The Deluge

The Deluge [with accents]

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Title: The Deluge
Author: DAVID GRAHAM PHILLIPS
Release Date: April, 2005 [EBook #7832] [This file was first posted on May 20, 2003]
Edition: 10
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO Latin-1
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, THE DELUGE ***

THE DULUGE
BY
DAVID GRAHAM PHILLIPS
Author of The Cost, The Plum Tree, The Social Secretary, etc.

WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY
GEORGE GIBBS
[Illustration]

CONTENTS
I MR. BLACKLOCK II IN THOSE DAYS AROSE KINGS III CAME A WOMAN IV A CANDIDATE FOR "RESPECTABILITY" V DANGER SIGNALS VI OF "GENTLEMEN" VII BLACKLOCK GOES INTO TRAINING VIII ON THE TRAIL OF LANGDON IX LANGDON AT HOME X TWO "PILLARS OF SOCIETY" XI WHEN A MAN IS NOT A MAN XII ANITA XIII "UNTIL TO-MORROW" XIV FRESH AIR IN A GREENHOUSE XV SOME STRANGE LAPSES OF A LOVER XVI TRAPPED AND TRIMMED XVII A GENTEEL "HOLD-UP" XVIII ANITA BEGINS TO BE HERSELF XIX A WINDFALL FROM "GENTLEMAN JOE" XX A BREATHING SPELL XXI MOST UNLADYLIKE XXII MOST UNGENTLEMANLY XXIII "SHE HAS CHOSEN" XXIV BLACKLOCK ATTENDS FAMILY PRAYERS XXV "MY WIFE MUST" XXVI THE WEAK STRAND XXVII A CONSPIRACY AGAINST ANITA XXVIII BLACKLOCK SEES A LIGHT XXIX A HOUSEWARMING XXX BLACKLOCK OPENS FIRE XXXI ANITA'S SECRET XXXII LANGDON COMES TO THE SURFACE XXXIII MRS. LANGDON MAKES A CALL XXXIV "MY RIGHT EYE OFFENDS ME" XXXV "WILD WEEK" XXXVI "BLACK MATT'S" TRIUMPH

I
MR. BLACKLOCK
When Napoleon was about to crown himself--so I have somewhere read--they submitted to him the royal genealogy they had faked up for him. He crumpled the parchment and flung it in the face of the chief herald, or whoever it was. "My line," said he, "dates from Montenotte." And so I say, my line dates from the campaign that completed and established my fame--from "Wild Week."
I shall not pause to recite the details of the obscurity from which I emerged. It would be an interesting, a romantic story; but it is a familiar story, also, in this land which Lincoln so finely and so fully described when he said: "The republic is opportunity."
One fact only: I did not take the name Blacklock.
I was born Blacklock, and christened Matthew; and my hair's being very black and growing so that a lock of it often falls down the middle of my forehead is a coincidence. The malicious and insinuating story that I used to go under another name arose, no doubt, from my having been a bootblack in my early days, and having let my customers shorten my name into Matt Black. But, as soon as I graduated from manual labor, I resumed my rightful name and have borne it--I think I may say without vanity--in honor to honor.
Some one has written: "It was a great day for fools when modesty was made a virtue." I heartily subscribe to that. Life means action; action means self-assertion; self-assertion rouses all the small, colorless people to the only sort of action of which they are capable--to sneering at the doer as egotistical, vain, conceited, bumptious and the like. So be it! I have an individuality, aggressive, restless and, like all such individualities, necessarily in the lime-light; I have from the beginning lost no opportunity to impress that individuality upon my time. Let those who have nothing to advertise, and those less courageous and less successful than I at advertisement, jeer and spit. I ignore them. I make no apologies for egotism. I think, when my readers have finished, they will demand none. They will see that I had work to do, and that I did it in the only way an intelligent man ever tries to do his work--his own way, the way natural to him!
Wild Week! Its cyclones, rising fury on fury to that historic climax of chaos, sing their mad song in my ears again as I write. But I shall by no means confine my narrative to business and finance. Take a cross-section of life anywhere, and you have a tangled interweaving of the action and reaction of