness and sparkle in the presence of an opportunity for release.

Mrs. Hand had this. Cowperwood, a past master in this matter of femininity, studied her hands, her hair, her eyes, her smile. After some contemplation he decided, other things being equal, that Mrs.

but he did not propose to be unduly disturbed, since he could always fight in the courts by money, and by preferment in the council, and with the mayor and the city attorney.

“There is more than one way to kill a cat,”

was one of his pet expressions, and it expressed his logic and courage exactly. Yet he did not wish to lose.

She looked very young in her soul, and yet moody—loving (for someone), eager, and defiant. He reflected for a moment what terrible things passion and love are—how they make fools of us all.

“All of us are in the grip of a great creative impulse,”

he said to himself. He talked of other things for a while—the approaching election, a poster-wagon he had seen bearing the question, “Shall Cowperwood own the city?” “Pretty cheap politics, I call that,” he commented.

He harbored in no way any grudge against Aileen—only a kind of sorrow over the inevitable consequences of his own ungovernable disposition, the will to freedom within himself.

Change! Change! the inevitable passing of things! Who parts with a perfect thing, even if no more than an unreasoning love, without a touch of self-pity?

But there followed swiftly the sixth of November, with its election, noisy and irrational, and the latter resulted in a resounding defeat. Out of the thirty-two Democratic aldermen nominated only ten were elected, giving the opposition a full two-thirds majority in council, Messrs.

It was not long after this conversation that Mr. Truman Leslie MacDonald, acting through Alderman Klemm, proceeded to make a count of noses, and found to his astonishment that he was not as strong as he had thought he was.

Political loyalty is such a fickle thing.

A number of aldermen with curious names—Horback, Fogarty, McGrane, Sumulsky—showed signs of being tampered with. He hurried at once to Messrs. Hand, Schryhart, and Arneel with this disconcerting information.

You would not have called Berenice Fleming sensuous—though she was—because she was self-controlled.

Her eyes lied to you. They lied to all the world.

They looked you through and through with a calm savoir faire, a mocking defiance, which said with a faint curl of the lips, barely suggested to help them out, “You cannot read me, you cannot read me.”

but where was she? He had not seen her for months and months. Could he go to Hand and confess all? But Hand was a hard, cold, moral man also. Oh, Lord! Oh, Lord! He wondered and thought, and sighed and pondered—all without avail.

Pity the poor earthling caught in the toils of the moral law.

In another country, perhaps, in another day, another age, such a situation would have been capable of a solution, one not utterly destructive to Mr. Sluss, and not entirely favorable to a man like Cowperwood.

Gray weather, severe cold, and much contemplation of seemingly irreconcilable facts had reduced his spirits greatly. He was a little pale and a little restless.

Mental distress has a reducing, congealing effect, and Mayor Sluss seemed somewhat less than his usual self in height, weight, and thickness.

Cowperwood had seen him more than once on various political platforms, but he had never met him. When the troubled mayor entered he arose courteously and waved him to a chair.

Once barely sipping at wines, cocktails, brandy-and-soda, she now took to the latter, or, rather, to a new whisky-and-soda combination known as “highball” with a kind of vehemence which had little to do with a taste for the thing itself.

True, drinking is, after all, a state of mind, and not an appetite.

She had found on a number of occasions when she had been quarreling with Lynde or was mentally depressed that in partaking of these drinks a sort of warm, speculative indifference seized upon her. She was no longer so sad.

Feeling herself neglected after Lynde’s departure, and dreading loneliness above all things, Aileen became intimate with Skeet, but to no intense mental satisfaction. That driving standard within—that obsessing ideal which requires that all things be measured by it—was still dominant.

Who has not experienced the chilling memory of the better thing?

How it creeps over the spirit of one’s current dreams! Like the specter at the banquet it stands, its substanceless eyes viewing with a sad philosophy the makeshift feast. The what-might-have-been of her life with Cowperwood walked side by side with her wherever she went.

She merely fixed him a moment with her cool, slate-blue eyes.

“Do you think the senses of the world are only five?” she asked, in the most charming and non-reproachful way.

“Indeed, they know well enough. She knows.” She turned and waved a graceful hand in the direction of the tree, where peace now reigned. The chirping had ceased. “She knows I am not a cat.”

Out of the cash-drawers of his various companies he took immense sums, temporary loans, as it were, which later he had charged by his humble servitors to “construction,” “equipment,” or “operation.”

He was like a canny wolf prowling in a forest of trees of his own creation.

The weak note in this whole project of elevated lines was that for some time it was destined to be unprofitable. Its very competition tended to weaken the value of his surface-line companies. His holdings in these as well as in elevated-road shares were immense.

The rank and file of both parties—the more or less hungry and thirsty who lie ever at the bottom on both sides—hailed him as a heaven-sent deliverer, a new Moses come to lead them out of the wilderness of poverty and distress.

Woe to the political leader who preaches a new doctrine of deliverance, and who, out of tenderness of heart, offers a panacea for human ills.

His truly shall be a crown of thorns.

As he was ushered into the room he gazed about him in a brave, leonine way.

“A fine night for a conference, gentlemen,” he said, walking toward a chair indicated by Mr. Arneel. “I must say I never saw so many straw hats at a funeral before. I understand that my obsequies are contemplated. What can I do?”

He beamed in a genial, sufficient way, which in anyone else would have brought a smile to the faces of the company. In him it was an implication of basic power which secretly enraged and envenomed nearly all those present.

Then let Hull & Stackpole fail, or if not you four put up the money to carry them. If you can’t, let your banks do it.

If you open the day by calling a single one of my loans before I am ready to pay it, I’ll gut every bank from here to the river.

You’ll have panic, all the panic you want. Good evening, gentlemen.”

“

I think I should prefer to be unhappy with wealth than to be without it,

” she said, idly, without looking up.

The road was valued at over one hundred thousand dollars more per mile than the sum for which it could actually have been replaced.

Pity the poor groveling hack at the bottom who has not the brainpower either to understand or to control that which his very presence and necessities create.

These tremendous holdings, paying from ten to twelve percent on every hundred-dollar share, were in the control, if not in the actual ownership, of Cowperwood.

Must he not rather in the sight of all men smoke out the animating causes here—greed, overweening ambition, colossal self-interest as opposed to the selflessness of a Christian ideal and of a democratic theory of government?

Life rises to a high plane of the dramatic, and hence of the artistic, whenever and wherever in the conflict regarding material possession there enters a conception of the ideal.

It was this that lit forever the beacon fires of Troy, that thundered eternally in the horses’ hoofs at Arbela and in the guns at Waterloo.

At this juncture his office door opened, and his very youthful office-boy presented him the card of F. A. Cowperwood. The governor had never seen him before. Cowperwood entered brisk, fresh, forceful.

He was as crisp as a new dollar bill⁠—as clean, sharp, firmly limned.

The two were scrutinizing each other defensively.

The men, as you must know, who are fighting you are fighting me.

I am a scoundrel because I am selfish and ambitious⁠—a materialist. You are not a scoundrel, but a dangerous person because you are an idealist.

Whether you veto this bill or not, you will never again be elected Governor of Illinois if the people who are fighting me succeed, as they will succeed, in fighting you.”

Aileen would never have followed the clue so vigorously had it not been for the look she had seen Cowperwood fix on the girl in the Park and in the restaurant—an air of soul-hunger which could not be gainsaid.

Let no one ridicule the terrors of unrequited love. Its tentacles are cancerous, its grip is of icy death.

Sitting in her boudoir immediately after these events, driving, walking, shopping, calling on the few with whom she had managed to scrape an acquaintance, Aileen thought morning, noon, and night of this new woman. The pale, delicate face haunted her.

Watson Skeet, the sculptor, who was also out of her ken at present. When Cowperwood was in the city and in the house she was accustomed from habit to remain indoors or near.

So great is the influence of past customs of devotion that they linger long past the hour when the act ceases to become valid.

“What an awful night!” she observed once, strolling to a window to peer out from behind a brocaded valance.

“Oh no; I’m used to lonely evenings,” she replied, quietly and without any attempt at sarcasm.

Relentless as he was in hewing life to his theory⁠—hammering substance to the form of his thought⁠—yet he was tender, too, in the manner of a rainbow dancing over an abyss.

For the moment he wanted to say, “Poor girlie, you do have a hard time, don’t you, with me?” but he reflected instantly how such a remark would be received.

You can’t. I’ll admit I have treated you badly; but if I had really loved you I wouldn’t have done it, would I? It isn’t my fault that love died in me, is it? It isn’t your fault. I’m not blaming you.

Love isn’t a bunch of coals that can be blown by an artificial bellows into a flame at any time. It’s out, and that’s an end of it.

Since I don’t love you and can’t, why should you want me to stay near you? Why shouldn’t you let me go and give me a divorce? You’ll be just as happy or unhappy away from me as with me. Why not?

“

Mr. Cowperwood, there isn’t anything you can do for me. You do not understand me, and I do not understand you. You cannot understand me because I am an honest man.

”