He had no spirit for the fight; his love of Dorothy Hallowell and his complete rout there had taken the spirit out of him--and with it had gone that confidence in himself and in his luck which had won him so many critical battles. Then-- He had been keeping up a large suite of offices, a staff of clerks and stenographers and all the paraphernalia of the great and successful lawyer. He had been spreading out the little business he got in a not unsuccessful effort to make it appear big and growing. He now gave up these offices and the costly pride, pomp and circumstance--left with several thousand dollars owing. He took two small rooms in a building tenanted by beginners and cheap shysters.
He continued to live at his club, where even the servants were subtly insolent to him; he could see the time approaching when he might have to let himself be dropped for failing to pay dues and bills.
He stared at his ruin in stupid and dazed amazement.
Usually, to hear or to read about such a catastrophe as this is to get a vague, rather impressive notion of something picturesque and romantic. Ruined, like all the big fateful words, has a dignified sound.
But the historians and novelists and poets and other keepers of human records have a pleasant, but not very honest way, of omitting practically all the essentials from their records and substituting glittering imaginings that delight the reader--and wofully mislead him as to the truth about life. What wonder that we learn slowly--and improve slowly. How wofully we have been, and are, misled by all upon whom we have relied as teachers.
Already one of these charming tales of majestic downfall was in process of manufacture, with Frederick Norman as the central figure. It was only awaiting his suicide or some other mode of complete submergence for its final glose of glamor. In this manufacture, the truth, as usual, had been almost omitted; such truth as was retained for this artistic version of a human happening was so perverted that it was falser than the simon pure fictions with which it was interwoven. Just as the literal truth about his success was far from being altogether to his credit, so the literal truth as to his fall gave him little of the vesture of the hero, and that little ill fitting, to cover his naked humanness. Let him who has risen to material success altogether by methods approved by the idealists, let him who has fallen from on high with graceful majesty, without hysterical clutchings and desperate attempts at self-salvation in disregard of the safety of others--let either of these superhuman beings come forward with the first stone for Norman.
Those at some distance from the falling man could afford to be romantic and piteous over his fate. Those in his dangerous neighborhood were too busy getting out of the way. "Man falling--stand from under!" was the cry--how familiar it is!--and acquaintances and friends fled in mad skedaddle. He would surely be asking favors--would be trying to borrow money. It is no peculiarity of rats to desert a sinking ship; it is simply an inevitable precaution in a social system modeled as yet upon nature's cruel law of the survival of the fittest. A falling man is first of all a warning to all other men high enough up to be able to fall--a warning to them to take care lest they fall also where footing is so insecure and precipices and steeps beset every path.
Norman, falling, falling, gazed round him and up and down, in dazed wonder. He had seen many others fall. He had seen just where and just why they missed their footing. And he had been confident that with him no such misstep was possible. He could not believe; a little while, and luck would turn, and up he would go again--higher than before. Many a lawyer--to look no farther than his own profession--had through recklessness or pride or inadvertence got the big men down on him. But after a time they had relented or had found an exact use for him; and fall had been succeeded by rise. Was there a single instance where a man of good brain had been permanently downed? No, not one. Stay-- Some of these unfortunates had failed to reappear on the heights of success. Yes, thinking of the matter, he recalled several such. Had he been altogether right in assuming, in his days of confidence and success, that they stayed down because they belonged down? Perhaps he had judged them harshly? Yes, he was sure he had judged them harshly. There was such a thing as breaking a proud spirit--and he found within himself apparent proof that precisely this calamity had befallen him.
There came a time--and it came soon--when he had about exhausted his desperate ingenuity at cornering acquaintances and former friends and "sticking them up" for loans of five hundred, a hundred, fifty, twenty-five-- Because these vulgar and repulsive facts are not found in the usual records of the men who have dropped and come up again, do not imagine that only the hopeless and never-reappearing failures pass through such experiences. On the contrary, they are part of the common human lot, and few indeed are the men who have not had them--and worse--if they could but be brought to tell the truth. Destiny rarely permits any one of us to go from cradle to grave without doing many a thing shameful and universally condemned.
How could it be otherwise under our social system?
When Norman was about at the end of all his resources Tetlow called on him--Tetlow, now a partner in the Lockyer firm.
He came with an air of stealth. "I don't want anyone to know I'm doing this," said he frankly. "If it got out, I'd be damaged and you'd not profit."
